Retaining Teachers Depends on Schools

ITE has been singled out as key to teacher supply but what happens to teachers in schools will determine whether an early career teacher will stay on.

Monash University Faculty of Education Dean, Professor Viv Ellis, says that long-term strategies are needed to address the working conditions for teachers, career structures, professional development, appropriate degrees of accountability, and salaries. 

“The notion of ‘classroom readiness’ is problematic if the systems and schools expect the quality of teaching from newly qualified teachers that they observe from their experienced classroom teaching staff,” he says. 

Fast-tracking career-changers into the job market through intensive training predictably can burn out the prospective teacher before they can acclimatise to schools.

Also, the issue for career-changers, is how they support themselves financially while learning to teach.

ITE policy in Australia has the expectation that new teachers navigate transitions between the university and one or more schools, on “placement”. The school “hosts” the student teacher and from a distance, the university tries to support their learning.

The boundary between university and school becomes a powerful but very high-risk opportunity for learning.

That means shifting focus from the individual teacher to the school. How can the school become both a safe and a supportive place to work and learn for teachers? How can the education and training of new teachers align with the school’s own development plans, improving both the supply of teachers and the quality of their teaching? And, crucially, how can the school retain teachers?

Ellis says focusing on the school as a whole and helping to create a sustainable environment for teachers to thrive is a long-term aim requiring active collaboration between governments, teacher unions, principals, community organisations, as well as universities.

Active collaboration is the norm in some countries, as in Norway’s 2017 ITE reforms. In terms of ITE, there’s evidence that innovative approaches that centre the school and foster links between ITE as an activity and school development can address both teacher supply and teaching quality.

The US teacher residency model for graduates has been federally funded since the Obama administration. Graduates - employed as “residents” in schools alongside completing academic coursework - make good teachers and stay in their schools post-qualification.

A distinctive feature of teacher residencies is that a school’s overall development is being fostered by the whole-school attention to teachers’ learning.

Talk of “partnership” is common when referring to university-school relations. Unlike “partnerships”, though, residencies don’t share out different tasks; residencies are a shared activity involving numerous stakeholders.

“In Australia, for the most part, ITE educators’ research is in their specialist field, is high quality, and directly relevant to the student teachers they are preparing. Australian educational research - much of which comes from those involved in ITE - is internationally renowned. These research-active teacher educators bring their research findings to their classrooms as part of evidence-based research-led teaching. This is a particular strength of many universities in Australia and should be celebrated,” says Ellis.

This is largely based on Viv Ellis’ piece in Monash Lens, Initial teacher education: With the profession in crisis, let’s not waste the chance for change. https://lens.monash.edu/@viv-ellis/2022/07/11/1384854/initial-teacher-education-dont-waste-the-crisis

Image by Christina Morillo