Chad Morrison PhD

Professional Experience placements provide invaluable opportunities for pre-service teachers to connect their expanding knowledge to teaching practice. When done well, these experiences are underpinned by purposeful and continuous guidance from experienced mentor teachers. Significantly, the participation and engagement of Australian mentor teachers in this process is voluntary in nature, meaning the system relies on teachers ‘opting-in’ to mentoring. This research examines mentor teacher participation within Secondary-level initial teacher education courses and highlights issues relating to overall mentor teacher (and host school) engagement. Analysis of placement data over a five-year period to 2021 illustrates a significant change in participation with a dwindling number of mentor teachers participating in placement activity. Other insights include a declining rate of school and mentor teacher participation and an over-reliance on a portion of the teaching workforce to sustain these preparatory experiences. These findings highlight structural and systematic gaps negatively impacting on the delivery and quality of initial teacher education, which in turn have broad implications for the current national workforce shortage in Secondary teaching.

Within initial teacher education (ITE), there is a complex and dynamic relationship between the theoretical content delivered within university settings and the practical components experienced within schools. Strengthening the nexus between the two represents the ongoing work of teacher educators and an ongoing challenge for pre-service teachers. Extended teaching internships (e.g., of 12 months duration) provide opportunities to develop pre-service teachers’ knowledge through classroom application. These extended professional experience components are justified through how they facilitate entry into the profession and support graduate teachers’ traction within the early career phase – an outcome commonly referred to in Australian policy and public discourse as being ‘classroom-ready’. This mixed-methods research presents findings from an examination of a year-long internship. Through surveys and interviews, graduates shared their experiences and perspectives of what they gained from their involvement. Drawing on conceptual tools of community of practice and pillars of the Framework of Conditions Supporting Early Career Teacher Resilience, the analysis identified participants’ sense of belonging and employability as regular and significant outcomes of the internship. Participants reported feeling a sense of belonging to their internship school colleagues and to teaching, explaining this as an influential factor to graduate employment, early career traction and pathways that carried them beyond the early career phase. These findings have implications for the priorities and outcomes pursued through extended internships, especially during a time where employment-based internships are burgeoning. Further long-term research is needed to understand the extent of impact of extended internships on career trajectories and continuity.

Australian teacher education programs must include a summative, capstone assessment of students' achievement against the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (a teaching performance assessment). This program accreditation requirement seeks to ensure graduate teachers are adequately prepared for the academic and practical demands of career entry. Research has examined a range of issues related to these assessments however examination of school-based teacher educators' contributions to this process is limited. School-based teacher educators work across school and university settings with pre-service teachers, drawing on their knowledge of both settings to enhance teacher preparation. This research explored the perceptions of these teacher educators as trained panellists involved in the assessment of one teaching performance assessment. Using constructs drawn from Carlile's work on boundary objects (2002), researchers analysed the meaning (knowledge), language (syntax) and pragmatics (practice) emerging from their movement between the intersecting worlds of university and school. Findings highlight the teaching performance assessment acted as an influential boundary object which reshaped par-ticipants' practice, on both sides of this boundary. Participants reported expanded knowledge of university and school practices for preparing pre-service teachers. The implications of this include enhanced practice, increased knowledge of conducive conditions for preparing pre-service teachers and improved assessment enactment. These findings illustrate the benefits of expanded engagement of these educators and their effective transfer of inherent knowledge back and forth across the threshold between their intersecting teaching contexts.

Early career teacher retention and progression are complex issues which inform discourse about and review of pre-service teacher preparation. Debate about how to best connect pre-service teachers’ theoretical learning about teaching to practical application and reflection within the classroom (praxis) is ever-present within this dialogue. Extended teaching internship is identified as effective for connecting these elements of learning to teach, through sustained placement activity situated within supportive school environments. These extended experiences are located within communities of practice and facilitate ongoing reflection on transitions from pre-service to early career teaching. The mixed methods research reported here focused on participants’ retrospective views of an extended internship and highlighted key elements that connected practice with developing understandings of what it means to be a teacher. Participants’ perspectives emphasised how their experiences established vital connections between them and the profession. Analysis of these data underpinned the development of a conceptual framework (Teacher Development and Progression Framework) that illustrates the complex nature of learning to teach and how interdependent factors support momentum and traction into and beyond the early career phase.

Australian universities are mandated to implement non-academic on-entry evaluations for all initial teacher education candidates. Universities have introduced interviews, written applications, psychometric tests, and more recently, simulation. This research sought to determine if simulation as an evaluation tool had utility as a measure of teaching dispositions and its utility in measuring candidates’ pre-existing dispositions such as self-confidence, resilience, and conscientiousness during and after a classroom simulation evaluation session. The mixed method design explored students’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the simulation tool and evaluation of their own on-entry performance. The findings showed that the utility, fairness and validity of on-entry assessments of this entry requirement were justified and candidates’ self-confidence as a distal measure of classroom preparedness was affirmed. The implications of these data and findings include the refinement of processes and tools for assessing non-academic teaching dispositions and an expanded evidence base for assessing the suitability of candidates for initial teacher education.

