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.

Professional experience represents a critical intersection between the academic programme and practice contexts as key elements within initial teacher education. It allows preservice teachers to engage in the roles and responsibilities of teaching while significantly enhancing their perspectives, knowledge and practices. These experiences represent sites of critical boundary crossings, where stakeholders associated with initial teacher education often pursue disparate priorities, perspectives and practices. Because of this, effective boundary crossings are critical to this work, but are also inherently challenging. This chapter reports on the redefining of boundaries between one university and its stakeholders for the purpose of developing a collective vision and common objectives. The introduction of a teaching performance assessment within Australian initial teacher education provided the impetus for reform. In response, a strategic, relational approach was developed to redefine how stakeholders reimagined shared practices. Importantly, this approach was strengthened through membership to what was referred to as the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA) Collective. The consequences of this included enhanced relationships, informed perspectives, new and shared language and practices and more regular and productive boundary crossings for those associated with this work.

This book explores how well teachers are prepared for professional practice. It is an outcome of a large-scale research and development program that has collected extensive data on the impact of the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment on Initial Teacher Education programs and preservice teachers’ engagement with the assessment. It contributes to international debates in teacher education by examining an Australian experience of teacher performance assessments as a catalyst for cultural change and practice reform in teacher education.

The respective chapters describe and critique this unique, multi-institutional investigation into the quality of teacher education and present substantial evidence, drawing on a variety of conceptual, empirical and methodological entry points. Further, they address the intellectual, experiential and personal resources and related expertise that teacher educators and preservice teachers bring to their practice. Taken together, they offer readers clearly conceptualised and evidence-rich accounts of site-specific and cross-site investigations into cultural, pedagogical and assessment change in Initial Teacher Education.

Higher education is increasingly responding to the need for flexible, accessible study options for diverse student cohorts. This includes offering courses available in fully online mode that incorporate work integrated learning (WIL) which contribute to preparing work-ready graduates. This chapter presents one university’s approach to delivering fully online initial teacher education (ITE), its embedded WIL components and innovative approaches for support and supervision. Survey responses from 56 online ITE graduates showed that participants were predominantly mature-aged females transitioning from other careers and who juggled multiple responsibilities during the final WIL. Overall, graduates were satisfied with their WIL and intended to stay in teaching for their whole career. Most were employed as teachers, with approximately one-quarter employed at their final WIL placement school. Insights gained about this component of fully online ITE are of global significance given the sustained interest in the capacity and retention of teachers in Australia and across the world.