It feels like every day we read about issues in teacher education, especially in the important field of English education. In this post, I’m going to discuss this trend from an insider’s perspective and will finish by responding to (the most personally relevant parts of) Federal Minister for Education Alan Tudge’s recent Roaring Back speech.
This will be my last blog post as a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). After completing a Bachelor of Education (BEd) degree, honours, a PhD, and (almost) eight years as a lecturer and then senior lecturer, UTAS has felt like a second home for an extended period. I will fondly remember my time at UTAS and I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to get started as a teacher educator and researcher in English education.
Next week I will be busy relocating from Launceston to Brisbane. On the 15th of November, I’ll start working as a senior lecturer at the University of Queensland (UQ). To win this position, I spoke about the critical need to promote evidence-based approaches to reading instruction as a core element of all teacher education courses. While lecturers in English education should be well-versed in all areas of language, literacy, and literature, I believe my strong desire to design and deliver a first-rate reading instruction experience for pre-service teachers at UQ was key to my appointment.
How Australian universities typically prepare new teachers to teach English
A key challenge in teacher education is the extremely limited time teacher educators have to work with pre-service teachers. In the past, time constraints have meant Australian universities have only included three core (i.e., compulsory) 13-week English courses in their four-year BEd degrees, and only two in their two-year MTeach degrees. This matches the number of courses usually dedicated to mathematics, while other content areas (e.g., Science, ICT, HASS, etc.) receive even fewer courses. Intensifying this challenge for people in my position, the Australian Curriculum: English has almost twice as many content descriptions as the next largest curriculum document (mathematics). In my opinion, two or three English courses in a new teacher’s training is really not enough time to fully prepare them for the complexities of English teaching.
With two or three courses only, it’s a struggle for teacher educators to cover all the important ideas of language, literacy, and literature in any real depth. At UTAS, it has been my job to truncate the explicit teaching of reading and writing into one rather cramped course. If you had only 13 weeks to cover basically everything on the teaching of early reading and writing from birth to Year 6, how would you divvy things up?
Working in teacher education
It’s quite common to read social media posts, online blogs, newspaper articles, and occasional political speeches that criticise, mistrust, and blame teacher educators for many educational issues. Given the immense responsibility teacher educators have for preparing every new generation of teachers, I think it’s fair to hold them to account and take an interest in the quality of education provided at our universities. Every misguided decision in teacher education has the potential to negatively impact the classroom teaching and learning of hundreds if not thousands of teachers and students.
At the same time, it’s important for people working at other levels of education to recognise that teacher educators operate in oftentimes challenging circumstances. The time constraints I alluded to above are intensified in English education with its jampacked curriculum. This can be coupled with difficulties getting pre-service teachers to engage fully in the learning opportunities provided. Many are frankly overloaded with life commitments, juggling studies with part-time jobs, families, voluntary work in schools, sporting responsibilities, and many other things. When they can engage, it’s sometimes difficult for pre-service teachers to fully grasp the importance of what’s being taught when they have had limited time with students in classrooms and typically complete four courses every semester on different topics, usually with little connection.
If pre-service teachers don’t engage in a given week, it might mean they miss some crucial aspect of English teaching, like spelling, or phonics, or written genres. It’s up to teacher educators to ensure that university assessments require pre-service teachers to demonstrate understandings and skills for everything that will be an important part of their jobs as teachers.
While there is almost certainly no magic-bullet solution for the issues in teacher education, in my view, simply having more time to prepare pre-service teachers for the complexities of English teaching seems essential and exciting. This is especially the case with early reading and writing.
Who decides what’s taught in Australian teacher education courses?
If you’ve ever wondered what’s being taught in Schools of Education these days, take a quick look at AITSL’s Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at the Graduate career stage and Standards and Procedures for the accreditation of initial teacher education programs in Australia. To be accredited, every university must demonstrate how their teacher education courses meet the Standards outlined by AITSL. They describe the accreditation process in this way:
These Standards and Procedures reflect high expectations of initial teacher education and the interest of all Australian governments in maximising our collective investment in the development of pre-service and graduate teachers. They also represent a collective sense of accountability and acknowledge that evaluation of initial teacher education is a shared responsibility. Quality assurance of teacher education programs is essential to ensure every program is preparing classroom ready teachers with the skills they need to make a positive impact on school student learning. They are designed to ensure that all graduates of initial teacher education meet the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers at the Graduate career stage. This is the foundation of the accreditation process. (AITSL, 2019, p. 3)
While teacher education is clearly important for building each pre-service teacher’s foundational knowledge and skills, the Professional Standards don’t stop at the Graduate career stage. Instead, teachers are expected to continue learning about the profession throughout their careers, supported by school leadership and overarching bodies like Departments of Education, Catholic Education Offices, and Independent Schools groups.
