Australia’s supervising teachers: motivators and challenges to inform professional learning

ABSTRACT

This paper offers an overview of what motivates and challenges Australian supervising teachers to work with preservice teachers in their classrooms. In the contemporary Australian context of new National Professional Standards for Teachers, a new national curriculum and new standards for Initial Teacher Education programs, what motivates and challenges supervising teachers becomes a focus for professional learning through analysis presented in this paper. Data are reported from a national data set that includes 314 responding supervising teachers who took the Mentoring Perspectives Inventory from 2012–2014. The MPI data are aggregated in this paper to suggest that the wider system of teacher education could benefit from attention at various levels of interest to develop the underlying knowledge base of supervising teachers and our understanding of how they are challenged and motivated in their work with preservice teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• Supervising teachers
• Mentoring Perspectives Inventory
• teacher education
• professional learning

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong. We appreciate the data gathering assistance of Dr K. Alex Miller from the University of Wollongong.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Preservice teachers are also known by different terms in different jurisdictions, such as student teacher, teacher candidate, practicum student or intern. Each of these may have local subtleties of meaning, but in this paper, we use the term used in New South Wales: preservice teacher.

2. MPI items and sub-scales refer to preservice teachers as “student teachers”. We maintain this use of the term when referring to MPI items or sub-scales. When interpreting results in the current study, we refer to the preservice teachers as PST.

3. The Graduate Diploma was a post-graduate teaching qualification of duration 1–2 years full-time study. Teacher candidates entered a “GradDip” program after successful completion of an undergraduate degree in a teachable (or related) subject area. Changes to certification requirements in Australia now require a degree be a minimum of 2 years, which in practice means that the GradDip has been replaced by new Masters level courses, such as the Masters of Teaching, at the University of Wollongong.

4. Instructions for setting up a “Project Code” can be found on the MPI website (www.mentoringprofile.com)

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty of Education, University of Wollongong.

Notes on contributors

Wendy Nielsen

Wendy Nielsen Associate Professor Wendy Nielsen is a science educator whose research interests span digital technologies and representations to teach and learn science; metacognition; complexity in education; preservice teacher learning; environmental education; and professional learning.

Juanjo Mena

Juanjo Mena Dr Juanjo Mena is an Associate Professor whose research focuses on teaching practice, mentoring, the practicum, teacher reflection and ICT.

Anthony Clarke

Anthony Clarke Professor Anthony Clarke is Director of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Canada. His research interests include the practicum, teacher education, mentoring and self-study.

Sarah O’Shea

Sarah O’Shea Dr Sarah O’Shea is an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the University of Wollongong. She coordinates programs in Adult, Vocational and Higher Education, is an Australian National teaching and Learning Fellows and also Chair of WATTLE, the Wollongong Academy of Tertiary Teaching and Learning Excellence. Her research interests include adult learning, university student access, equity in higher education and the First Year Experience.

Garry Hoban

Garry Hoban Professor Garry Hoban (retired) is a science educator whose teaching and research has focused on student-created digital media for learning and explaining science. He has developed frameworks for long-term professional learning and authored and edited several books on teacher professional learning.

John Collins

John Collins Dearly departed Dr John Collins was an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focus has been evaluation of educational training and initiatives, including developing and validating surveys, scales and custom-designed indices for large-scale information gathering and analysis.