Balancing Stakeholders Interests In Evolving Teacher Education Accreditation Contexts
While Australian teacher education programs have long had rigorous accreditation pathways at the University level they have not been subject to the same formal public or professional scrutiny typical of professions such as medicine, nursing or engineering. Professional accreditation for teacher preparation programs is relatively new and is linked to teacher registration which in itself is relatively recent in most jurisdictions. As elsewhere, the goal of accreditation is to enhance the overall quality of teacher preparation programs and to meet jurisdictional requirements for initial teacher competence. Any new system of quality control takes time to develop and to embed into professional cultures and academic processes at the university or college level. Accreditation processes are no exception and Australia is grappling to develop procedures that meet jurisdictional legislative requirements, assure the public of the quality of teacher preparation and suit the professional context for each state. As yet these procedures have not focused on professional growth, accomplished or expert teaching, or quality within specific areas of preparation. While all agree that the ultimate goal of accreditation is quality assurance- to improve teaching quality in schools, negotiating optimum pathways to quality outcomes is no easy task in a country with an education system and population as diverse as Australia. This paper considers some of the practical and institutional issues confronting teacher education providers as they come to terms with new regulatory environments that require external accreditation of teacher education to meet varying state and national policy agendas. Specifically, it focuses on issues engaging a small and regional teacher education provider, Charles Darwin University as it negotiates developing registration and accreditation requirements. It also flags the need to improve teacher quality through acknowledgement of advanced practice in teaching and expert performance in delivering teacher education.
An Evaluation of the Bachelor of Learning Management at Central Queensland University
Lawrence Ingvarson, Adrian Beavis, Charlotte Danielson, Louise Ellis and Alison Elliott for that graduates of the Bachelor of Learning Management degree believed that they were better prepared for the first year of teaching than graduates from other Queensland universities. That finding was supported by an observational study of 18 BLM graduates that found they performed at a significantly higher level on a range of teaching standards than did graduates from other universities.
Pre-Service Teacher Education In Australia : A Mapping Study Of Selection Processes, Course Structure And Content, And Accreditation Processes
Summary The data from these universities suggests that the key factor used to select into pre-service teacher education – whether undergraduate or postgraduate – is the measured academic ability of the applicant. Tertiary admission centres nearly always process applications to undergraduate courses, and special access provisions supplement these processes. One of the features of the data was how similar the selection procedures are across Australia. The major differences in selection are to be found between undergraduate and postgraduate courses. For undergraduate courses the use of Tertiary Admission Centres is near universal, and little other data are used to make selections. However for postgraduate courses where applicants have already attained a degree, universities use a wider range of information to guide selection. Again, the type of information used is common to most universities. This similarity suggests that universities have optimised their selection procedures in terms of efficiency. However it is interesting to reflect upon the speed with which most courses put their new students into classrooms to help them to decide if teaching really is for them – such haste suggests that universities may have some concerns about the validity of their selection procedures. Thus there may be issues to be found to do with selection despite the uniformity in the procedures and rationales for these procedures across Australia.