The Standards have been updated in minor ways over time, but 2019 marked a very important change in relation to English education. In response to concerns about pre-service teachers’ preparation for the teaching of reading, AITSL made it compulsory for every undergraduate program (e.g., BEd degree) to dedicate at least one-half of a year (equivalent full-time student load) to English/literacy courses, and one-eighth of a year to early reading instruction. Since full-time BEd students at Australian universities typically complete eight courses per year (four per semester), this means AITSL are requiring that their degrees include four compulsory English courses, with one of these dedicated to early reading instruction. In their words, “early reading instruction should address evidence-based practice across the following elements: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and oral language” (AITSL, 2019, p. 16).
This single change to the Accreditation Standards has major implications for Schools of Education around the country. Since accreditation occurs every five years, every Australian university will need to demonstrate that their undergraduates receive a full course dedicated to the essential elements of reading by 2024 or sooner (depending on when their accreditation rolls around). I consider this to be fantastic news for every Australian child, parent, and future teacher. Anyone with an interest in the quality of reading instruction in Australia’s primary schools should be grateful to the people who brought about this change to the Standards.
The new Standards have already made a difference. In 2022, I’ve been asked to develop a new, 13-week, early reading-focused course for UQ, which will be a core unit for all pre-service teachers completing a UQ Bachelor of Education (BEd) Primary or Master of Teaching (MTeach) Primary degree. Being able to dedicate a full course to early reading is a dream come true. The decision by UQ School of Education leadership to add this new course to the existing suite of courses will go a long way to preparing more confident, capable teachers of reading and English more broadly. The recent changes to the Accreditation Standards suggest it’s quite likely that other Australian universities will follow in UQ’s footsteps.
What does teacher education have to do with Alan Tudge’s speech?
On October 22, 2021, Alan Tudge, Australia’s Federal Minister for Education, offered a speech entitled Roaring back: My priorities for schools as students return to classrooms. There was quite a bit of backlash from many in the Australian education community regarding Tudge’s comments about the Australian History Curriculum.
You might be happy to hear, I have nothing to say about this.
Instead, I’d like to turn to some comments in the speech that were, as Greg Ashman described them, crowded out. For instance, roughly halfway through the speech, Tudge said this:
The second aspect of my quality teaching agenda is ensuring that every student training to be a teacher is equipped with the toolkit to be highly impactful in the classroom. If anything, this is my top priority.
He went on to make clear why teacher training is his top priority, with comments about the quality of degrees offered by Australian universities:
Over the last twenty to thirty years, we have seen ideology and fads dominate instructional practice in our universities’ education faculties, instead of evidence-based practices. The lack of transparency in these courses mean we do not have all the information we should. But what we do know should trouble us greatly, especially when it comes to two highly effective teaching methods – explicit instruction and phonics. The evidence is crystal clear on these, and yet we have seen ideological resistance which has limited their use in classrooms.
Tudge made several other thought-provoking points in this speech related to teacher education, but I’m going to pause here to focus on the key idea of transparency. I agree that, in the past, Australian teacher educators have not been as transparent about course content as they could with the wider education community. Admittedly, I’m not sure whether any other group of educators has, on the whole, been notably more transparent about the content they teach, and most teacher educators are likely willing to share what they do if you ask them.
The lack of public information about what’s in teacher education courses has meant pretty well anyone has been able to say whatever they like about what these courses do or do not include, or even about the expertise and abilities of the teacher educators who provide them. While online course descriptions hint at what’s in these units, such descriptions were never intended to provide a blow-by-blow account of every concept, theory, and approach a course includes. The only reliable way to find out what’s actually in these courses has been to speak with teacher educators directly.
I can’t speak for other teacher educators, but I’ve promoted both explicit instruction and phonics in my lecturing at UTAS since I started in 2014. In my new co-edited book, Teaching and learning primary English, explicit instruction is the topic of Chapter 2 and presented as the book’s main pedagogical approach for teaching reading, writing, and children’s literature. The essential elements of reading are also given a chapter each, with the chapter on phonics contributed by international phonics expert Emerita Professor Rhona Stainthorp from the University of Reading in the UK. But I think it’s important for teacher educators to do more to renew the wider education community’s confidence in how universities prepare pre-service teachers to teach English (and everything else, really). Being able to design the new reading-focused course at UQ presents a useful opportunity for this.
The Transparent Reading Course Experiment
I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of Emina Mclean and Greg Clement who have been entirely transparent about how they transformed their schools’ approaches to reading instruction. As I design the content of the new reading course at UQ, I plan to provide regular updates via Twitter and this blog, encouraging feedback and input from the wider education community. This will provide the many reading experts I follow a rare chance to inform the design of (what I hope to be) a cutting-edge, evidence-based course on reading. I’m not entirely sure what to expect, but my hope is that the increased transparency of the process will help other teacher educators who also have the opportunity to design new reading-focused courses.
Like Alan Tudge, my top priority is to provide those who wish to become teachers with the best possible start through high-quality teacher training. As I move from UTAS to UQ, it will be exciting to have you come along on the journey. And before you mention it, yes, I have heard it’s very hot up there (it’s OK – I’ve packed the sunscreen).