Positive voices of published assessments in initial teacher education courses: A step towards professional sustainability and sustenance

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Teaching and teacher education (TETP) round-table 1

Proposal

A focus exists in Australia on the first years of teaching given on average teachers stay in the profession for five years. This issue has been identified internationally (Schaefer, Lee, Downey, Aiden, & Clandinin, 2014). This is costly for students who connect and disconnect in teacher relationships - a priority teaching component - (Hattie, 2003), the knowledge of students’ learning that transfers from one year to the next by teachers for effectiveness in teaching (Henry, Bastain & Fortner, 2011), for schools to re-induct and re-train staff, and ultimately, for school communities to flourish. Online induction applications have been developed for nation-wide use (AITSL, 2018a) and mentor programs planned by the state of Victoria, Australia (VIT, 2018) are geared to support early career teachers. Initial teacher education (ITE) courses have no input into this issue. Vocational courses are structured by set standards (AITSL, 2018b) to train to teach with impact on student learning, to indicate how to become a lifelong learner through continuous professional development (CPD) (Collin, Van der Heijden & Lewis, 2012) and perform the role of a professional teacher. They do not address how to sustain yourself, your colleagues and your future profession. ITE courses have the potential to scaffold acts that combat this paradigm, not only to assist those in ITE courses, but simultaneously those in the profession.

One direction is of publishing in partnership within professional association journals while undertaking a teacher education course, where pre-service teachers (PSTs) are advantaged as their early career voices reach outward (Caldwell, 2014) to practicing teachers. This approach melds enterprise pedagogy (Jones & Iredale, 2010) with altruism. Both achieving for oneself as much as supporting the profession for future sustainability. This project sets the scene, to foster practicing teachers who publish as a professional standard, and through example setting in pre-professional courses, indicate the innate worth and essential professional development of engagement with professional associations as sustenance of one’s profession (Collin, Van der Heijden & Lewis, 2012; Murphy & Calway, 2008). There are three dimensions of advantage – for oneself, one’s profession and contribution to lifelong learning.

An assessment was scaffolded in a secondary method of mathematics teaching subject where PSTs investigated heartfelt concerns in mathematics teaching. They performed a brief literature review and commented on the actions recommended for practicing teachers and themselves based on their discoveries. The articles focussed upon here have titles “Bringing the Joy of Mathematics to Everyone” (Fuller, 2016), “Number Sense” (Showell, 2016) and “Constructivism in Mathematics” (Mallamaci, 2018). These articles housed themes of ‘How to overcome mathematics anxiety when teaching’, ‘Number sense development through regaining student interest in mathematics’ and ‘Constructivism in mathematics through teaching for greater student learning outcomes’. Through unravelling the messages nested in these articles of how the PSTs perceive their future teaching practice we glimpse early professional career voices. The positivity projected in these published artefacts indicate that such endeavours are outward facing practices with potential advantageous professional impact that warrant further and increased consideration in ITE courses.

Author

• Jacolyn Weller, La Trobe Unversity