Transcript School Centres for Teaching Excellence Symposium 2

School Centres
for
Teaching Excellence
Symposium Two
Session Three
Theme: New considerations for schooluniversity-community partnerships.
Education
New considerations for school- university
partnerships
School Centre of Teaching Excellence - Symposium Two, 24 May 2013
Associate Professor Lucas Walsh, Monash University
Senior Research Fellow, The Foundation for Young Australians
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Changing worlds of work and ways of working
• The rate of full-time employment among teenagers not in
education has decreased by more than 22 percentage points
since the mid-1980s.
• 3 times as many teenagers and more than twice as many young
adults had part-time jobs in 2011 than in the mid-80s.
• A third of the 814,700 part-time workers who would prefer to work
more hours was aged 15 to 24 years.
• An average of nearly 1 in 5 teenagers changed their labour force
status every month in 2011, compared with 1 in 10 older workers.
• Young people seek hands-on opportunities to learn.
Source: Robinson, Long and Lamb 2011
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The Teaching Profession
• "Globalisation and technological, environmental, social, demographic
and economic change and rapid and continuing advances in
information communication technologies will place greater demands
on, and provide greater opportunities for, young people. These
changes will also place greater demands on and opportunities for
teachers and school leaders“ (Cole 2011, p.2).
• What are the knowledge and skills that teacher educators require to
be effective in strong school-university partnerships?
• W
ƒ hat can universities and school communities do better to build an
effective teacher educator workforce?
• Some common constraints to developing strong school-university
partnerships.
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Changing School Cultures
• New teachers can inject innovative thinking, current research,
evidence and fresh approaches to school life.
• ƒEvidence from 2008 TALIS data suggests that this transference is
not taking place from new teachers to experienced teachers in
schools (Jensen et al. 2012).
• ƒAre school cultures open and receptive to innovation and new
thinking?
• ƒHow can partnerships enable this?
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Leaders must adapt to increasingly complex environments
Where there has been a push for leaders to become more managerial, there is now an awareness that more is
required:
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Engaging policy change
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Engaging stakeholders across sectors
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Engaging parents and carers
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Engaging individual stakeholders “where they live”
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Working within structural constraints
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Partnership networks:
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As a result of informal patterns of communication and without clear governance models
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Informal communication (mobile phones)
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Based on personalities
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Brokers
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Professional judgement: to whom to disclose, when to disclose it and what to whom
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Legal issues of confidentiality, security and privacy
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Schools rely on face to face meetings
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Horizontal Engagement
• The notion of "learning environments" beyond the classroom also is important to
understanding the future direction of the profession, in which schools need not
necessarily within a given be the default locations for learning community.
• Underpinning these environments is a platform upon which a range of actors
interact in a learning ecosystem reef.
• Within contemporary learning ecosystems, the conventional notion of the school
working in isolation gives way to one in which it becomes a "base-camp" within a
broader vibrant platform of learning from which teachers and leaders engage with
other key actors (such as those from the community and third sector) and other
stakeholders seek to improve student outcomes (Hannon, Patton and Temperley
2011, p.18).
• Horizontal engagement is a feature of high performing systems.
• Teachers, support staff, administrative staff, social workers, psychologists and other
health carers and so forth play a role within the learning ecosystem.
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Horizontal Engagement
• Community actors, parents and carers, brokers, external stakeholders
such as universities, business, philanthropic and NGOs, as well as other enablers
of improved learning outcomes also need to be taken into consideration
• Brokers, universities and funders provide new opportunities for professional
development, new models and measures of their employees, enhancing and
extending learning, as well as physical and in-kind resources for teaching
and learning
.
• In contrast to the vertical engagement of teachers with school leaders and
schools with jurisdictions and broader policy, these actors represent important
features of horizontal engagement within the learning platforms and education
ecosystems of the 21st century.
• Web 2.0 technologies enable broader networks of knowledge sharing and
building that can engage students, teachers and leaders in educational
transformation in participatory ways.
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Horizontal Engagement
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Its applications can be used to extend and deepen networks of participation and
collaboration in educational environments surrounding the school and extend opportunities
for horizontal engagement.
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ƒ istributed leadership is an emergent feature of this landscape to develop coherence across
D
communities working in interdependent partnership to ensure school improvement
(Timperley 2011, p.22).
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The need for schools to increase capacity through engagement with the business
community is now recognised as a key feature of the of 21 st century education landscape.
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Increasing this capacity through horizontal engagement requires recognition,
encouragement and support of "teachers and school leaders to develop the skills needed
for effective and sustainable school-business relationships" (DEEWR 2011a, p.1).
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How can school-community-university partnerships can better foster adaptability?
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Engagement with youth remains underdeveloped
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Concluding Remarks
• As the world is becoming more fluid for young people, the same
applies to the teaching profession.
• Exposure to opportunities for professional learning and development
are important in both formal and informal learning contexts
• New skills are needed to navigate emergent eco-systems of schooling
• How do these partnership approaches fit within the broader learning
eco-systems of the 21st century?
Email:[email protected]
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Input 3:Deakin-Northern Bay College
• A/Prof Damian Blake
• Kellie Tobin
• Jennifer Dalton
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The Deakin-NBC SCTE
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Is it time to consider a more consistent
approach to assessment instruments?
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Feedback from school-based teacher educators supervising PSTs from different
programs and universities:
– Working with many different assessment instruments despite the existence of
national standards;
– Different ITE courses offer varying degrees of support for using the assessment
instruments;
– Some conflict and contradictions between school-based teacher educators and
university-based teacher educators regarding:
• the merit of different ‘types’ of teacher knowledge/skills that is being assessed;
• the sequential development and assessment of knowledge and skills.
– A need for a common assessment instrument across ITE courses?
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Is it time to consider a more consistent approach to adult-based
pedagogy (andragogy) informing supervision?
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Contrasting feedback from students undertaking a more conventional
professional experience:
– Some PSTs expected to a clone of their supervising teacher;
– Limited opportunities to experience ‘shared professional knowledge’
and knowledge/skills required for team-based approaches to
teaching;
– PST-Supervising teacher relationships that are based on a childfocused pedagogy rather than an adult-based relationship for
supervision and learning;
A need for a school-based teacher educators to be skilled in
contemporary approaches to adult learning?
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Consideration for the capacity PSTs bring to a
community?
• Feedback from PSTs regarding:
– Limited recognition of PSTs prior experience and skills that are often
very relevant to teaching and schools (in conventional professional
experience arrangements);
– Multiple cases of PSTs’ capacity to add significant value to school
improvement initiatives;
– Expansive learning opportunities and partnerships arising from PSTs’
prior networks and community connections;
– Opportunity for PSTs to build their teacher identity in a manner that
recognises and values their individual pathways into teaching.