I am passionate about primary teaching, science education, technology education, and facilitating teachers to become competent and confident teachers of science and technology. I have a Bachelor of Science (Psychology), a Graduate Bachelor of Education (Primary), and a PhD (Science Education). I was a primary school teacher with Education Queensland for 6 years, teaching in remote, regional, and city locations. My PhD examined the claim made in many curriculum documents around the world that “learning science helps people to make good decisions.”
Let's also jail the parents of adults who commit crimes. Oh, and any law school whose graduate lawyers commit malpractice, or medical school whose graduate doctors have patients that die. Oh, and any dentists... I could go on. Perhaps there are people who actually agree with these approaches. How frightening.
In Australia, we have teacher education, not teacher training. We educate preservice teachers in the theories, frameworks, and fields relating to education and teaching, so that they are empowered to make their own decisions regarding why, how, and when to teach students. Admittedly, once they graduate, they are immediately disempowered to make many decisions at all by the sheer weight of policy and procedures about what and how they must teach, dictated by 'experts,' and never mind the why.
Teacher educators and education institutions are not employing bodies. Graduating education students are at the beginning of their learning journey, not the end. The employing bodies must bear the responsibility, in partnership with other institutions and teachers themselves, to provide professional development, mentorship, and coaching to beginning and establishing teachers. Just as health organisations, legal companies, etc, bear the responsibility alongside their doctors, lawyers, etc.
The 'teacher quality' and 'reform' narratives have been around for a long time, and have contributed substantially to the erosion of education policy and practices. They are unhelpful narratives. The countries where those narratives have been established are rapidly sinking in the international 'measures' that advocates of these ideological policies worship so faithfully.
Until our education system is actually equitable, any program that attempts to do what has been suggested in this article will be inherently flawed. It is about equitable funding, first and foremost, whatever Hattie might say.
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