Abstract
Assuring pre-service teachers’ professional readiness has been a long-standing issue in Initial Teacher Education. Not only does the issue rely on questions of the kinds of attributes, skills, and knowledges a ‘classroom ready’ graduate teacher should possess, but also how these can be reliably assessed within authentic contexts of teaching and learning that capture the complexity of the ways in which teaching practices can strengthen student learning. The introduction of a final year teaching performance assessment, has from 2016, been a mandated inclusion for Australian initial teacher education programs as a condition for graduation. Its introduction, akin to a “bar exam” for the profession, is reflective of similar policy moves globally. Given that this is a recent policy measure, there is to date scant research in the Australian context exploring the perspectives of graduate teachers who have undertaken the teaching performance assessment on its effectiveness as both an assessment of professional readiness and as an educative experience. The lived experiences of these graduate teachers are important in a number of ways. Drawing on teacher self-efficacy theory and teacher well-being literature, the project reported on here examines graduates’ valuable and distinctive insights into the ways pre-service teachers negotiate the tensions between discourses of professional learning along with initial teacher education program development, amid broader discourses of accountability and licensure. Data were gathered through a survey of graduate teachers who had previously completed a teaching performance assessment within one of two Australian universities. The survey instrument was developed using items from the long form of the Teacher Sense of Self-Efficacy Scale, the Teacher Well-Being Scale, items exploring pre-service teacher and teacher educator perceptions of the edTPA, and demographic information about participants’ current teaching roles and contexts. These data are important to the ways initial teacher education providers continue to develop and refine teaching performance assessments to enhance course curriculum, pedagogy and outcomes, particularly in relation to what graduate teachers identify as central to their effective transition into the workforce.