10.1 In Chapter 4, the Committee drew attention to the need for continued upgrading of the workforce. Employer and industry groups with whom the Committee consulted stressed the need for a better educated and more adaptive and innovative workforce. Most education and labour market authorities predicted that shifts of occupation and retraining would become customary for many members of the labour force over their working lives and that once only initial training would be inadequate to meet contemporary needs.
10.2 What is required for the labour force as a whole is equally necessary for that part of it which is the teaching force. Improved outcomes from schooling are dependent on well educated, adaptive and innovative teachers who must be able to provide high quality schooling and to do so in the face of a changing economic, social and cultural framework. To the extent that investment in people improves economic performance there is a strong case for higher, and sustained, investment in teacher development. The achievement of desirable outcomes from schooling must depend on the calibre of teachers. They are the major resource in tenus of influence and cost. Any changes in objectives, credentialling and assessment arrangements, the curriculum or school organis- ation generally, depend on the ability of teachers to carry them out. It is this dependence on teachers for educational outcomes that brings sharply into focus the need for measures to improve the quality of teachers and teaching.
10.3 This chapter is confined to issues in teaching and teacher development which are most directly related to the ~tt~inment of the desirable outcomes identified in Chapter 5.
Teacher development has been comprehensively reviewed in the recent past. The National Inquiry into Teacher Education (I) was complemented by reviews in each State in the late 1970s and early 1980s (2). More recently, the Commonwealth Government called on its two education commissions to report on aspects of teacher education. Their joint report is not yet completed.
PRIORITY
ISSUESlOA Teacher development affects the 190 000 people who are already teaching, most of whom having undergone at least three or four years of formal teacher education.
Experienced teachers make up the majority of the teaching staff in each school and occupy the leadership positions. Although teacher turnover rates reached 12.5 per cent in the early 1970s and may reach this level again as the employment situation improves, new entrants to teaching each year currently represent in the order of 5 per cent of the total teaching force. Improvements which might be made in pre-service training will take too long to be generalised through schools to change outcomes for the bulk of the students already at school or expected to begin schooling in the immediate future. It is with the in- service education of teachers that this chapter is principally, but not exclusively, concerned.
116
Development of Competences
10.5 The development of competence in acquiring and conveying information, in applying logical processes and in performing practical tasks as individuals and as members of groups, is a prime teaching responsibility. Improvement in the levels of competence among students depends on the competence of teachers in these develop- mental tasks. There are several reasons why teachers need further assistance in this area, despite the changes in the teaching force noted in Chapter 3.
10.6 For many teachers, initial training does not include detailed attention to the ways in which students learn to read, write, converse and calculate. Knowledge of how these learning processes occur is increasing but no simple. formula has been developed for either teaching teachers to teach or students to learn in these fields. For many teachers, too, the time spent during their initial training on teaching methodologies associated with these processes is restricted. The pre-service education curriculum is crowded. being subject to similar pressure to that exerted on schools for increases in the fields to be covered. Among secondary teachers, a common pre-service education pattern has been one year's teacher education subsequent to the completion of a degree course. Where concurrent courses exist, for either primary or secondary teacher trainees, much of the course time is devoted to extending the trainee's own education.
10.7 Many teachers do not have the range of skills necessary to assist students experiencing difficulty in reading, one of the skills fundamental to competence in acquiring information. A recent small study of poor readers in primary schools in Western Australia (3) found that while teachers had identified students who were having difficulty in reading, they were not skilled in using diagnostic tests or confident about developing remedial programs for individual students. A study in Tasmania of six schools where there had been a significant improvement in reading among 10 year olds between 1976 and 1978, showed that the availability of a reading consultant was one of several important factors to which the improvements were attributed (4). The consultant assisted class teachers in the diagnosis of reading problems, with reading methodologies, with the selection of materials and with evaluation procedures, that is, in areas of teaching skill.
The recent introduction in some government school systems of a reading scheme, devised in New Zealand for six year old students who are developing their reading skills more slowly than their peers, has been accompanied by a need to train teachers in the use of the method.
10.8 In secondary schools, the curriculum is generally organized along traditional subject lines, leading to a terminal certificate at the end of Year 10 or Year 12. The assumption is usually made that students entering secondary schools have acquired the communication skills necessary for study in subject disciplines. There appears to be no tradition that secondary schools as a whole have the responsibility of furthering these skills, although there has been considerable discussion of the need to teach language skills across the curriculum.
10.9 To the extent that there is a direct link between levels of competence and career aspirations, there is a special need to enhance general competences among girls. Research evidence suggests that teachers, particularly in secondary schools, need to modify their classroom practices if they are to meet the needs of girls. The Commonwealth Schools Commission's Working Party on the Education of Girls noted the accumulation of 117
evidence that some of the differentiated teaching practices adopted for boys and girls were likely to affect girls adversely (5). For example, teachers spend more time talking to boys than to girls in their classes and boys take up most of the students' talking time. Science classes in which girls are in the majority are reported as being likely to concentrate on lower order intellectual activities. A predominance of boys in the class is, however, associated with greater attention to abstract problem solving, analyses. inference and hypotheses generation.
