The Australian 29 August 2012
The recommendations of the Gonski review of school funding will fail to lift standards unless they are complemented by a transformation in teacher training, according to University of Melbourne dean of education Field Rickards.
He said the recommendations of the Gonski review are a necessary and important step, but not the sole solution to educational disadvantage in the nation.
Rickards called for the end of the existing system that “recycles” teaching practices from one generation to the next” and said research showed that the biggest factor in lifting student achievement is the quality of the teacher, and better teachers required a paradigm shift in the way education faculties prepared them for the classroom.
Teacher education for many decades has really been recycling, it’s an apprenticeship mode In many current models, including our old model, teachers would be parachuted into schools for short three-week placements and often told by their mentor, ‘Forget all the stuff you’ve learned at uni, I’ll teach you everything you need to know.’ In that way teachers are taught what their mentor teachers were taught, who were taught what their mentor teachers were taught. We have had a recycling model.
The teaching courses at the University of Melbourne were overhauled about five years ago, and it is now offered only as a graduate degree and taught in close partnership with schools and early childhood centres. Students spend two days a week in schools to provide the practical experience of the theory learned at university. The faculty pays half the salary of a leading teacher in the schools, called a teaching fellow, to work with the students, and also a clinical specialist at the university.
