The future of teacher education.(Education)

DURING THE LAST century or so, the scholarly standing of teacher educators in Australia has usually been modest. Lecturers responsible for training primary school teachers were, naturally enough, usually appointed directly from primary schools and until the 1980s there were few graduates, let alone recognised scholars, in their ranks. Lecturers in university departments of education responsible for training secondary teachers were usually graduates with a reputation for successful classroom teaching, but few of them were scholarly authorities in their substantive fields. It was rare, for example, for a Manning Clark to be found in Canberra Teachers College or the like (and Clark never undertook a course himself in such an institution).

Just as teacher educators ranked low in academic hierarchies, so they were held in only moderate esteem in the schools. Until compelled to appoint trained teachers, many of the most prestigious schools preferred "untrained" graduates. This was even more pronounced in Britain, where before 1970 it was rare to find a "trained" teacher in schools such as Eton and Harrow. I became very conscious of the marginality of teacher educators in the eyes of heads of schools when I was a senior lecturer in an English college of education. I was lucky to be given a few minutes of a bead's time, whilst quite often the teaching programs of student-teachers were changed without notifying the college, so that visits to supervise teaching practice proved largely fruitless. On the other hand, when I arrived in schools as the representative of the Local Education Authority or as local inspector, I was greeted with coffee (and sometimes something stronger) and ceremony. Any teacher I wished to see was made immediately available. In South Australia schools generally treated visiting teacher educators with even less consideration than in England.

Many student-teachers think the most valuable part of their initial teacher training (ITT) is the teaching practice, often called the "practicum" these days. Many teachers, too, looking back on their teacher education consider that teaching practice was the most important part of it. Teacher educators were, and still are, often described by schoolteachers as out of touch with classroom realities. Many teachers tell student teachers that what they learn in education courses is a waste of time and does not fit them for the real world of the classroom. These opinions may well be flawed but their prevalence indicates the low standing of ITT in higher education institutions (HEIs). The rapid expansion of ITT during the second half of the twentieth century: from two-year to three-year and then four-year BEd courses, together with the extension of postgraduate certificate courses from one year to two years, was less a tribute to the high esteem in which ITT was held than an expression of dissatisfaction with teaching standards in the schools. Nonetheless, there were, and remain, many good arguments in favour of ITT in HEIs.

THE CASE FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

GAINING KNOWLEDGE has, of course, logical precedence over acquiring ways, even the best possible ones if these can be identified, of communicating that knowledge to others. Content knowledge affects not only what teachers teach but how they teach it. Teachers with depth of knowledge are more likely to promote conceptual understanding and to reveal connections between different elements of study, whereas non-specialists more often simply teach the content as represented in a prescribed text.

However, successful study of a subject is not always sufficient for teaching it successfully. This is true even of specialist subject teaching in secondary schools. Good mathematics teachers must, indeed, be competent mathematicians, but it is very helpful if they also understand the relationships that exist between different mathematical ideas and processes, and how mathematical understanding can best be fostered among students. Being a capable historian, of whatever period or subject, does not in itself enable one to choose curriculum content and teaching methods in the best ways possible.

My own professional work in Flinders University was mainly in "methods" courses in history and social science teaching. In history methods courses I aimed to get prospective history teachers to reflect upon criteria of significance in history: upon the reasons there might be for picking out some aspects of the past for study in schools rather than others. We looked at obstacles to objectivity in historical judgment and how they might be overcome, at the rival claims of breadth and depth of study, and so on. Some students responded eagerly to approaches such as mine, although others wanted only to be told what the school history syllabus contained, which textbooks covered the basic facts most adequately, and how workable lesson plans could be devised. This we did as well.