The Future Teachers Project

This paper reports on research conducted for the Victorian Institute of Teaching as part of its Future Teachers Project. One of the main purposes of the VIT Project is to develop new guidelines for the accreditation of teacher education courses; guidelines that would reflect the changing demands of schools and teachers' work. The brief for this research project involved designing an instrument for surveying the perceptions of stakeholders (beginning teachers and their employers) about the effectiveness of current teacher education models in Victoria. The survey was administered in March 2004 to all registered teachers in Victoria who were beginning their second year of teaching. A similar survey was developed and administered to all school principals about their perceptions of the preparedness of beginning teachers in 2003. The survey instrument was designed to enable relationships between structural and process features of teacher education programs and outcomes to be examined. This paper reports on the findings of the surveys and the changes that stakeholders believe should be made to teacher education programs to better prepare future teachers.