Trust the Teaching Profession with the Responsibilities of a Profession

In 1973, a major national report on education called for a more active role for the teaching profession in developing standards for practice and in exercising responsibility for professional development. While it would not be accurate to say that the teaching profession has become "the point of reference for standards and thus the source of prestige..." for members who attain its standards, there have been definite signs of movement in this direction, especially over the past ten years. Nearly twenty professional associations have developed their own standards for accomplished teaching in their specialist fields and they want to use them to provide a certification system for those who meet them. The present question is whether the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs (MCEEDYA) will enable the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) to build on this resource and allow teachers and their associations to take the major responsibility for developing and implementing a voluntary standards-based professional certification system, which will be essential to the latter's success. While it is not appropriate for governments to tell teachers how to teach or to decide what counts as accomplished teaching, it is appropriate for governments to ask the profession to show that it can be trusted to provide a rigorous teacher evaluation system if the profession expects expertise to be rewarded. The author stresses that it is time for the profession to be entrusted with one of the main responsibilities of a profession; that is, to establish its own infrastructure for defining standards for accomplished practice, promoting development toward those standards, and providing a rigorous system for the certification of those who reach them.