10.10 In education more than anywhere else, girls have had before them role models who might have been expected to shape their career aspirations. since teaching has proved an attractive career to women. However,females predominate at the lower levels and in primary schools. Even though in 1982 women made up 57 per cent of teachers in government schools and 63 per cent of those in non-government schools, a recent study of Australian school principals reported that only 23 per cent were female (6). Only in Catholic primary schools were women more likely than men to be principals. The majority of these women were serving as principal in their capacity as members of religious orders and tended to be older than their male counterparts. Women were least likely to be principals of government schools. The reasons for this imbalance have been explored in some depth (7) and most employing authorities are addressing the problem of imbalance, not only in terms of the importance of positive role models for female students but also of equal employment opportunity.
Rigour in Teaching
10.11 As stated in Chapter 7, there is no definitive body of knowledge which all students shuuhi <lI';(I'.iire, Nor are pa.-ticular '.;'a),3 of ten.ching necessarily superior lJ!!der ~11
circumstances. Teachers use a variety of approaches, depending on their subject matter, the groups of students in their charge, their skill in selecting methods and their personal teaching style. All set standards as part of normal classroom operations.
10.12 More rigorous approaches to the treatment of curriculum content involve greater attention to the full extension of each student. At present some students are able to take on new courses or levels of study without having acquired prerequisite knowledge and skills. Others coast through their studies without being required to explore the limits of their ability. The widespread practice of automatic grade progression was discussed in Chapter 9. Repeated failure to achieve success at school is clearly linked with loss of self esteem and further failure. For some students, school learning is difficult and they will be less successful than their peers. Nonetheless, damage is likely to be done to all students' long term life chances if they are not encouraged to be thorough in their approach to learning and to understand the realities of performance criteria as they apply in many areas of living.
10.13 Similarly, teachers have a responsibility to ensure that curriculum content is challenging. Some courses may lack substance. Others may be taught at levels of generality which require little effort on the part of students. In material presented to the Committee, the Council of the Schools Commission's Curriculum Development Centre noted, as a defect of schooling:
118
the widespread use of instruction which does not take children beyond recitation of information, or circumscribed and guided exercise of skills. There seems not to be a
strong enough drive to bring children to the point where, independent of instruction, they can intelligently apply and use what they know to solve problems, to com- municate ideas, to generate possibilities, to construct things which work, and to use machines purposefully and effectively. (8)
10.14 The Council drew attention to several factors which appear to be related to the defect it had identified, namely:
• insufficient attention to challenging content, that is, substantial and culturally significant matter;
• the exercise of skills in isolation from tasks and purposes;
• lack of application of learning;
• assessment methods which place stress on recitation and limited application of formulae;
• inadequate use of student reflection on their own performance as a means of teaching and learning;
• . normative testing which has the likely effect of discouraging all those students who are categorised as below average;
• consistent underestimation of students' thinking capacity; and
• over use of transmission methods of teaching, that is, 'talk and chalk', which concentrate excessively on reading and listening.
10.15 The Council's statement echoed statements made to the Committee by agencies which were critical of the type of education students were receiving. This suggests that teachers need to give greater attention to the selection of content and its sequencing, to their classroom methods and methods of evaluating student performance.
10.16 On the other hand, it is unreasonable to expect that all teachers will reach pinnacles of excellence in their profession or that all teachers will be equally competent.
Teaching is not confined to those who see themselves as having a teaching vocation nor to the most intellectually able. With the expansion of school enrolments and decreases in ,s size, the demand for teachers has expanded. Whereas, in 1967 there were about nine mary and secondary teachers per 1000 of the population, by 1981 there were 12.
,'urriculum Consistency
10.17 Effective schooling requires continuity of learning and the cohesion of the courses being followed by particular age or ability cohorts. The primary school, where individual teachers tend to be responsible for a group of students for the major portion of their school year, is conducive to the programming of learning in ways which ensure cohesive programs for students. Teachers in secondary schools are not so well placed.
They teach several classes and students have several teachers, each in a particular subject area. In schools organized on subject lines there is scope for neglect of some areas.
overlap and discontinuities. For example, responsibility for the development of language skills may be left with the teacher of English; and teachers of mathematics, science and geography may teach the same numerical concepts to the same students but do so at different stages and from different bases.
