Search

Demands that Initial Teacher Education (ITE) prepare teachers who can equip students to be agile real-world problem solvers are frequent. Guidance about ITE integrated curriculum approaches to achieve this aim is harder to find, a significant gap given increasing time and policy pressures for ITE educators. Drawing from an Australian context, this systematic review investigates how integrated curriculum is conceptualised and enacted in secondary schooling ITE courses. Three conceptions of integrated curriculum for ITE are highlighted -- Interdisciplinary, Disciplinary Literacy, and Transdisciplinary approaches -- alongside benefits and barriers to enacting integrated curriculum. Recommendations for further research and practice around integrated curriculum are proposed.

In this article, we look at three teacher education programs across three countries--Australia, Bhutan, and Canada--to examine how reflection is cultivated in pre-service teachers (also referred to as teacher candidates) through a pedagogy of self-assessment. We begin from the premise that a cornerstone of effective teaching is the capacity of an educator to reflect on their practice and to use their reflections for professional growth and development. Qualitative data were collected from teacher candidates from one teacher education program in each country to obtain the views and reflections of teacher candidates about the power and pedagogy of self-assessment to inform their learning and development. Analysis of results led to three overarching themes: (a) consistent learning priorities of pre-service teachers as they engage with reflection; (b) pedagogical features that leverage self-assessment strategies to enhance reflective practice; and (c) the possibilities for reflection to facilitate a professional stance towards learning. Each theme is discussed with consideration for teacher education practices and theory.

As the generational context of higher education shifts, a rise in Emotional Support Animal (ESA) use and mental health concerns are present for students on college campuses. While previous studies have aimed to address the relevancy and controversy of ESAs in higher education as well as their effectiveness in supporting individuals, less research has explored underlying factors that contribute to the use of an ESA. The purpose of this study was to explore the parenting behaviors of parents/caregivers of students with ESAs in comparison to parents/caregivers of students without ESAs. An embedded mixed methods design was used. Participants completed the Parenting Behaviors Questionnaire (PBQ) assessment scale and an embedded qualitative question. Findings revealed significant differences in the PBQ subscales of responsiveness, explaining, and discipline indicating that the parenting behaviors among parents/caregivers of students with ESAs differ in these areas. Students with ESAs also disclosed higher incidents of unexpected life events and caregiver instability than their non-ESA counterparts. The data provides essential assessment and intervention information for college counseling centers.

Teacher quality is not often defined but can be understood through the way that policies and expectations for teaching quality are talked about and talked into being. How do early career teachers (ECTs) navigate high expectations of becoming quality teachers, especially when there are several discourses of quality, some prominent and others less so? Data from interviews with 13 Australian ECTs five years after their graduation from selective quality teacher preparation degrees were analysed to identify how ECTs discerned, deliberated and dedicated themselves to quality teaching in their diverse contexts. ECTs drew from concepts of effectiveness and responsibility when they focused on their students, yet their emphasis on relational priorities and the importance of reflexive dialogue points to a practice-based approach. While dominant discourses of teacher quality do not highlight relational or collective approaches, these ECTs showed how professional standards, effectiveness and responsibilisation approaches were recontextualised. Importantly, the systemic conditions of time to talk, and opportunities for attending to relationships, as well as the skills of reflexivity underpin this alternative approach.

Student agency in assessment is evident when students make assessment choices, and their voices inform decisions. This paper presents an in-depth case study of a high performing school that sought student voice to reform its assessment culture to enhance student agency. Secondary students in an Australian school were invited to draw a visual metaphor: if assessment were a food, what would it be? Responses were analysed to identify: What can be learnt about assessment culture from students' drawings and comments? And how did student voice inform changes in school assessment practices and assessment culture? Six years later, the student ideas were revisited by a school leader to identify how cultural and structural conditions for student agency within the assessment culture had changed. Using visual methodologies with students provided insightful commentary on how assessment practices may be modified to support learning and the challenges of engaging in assessment culture reform.

The Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher (HALT) Certification process introduced in Australia in 2012 was designed to recognise expert teachers, to encourage them to continue to influence and impact their students and colleagues through their exemplary classroom practice. Expert teachers prepare evidence of their impactful practices, and have this evidence evaluated through a National Certifying Authority. HALTs are a relatively new role in Australian education, and little is known about their impact in schools, or the potential for their ongoing role as middle leaders in schools. This paper analyses the experiences of HALT teachers who had been certified by Independent Schools Queensland (ISQ) in 2018, and what impact they recognised they were having in the schools who supported them through their certification process. Impact is theorised as a temporal, reflexive narrative. Data were gathered in a cascading evaluative process through portfolio analysis, interviews with nationally certified teachers, school-based mentors and school leaders and a survey about their teacher and middle leader efficacy. The process of applying for HALT Certification had significant positive personal impact for the teachers, their students, their colleagues in their school and for some, beyond their school. The recognition of impact as a temporal narrative with distinct genres, and the concept of HALT teachers as middle leaders may point to new avenues of supporting applicants and to potential benefits for schools to encourage teachers to consider national certification.

Feedback is a cultural tool through which English teachers can facilitate secondary students' evaluative expertise in their writing development. While there is increased concern to use feedback to enhance learning at all educational levels, there is currently little empirical knowledge of how secondary teachers of English design feedback for complex appraisal. Using data from two qualitative studies, this paper explores practices drawing on Anglophone cultures of secondary schooling for subject English. Observation, artefact and interview data are analysed using a socio-cultural theoretical lens. Cultural tools including student planners, peer feedback and discussion linked students' self-regulated learning to community norms for evaluating written texts. Two distinctive feedback conditions for written texts in the school subject of English are identified: the disciplinary practices of evaluation of texts within community cultural values, and the role of cultural tools in co-regulation of learning in the classroom context.

How feedback is understood and enacted has shifted from the traditional practice of providing individual feedback on summative tasks at key points to a more ongoing series of dialogues between the teacher and students during the teaching period. This paper reports on the experiences of designing faster feedback through weekly dialogic feedback loops to enhance students' personal connection to their learning while providing teachers with faster, actionable feedback data to inform learning design. A pragmatic inquiry considered how benefits might potentially be amplified through the use of digital technologies. Data included student reflections collected via the GoingOK web application, interviews and focus groups. The findings identify and theorise four types of digitally mediated feedback loops: students in computer-mediated dialogue with themselves; students and teachers in dialogue with each other; the reflection on how feedback informed learning; and the sociotechnical dialogue informing ongoing technical design. Three design dilemmas that were experienced by teachers as they enacted digitally mediated dialogic feedback loops are articulated, alongside the principles that enabled responsive design. Understanding these design elements is fundamental if automation of some parts of the feedback loop through reflective writing analytics is to be considered both feasible and desirable. Implications for practice or policy: (1) Digitally mediated feedback loops can facilitate faster feedback, enabling students to reflect on their learning and providing teachers with access to new insights about diverse learners; (2) Feedback technology can challenge existing ideas about feedback; (3) Faster feedback can save teachers time, but efficiencies are likely to depend on an increased human workload in the short term as automation technologies can be slower to develop; and (4) Sociotechnical innovation requires collective dialogue between educators and digital developers, across asynchronous timelines.

Concerns with the readiness of beginning teachers has resulted in significant changes to ITE programs in Australia. Declining student performance in domestic and international assessments is being seen as a policy problem that can be addressed through policy solutions intended to lift the quality of teachers. While quality and performance measures are linked in this policy agenda, it is not clear how quality teacher and teaching are being defined. In this special issue exploring what teacher educators "should" know, it is reasonable for teacher educators to know more about the ideals of teacher and teaching quality against which they are held to account. Exploring the literature pertaining to the quality teacher discourse informing initial teacher education (ITE) programs, this paper is a thematic literature review relating to the discourses of teacher and teaching quality. Understanding how these discourses of quality interrelate and shape teacher education is an important and necessary consideration in the development of ITE programs.

There has been a progressive move towards the adoption of social media in formal post compulsory learning. This qualitative study evaluated the readiness of teachers and students to use Facebook to enhance learning in a tertiary vocational setting in Australia despite a lack of support from the institute. Readiness was understood to be the balance sought between potential energy available (power) and the energy required for change (load). The findings, from surveys and focus group interviews, show that students were much more likely than teachers to have a Facebook account and to be interested in using Facebook as part of their learning. Agreed benefits, evident through a student-initiated closed Facebook group, included collaboration through sharing resources, knowledge and ideas, increased communication with peers and teachers, and a platform that was familiar to students. The difference lay in perceptions of purpose, places and spaces for learning, and an understanding of social norms.