Teacher wellbeing is important, not least for the role teachers play in supporting students' social, emotional, physical and academic wellbeing. Effective teachers need to remain both physically and mentally healthy. This paper examines how teacher wellbeing is conceptualised through research to identify the influential ecological influences that support and sustain teachers. Through a scoping review methodology, this examination starts with a conceptualisation of teacher wellbeing, and is then organised into three interrelated themes. This thematic approach provides a basis to examine, first, the influential individual factors shaping teachers' wellbeing; second, the relational factors that characterise teachers' work; and, third, the contemporary contextual factors associated with enhancing or eroding teacher wellbeing. These themes highlight that many approaches to enhancing teachers' wellbeing are often short-term band-aid fixes, and the authors argue that attention must be given to longer-term bridge-building strategies that place teacher wellbeing at the heart of teaching.

Australian initial teacher education accreditation requirements have, since 2016, mandated a capstone teaching performance assessment (TPA) to assess pre-service teachers (PSTs) against the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. This research examines how a standardised TPA known as the Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT) can impact on PSTs' readiness to teach. The AfGT comprises PSTs' analysis of their teaching practice using video of teaching episodes, observation feedback, and students' work samples augmented by an online situational judgement task. The researchers used thematic data analysis of surveys to investigate how the AfGT impacted on PSTs' perspectives of what matters in teaching. The research established that the process of completing the TPA can activate and reinforce reflection and professional reasoning, and expand PSTs' knowledge of how their teaching improved student learning. The results provide insights into how a complex and high-stakes TPA can foster professional growth while signalling key enabling conditions.

Legislative guidelines regulate professional experience within initial teacher education (ITE) but little is known about teacher educators’ perspectives on how these guidelines are operationalised. ITE providers, in collaboration with school partners, implement a range of programs designed to develop pre-service teachers’ ‘classroom readiness’. We examine how current legislation influences the delivery of professional experience, the provision of funding, and support for university-school partnerships and in-school supervision. This analysis highlights ambiguities in the interpretation of the legislative guidelines, creating a disconnection between policy and practice, an over-reliance on the ‘good will’ of key stakeholders, and competing demands between the ‘actual’ and ‘hidden’ costs of professional experience. Without reform of both policy and practice ITE providers will continue to be constrained when attempting to meet regulatory expectations. These findings demonstrate a need for government departments and ITE regulators to work more closely to improve integration of policy and practice for professional experience.

The rapid expansion of fully online delivery of initial teacher education (ITE) seen in the past decade has generated some concerns about impact on teacher quality. This is set within broader, sustained concerns about ITE generally. Much of the criticism of online ITE has been made without sufficient evidence to support the claims, largely due to the still-nascent evidence base. The data presented here contributes to that evidence base by providing demographic and academic achievement insights for cohorts of graduate teachers (N= 2008) across the years 2012 to 2018 who have engaged in fully online ITE at an Australian university. The literature has recognised the traditional barriers to accessing higher education for many of these students, including women, the mature-aged, and those with family and work responsibilities. Performance data for online ITE students within their programs demonstrates that they are breaking through these barriers associated with the digital divide. Analysis of who these people are, where they come from, and how they are performing provides valuable insights into online ITE, at a time when the value of broadening access to education and digital equity are being widely acknowledged.
Implications for practice or policy:
The educational community should consider the achievement of online ITE students and contributions they can make to education and schools.
The educational community should consider the contributions online ITE can make to broadening access to higher education and digital equity.

Over recent years, much has been said about the quality of Australian initial teacher education. Concerns about the preparation of pre-service teachers and the capacity of graduates to meet the demands of the classroom have re-emphasised professional experience as a fundamental component of high-quality teacher preparation. Simultaneously, this focus on professional experience has emphasised the importance of partnerships. Through policy, the formalisation of partnerships between initial teacher education providers and early learning centres and schools has been linked to quality assurance and auditing cycles which report on the ways that providers prepare graduates for teaching. The employability of suitably-prepared graduates and their early career traction are of particular interest to policy makers, regulators and teacher educators alike. As a result, establishing an evidence base for quality in professional experience partnerships is paramount. This paper reports on the evolution of a strategic partnerships model between one provider and its growing network of partner schools. This model has been developed through a comprehensive evaluation process, examining the nature of formal partnerships and the outcomes associated with them. Data presented here highlights outcomes identified by stakeholders as influential and enacted through formal partnerships. Analysis of data also emphasises ongoing priorities for partnership development, implementation and evaluation, collectively understood to be closely connected to graduate employability.