10 .18 The progressive development of the general competences depends on' the acknowledgment by all teachers of the part that they must play in it. This in turn depends 119
on teachers having skills in these areas, knowledge of what they should expect of students at particular stages in their education and what others teaching the same students at the same stage are doing. It may require some agreed specialisation, not all teachers being equally expert in developing the full range of competences. Because of the practice of reallocating classes at the beginning of each school year, and the movement of students from primary to secondary schools, it certainly requires adequate recording of completed learning programs. Given that there is a change to subject specialisation at the boundary between primary and secondary schools, primary and secondary teachers need to share understanding of their respective roles.
Educational Disadvantage
10. 19 Reference was made in paragraph 10.7 to teachers' lack of confidence in using diagnostic tests and in the development of programs of additional assistance for students with particular learning difficulties. Teaching the educationally disadvantaged requires more than diagnostic skill. The needs of special groups are. discussed in Chapter 11, which also examines the major findings of a recent series of reviews of current Commonwealth provisions for special groups. In several instances, these reviews drew attention to the desirability of changes to teaching practice in order that the educational needs of students from particular social groups are met. The major reviews of teacher development, referred to in paragraph 10.3, covered similar ground.
10.20 The extent to which teachers are able to make these changes in teaching practice depends, in part, on their underlying value systems, a point frequently made in discussions about teaching children of different ethnic backgrounds. The present teaching force is not representative of the socio-economic and cultural backgrounds within the general population, although it is more representative than most otherprot'essions. A 19'/9 profile of the teaching force showed that a typical pre-service teacher education student was a young Australian born female of lower middle class family and that this pattern was reflected in the teaching force as a whole (9). The Chapman study (10) found that 90 per cent of principals were Australian born and that, of those born overseas, the majority had been born in the United Kingdom or Eire. There are some signs that a proportion of the children of first generation migrants arriving in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s are now moving through the school system as teachers. A 1978 survey of teacher education students at Sydney Teachers College (11) found that more than 50 per cent had either or both parents born outside Australia. Fourteen per cent had themselves been born overseas.
At the University of Wollongong in 1984, approximately 30 per cent of pre-service trainees came from non-English speaking, predominantly Italian or Greek, backgrounds.
10.21 The lack of representation of major social groups within the teaching force is evident in the field of Aboriginal education. Increasing the number of Aboriginal teachers has been an important goal for Aboriginal communities for many years. The National Aboriginal Education Committee has set a target of 1000 Aboriginal teachers by 1990, but present trends indicate that it cannot be reached through existing practices. This desire for increased Aboriginalization of the teaching force stems not only from the principle that Aboriginal teachers will better understand the cultural framework of Aboriginal students;
the presence of Aboriginal teachers in schools is regarded as a component in the education of' non-Aborigines about the culture, lifestyles, values, aspirations and needs of Aborigines. The National Committee has declared teacher education as a priority area 120
within tertiary education and advocated measures to increase the student capacity of enclave programs, develop external or off campus facilities, train people living in traditional communities as teachers and increase the number of secondary teachers.
10.22 There have been several teaching responses to the perceived failure of schools to provide adequately for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. These range from proposals for positive discrimination at the point of entry to teacher education for members of these social groups, to the expansion of the curriculum during pre-service education, to the mounting of new types of pre-service course arrangements and to intensive in-service education programs for teachers in schools with high proportions of disadvantaged students. At the same time there has been pressure on school systems and teacher education institutions to provide more specialist teachers, for example, of English as a second language and of remedial reading.
10.23 Positive responses to these pressures will go some way to meeting some forms of educational disadvantage where there are concentrations of students with these characteristics. They cannot be expected, however, to provide the whole solution.
Ordinary teachers in ordinary classrooms will have within their classes students who are educationally limited by their own intellectual capacity or personality. They will also have students whose disadvantage lies in their social background, and others whose cultural backgrounds are different. Because there are limits to the availability of specialist assistance, it is the classroom teacher on whom the future of educationally disadvantaged students most depends. There is thus a strong case for in-service education to assist all teachers to cater, with greater confidence and competence, for the educational needs of disadvantaged groups.
RAISING TEACHER QUALITY
10.24 The priority issues discussed in the preceding section imply changes in classroom teaching practices and extension of the knowledge and skill base from which teachers operate. Possible ways of bringing about these changes include attention to class size, consultant services, teacher recruitment, teacher qualifications, rewards and incentives, in-service education and pre-service educ'ation. As already noted, the last does not yield immediate benefits and it is thus the present teaching force which should initially be the focus.
Class Size
10.25 It is commonly claimed that the quality of learning outcomes depends on the size of classes in which students are taught. Research evidence is ambiguous. It has recently been comprehensively reviewed for the Schools Commission (12). The weight of studies suggests that, all other things being equal, a reduction of class size from 40 to 20 students would have relatively little effect on learning outcomes but a reduction to below 20 students might have a major impact. Clearly, reducing all classes to this size is well beyond present economic capacity and alternative less costly means of raising the quality of teaching have to be found. Nonetheless, at present staffing levels, there is scope 121