Mentors for beginning teachers in schools are often unacknowledged middle leaders in their schools. Through their work with beginning teachers, they not only provide local leadership in their contexts, they influence and shape the work of the next generation of teachers. Government-funded mentor training for the purpose of supporting beginning teachers in Education Queensland schools commenced in 2014 (Queensland Government. [2017]. "Mentoring Beginning Teachers". http://education.qld.gov.au/staff/development/employee/teachers/mentoring.html). In Queensland, Australia, over 3000 experienced teachers have completed a two-day professional learning Mentoring Beginning Teacher (MBT) programme. Upon completion, mentors were expected to design and enact a mentoring programme that met the beginning teachers' needs in their context, using the dialogic mentoring principles they had learned to fulfil the policy goals of increasing the number of beginning teachers transitioning to full registration. This article draws on Bernstein's ([2000]. "Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique". Revised ed. Rowman & Littlefield) concepts of recontextualisation, and horizontal and vertical discourses of knowledge to understand how mentor teachers negotiated and enacted their roles as middle leaders in schools in diverse schooling contexts.

Purpose: A new senior curriculum and assessment policy in Queensland, Australia, is changing the conditions for teaching and learning. The purpose of this study was to consider the personal, structural and cultural conditions that mediated the agency of Senior English teachers as they negotiated these changes. Agency is conceptualised as opportunities for choice in action arising from pedagogic negotiations with students within contexts where teachers' decision-making is circumscribed by other pressures. Design/methodology/approach: An action inquiry project was conducted with English teachers and students in two secondary schools as they began to adjust their practices in readiness for changes to Queensland senior assessment. Four English teachers (two per school) designed a 10-week unit of work in Senior English with the aim of enhancing students' critical and creative agency. Five action/reflection cycles occurred over six months with interviews conducted at each stage to trace how teachers were making decisions to prioritise student agency. Findings: Participating teachers drew on a variety of structural, personal and cultural resources, including previous experiences, time to develop shared understandings and the responsiveness of students that mediated their teacher agency. Teachers' ability to exert agentic influence beyond their own classroom was affected by the perceived flexibility of established resources and the availability of social support to share student success. Originality/value: These findings indicate that a range of conditions affected the development of teacher agency when they sought to design assessment to prioritise student agency. The variety of enabling conditions that need to be considered when supporting teacher and student agency is an important contribution to theories of agency in schools, and studies of teacher policy enactment in systems moving away from localised control to more remote and centralised quality assurance processes.

When unpaid female carers consider whether to pursue higher education (HE), they frequently experience decision-making uncertainties which stem from the structural and cultural challenges associated with their roles as carers. Reflexivity is a critical part of decision-making, as it empowers individuals to mediate between the present and future within the structural and cultural conditions which impact and guide their actions. To investigate the reflexive deliberation processes unpaid female carers engage in as part of their HE decision-making processes, this study analysed data from an in-depth, qualitative Australian study with 15 unpaid female carers who were considering higher education. Dialogic processes including narrative interviews and a card sort activity made visible the array of mental activities involved in reflexive decision-making by carers. Considering the more and less productive types of reflexive inner conversations which had been identified enabled participants to reflexively adjust the efficacy of some of their decision-making processes. This study contributes to the reflective and career counselling literature by theorising the cognitively and emotionally complex personal and structural demands of HE decision-making. By conceptualising reflexive decision-making anew, unpaid female carers and HE institutions can better identify and address the structural and cultural conditions which may be influencing their HE decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

University learning increasingly includes online learning experiences embedded within teaching with the dual policy intentions of increasing flexibility and learner engagement. In this research project, three university lecturers from different teaching contexts selected technologies for online learning to enhance learner engagement by encouraging peer learning. A sociocultural view of learning was used to conceptualise the technological and social affordances that might enable student peer participation and engagement. The research explored the question: "What are the benefits and barriers experienced by students engaging in online peer collaboration?" Students reported benefits including a sense of belonging that enhanced motivation, and professional identity. This article also reports on some of the challenges for students and University academics when engaging in online learning communities. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)