Let’s talk about American Football. For those of you still reading, let’s focus on what the professionals call “The Quarterback Problem”.
How would you choose an NFL quarterback? They’re the most pivotal player on the field and it really pays to get the selection right. Not only do quarterbacks earn up to $10 million a year but they can also make or break a season for an entire team. With so many jobs and so much money on the line, developing a surefire way of determining success is vital.
Guess what? There isn’t a surefire way. Dan Shonka (awesome name) has vast experience in the field, works very hard and analyses statistics and DVDs of players. His job with an NFL team relies upon him making good decisions about which quarterbacks to choose. A lot of money is on the line. People’s careers. People’s livelihoods. If there was a surefire way of choosing a quarterback, someone with Dan’s experience would have worked it out.
IQ tests don’t work. Video analysis doesn’t work. Analysing college level performance doesn’t work. You cannot predict performance in this case. The only way that you can tell if someone is going to be a good NFL quarterback is to let them have a go at being an NFL quarterback.
The same is true for teaching. The only way to work out if someone is going to be a good teacher is to let them have a go at teaching. This problem is even more dire than the quarterback problem: There’s no such thing as “college level teaching” before you get to “NFL level teaching”. Teachers can arrive at their first job without having taught before. Practicum (a supervised simulation) is a good start, but it’s not the same thing as being a teacher responsible for a class.
There have been some attempts to bridge the gap, and they’re welcome because they address the issue. Lifting the quality of initial teacher education is always a good idea. I’d ask Mr Pyne how he plans to implement the recommendations made to him. For example:
“Higher education providers select the best candidates into teaching using sophisticated approaches that ensure initial teacher education students possess the required academic skills and personal characteristics to become a successful teacher”.
Sounds promising right? “Sophisticated approaches”? Everyone can agree with that. The problem, however is that there’s no evidence that having a teaching degree, passing a test or looking good in a qualitative survey on “personal characteristics” affects your capacity to be a good teacher. None. Nil. Nada.
Depressing, huh? Despair not; some of the recommendations of the TEMAG report are actually pretty sensible. They are focused on rigour. They target ineffective tertiary practice and the lack of coordination between schools and universities. More power to them. I’d disagree with the focus on entry criteria and say that raising the bar for entry into the profession is a fool’s errand and will be a textbook case of managerialism.
Choosing teachers will always be always be too hard to reduce to quantifiables. Some have suggested you have to try out four people to find one good teacher. This is simply because the job is unquantifiable. I hope this makes you appreciate the good teachers in your life even more. In the mean time, I suppose we can hope that Pyne will fix the problems in pre-service teacher education.
