Conference targets quality of teacher education programs

Jul 05, 2007

More than 100 teacher educators from around Australia are visiting the University of Wollongong this week to participate in the 35th Australian Teacher Education Association (ATEA) annual conference.

Hosted by UOW's Faculty of Education, the conference theme is "Quality in Teacher Education: Considering Different Perspectives and Agendas". The conference proper began yesterday (4 July) and continues to 6 July.

Conference co-convener Dr Julie Kiggins said the quality of teacher education programs was under the microscope in many different countries.

"One reason for this close scrutiny is that in western countries, up to 20% of beginning teachers are leaving the profession within the first five years of employment while during the same time span many teachers are retiring.

"This high attrition rate coupled with the high retiring rate has serious implications for the teaching workforce. Moreover, there are myriad opinions about how to improve the quality of teacher education," Dr Kiggins said.

In Britain, traditional teacher education has been dismantled and is now strongly regulated by the Teacher Training Agency with students spending most of their time in schools.

In America, there is a growing movement to deregulate teacher education with over 700 unaccredited schools of teacher education, while at the same time the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education is working towards establishing a knowledge base for the profession and linking this to standards for preservice teacher education.

In Thailand, the government has mandated that teachers incorporate constructivist views on learning into their pedagogy. And in some underdeveloped countries teacher education is in crisis.

In South Africa, a third of existing primary teachers are untrained and in Kenya more teachers are dying of AIDS annually than is the output of teacher education institutions. And in Australia, over the past 25 years there have been more than 20 reviews of teacher education with almost no impact, Dr Kiggins said.

There is now a new national body, Teaching Australia that is identifying standards for teacher education at the preservice and inservice level, she said.

Dr Kiggins said there were many questions to address. Should teacher education programs focus on preservice teachers becoming reflective practitioners and developing views on social justice? Should programs include more discipline knowledge?

Is there a clearly defined knowledge base of teacher education? Should teacher education be school-based? Should programs promote diversity or uniformity? Should the time for teacher education courses be extended? Should resources for teacher education be increased or decreased?