Amid the rollout of new professional guidelines for initial teacher education (ITE) students, an expert is warning of several flaws he says must be urgently addressed.
The new guidelines, announced recently by the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), aim to improve professional experience programs and address Australia’s growing school workforce shortages.
AITSL CEO Tim Bullard said the new guidelines will help to clarify roles and responsibilities, improve consistency of quality, and reduce administrative burden for teacher education providers, education systems, schools, early childhood settings and regulatory authorities.
“We want to set up every pre-service teacher for success and do all that we can to ensure their professional experience is a positive experience – whether they are in a metropolitan city, regional town or remote community, and whether they are 18 years old or have decided to make the shift to teaching mid-career,” Bullard said in November.
However, Dr Saul Karnovsky, Senior Lecturer in Education at Curtin University, says while he is generally supportive of the guidelines, he has concerns about the guidelines’ standardised core content, and the potential inequitable burden on resource-poor schools implementing them.
“It is concerning that the core content [Point 4.10] continues to be foregrounded by AITSL as I find the explicit, didactic and standardised approach to teaching methods set out in the core content deeply troubling,” Dr Karnovsky said.
“There is an inherent contradiction in the guidelines that highlight the need for pre-service teachers to develop ‘culturally responsive practices’ [point 11.1] to cater for ‘diverse student cohorts’ [point 4.7] on the one hand, whilst on the other, enshrine the core content as a fundamental component of ITE courses.”
‘Narrowly defined and politically motivated’
Dr Karnovsky said he supports championing a broader, evidence-based approach to teacher education that reflects the diverse needs of modern classrooms.
“It’s problematic that a narrowly defined, politically motivated set of regulations for what constitutes effective learning and teaching appear to have gone unquestioned by the chief governing body of our sector,” he said.
“I believe AITSL has the responsibility to advocate for ITE providers with state education departments and be more than simply a governing and compliance body for the profession.”
Dr Karnovsky pointed out that currently, ITE providers must spend a great deal of resources securing adequate placements in education sites for their courses.
“There is no firm agreements or mandated required placements numbers that schools are obligated to facilitate,” he said. “AITSL could provide clearer regulations around state obligations to secure a minimum number of placements to be made available by public schools.”
Dr Karnovsky says it is “critical” that state education bodies support schools and teachers to ensure these guidelines can be met.
“There is also an equity issue here, that schools with high teacher turn over and staff shortages tend to take on more pre-service teachers, whilst high performing and socio-economic advantaged schools will take far fewer pre-service teachers,” he said.
“It would then seem that schools already who are resource poor would take on the burden on putting these guidelines in place.”
AITSL CEO Tim Bullard has been contacted for comment.