Quality teaching: standards, professionalism, practices

International and national policy discourses around quality teaching and professional standards are redefining teaching as a profession (see Schleicher, 2011). At the supra-national level, Robertson and Sorensen (2018) argue that teachers’ work and pedagogic practices are being increasingly regulated by instruments and measures developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). They propose that such policy discourses are leading to a restricted imagining of the 21^st century teacher and teaching, and the promotion of generic, constructivist models of pedagogy. Writing about the English national context, Beck (2009) suggests that the teaching professional standards movement has very significantly redefined both what counts as being a profession and “being professional” for teachers, and reduced teachers’ professional autonomy by promoting a “coercive re-professionalisation” (p. 8). They argue that ‘the performative emphasis is what dominates Professional Standards for Teachers’, not only in terms of the content, but the discourse that frames them. The Professional Standards discourse is built on a “technicist model” and is “profoundly reductive” suggesting that teachers and teaching is about ‘acquiring a limited corpus of state prescribed knowledge accompanied by a set of similarly prescribed skills and competencies’ (Beck, 2009, p. 10). Australia also has a national authority responsible for the development of Professional Standards for Teachers, as well as the delivery of professional learning programs for teachers and school leaders.

Policy discourses around teaching quality are linked tightly to specific notions of teacher accountability and responsibility. Within the accountability reform paradigm, teachers’ work is evaluated in terms of value-added measurements that claim to assess individual teacher productivity against individual student and whole class test score performance and reward teachers accordingly (Berliner, 2014). The market-driven performativity agenda of neo-liberal education policies, where teachers’ performance is judged against the performance of students on high stakes standardised national testing, is affecting teachers’ work. Critical policy scholars report the high levels of fear, anxiety, mourning and loss of hope experienced by teachers as they navigate and negotiate the contradictory and conflicting discourses of this policy terrain (Ball, 2016; Clarke, 2013; Singh, 2018).

Walk into any primary school in Queensland, Australia and teachers’ talk about their work is scattered with acronyms such as WoW (Watching Others Work) and PiP (Pedagogy in Practice); mnemonic devices (Five Questions, Seven Steps, Three Ways); and abbreviations such as F2D (Faces to Data) and APDP (Annual Performance and Development Plans) (Singh, Märtsin, & Glasswell, 2015). School staff room and classroom walls are decorated with data artefacts mapping individual student progress as measured by various testing instruments. The data artefacts take many forms, some include faces of children, others list children’s names, some are in grid table format, others in a path or tree format. All of the data artefacts are designed around a specific purpose – to measure, monitor and improve student learning in literacy and numeracy. Sometimes slogans adorn data walls, catchy phrases that compare “hard data” and “numbers” to “mere opinion”.

Devices such as slogans, artefacts, and patterns of professional talk, while purporting to be research-informed, generate greater chasms between educational research and teaching practices. A whole industry of private and public consultants are now engaged in pedagogising research, that is, converting particular categories of research work into scripts for teachers’ consumption (Singh, Thomas, & Harris, 2013). In order to be adopted in practice, the pedagogised research positions itself around an acronym, mnemonic device, slogan or abbreviation, so that it can be instantly recalled in a performance review or report, checked against a template during a classroom walk-through, and used as a conversation starter during a school performance review. The types of research favoured in the neo-liberal education policy framework centre on narrow definitions of measurement, data, evidence within a particular mechanistic version of research (Berliner, 2014). Anything outside of this version of research is disparaged as “opinion”, “stories” or “anecdotes”.

This edition of the journal explores these policy discourses and enactments around teaching quality, classroom ready teachers, teacher professional standards and learning, as well as what constitutes quality research in teacher education and teaching practice. Some of the papers suggest alternative ways of thinking about teaching, teacher education programs and teacher education research (see also Heimans & Singh, 2018; Heiman, Singh & Glasswell, 2017).

In the first paper, Salter and Halbert explore the ways in which teacher education policies and regulatory frameworks privilege discourses of “classroom ready”, arguing that such a discursive focus narrows initial teacher education (ITE) and defines “readiness” in instrumental, functional, technical terms. The authors argue for a policy shift that prioritises “community ready” teachers, that is, teachers who become “engaged global citizens” with “relational understanding and skills” about the lived experiences of students and their wider community contexts. The knowledge, skills and dispositions required to become “community ready”, rather than simply “classroom ready” are complex and cannot be easily captured through narrow definitions of “evidence” and “measurement”. The authors explore the increased regulatory and accountability pressures and competing demands on ITE, as well as the ways in which teacher professionalism is defined within intended and enacted curriculum. Salter and Halbert call for wider professional experience (WPE) which extends beyond the classroom through critical service learning and engages ITE students into thinking of themselves as part of a collective responsible for mobilizing communities with the goal of developing “activist teachers” who can both imagine and be change agents.

In a systematic review of the literature, Zhang explores how discourses of quality are used to narrow and delimit what is categorised as acceptable teacher education research for the purposes of research assessment exercises. He explores four non-traditional dimensions of criteria for assessing the quality of research in initial teacher education, namely, innovative research questions; use for practice; research capacity building; and contribution to platforms and protocols. The term innovative, as used by Zhang, does not simply denote something new and different. Rather, the term highlights complexities, ambiguities and uncertainties of ITE. The phrase use for practice does not signal a technical, instrumentalist appropriation and recontextualisation of research. Rather, the phrase values research that targets practitioners as users of research. The phrase research capacity building promotes a team approach, where the problem to be investigated is worked out in the field, and research resources are mobilized to work through such problems. The phrase contribution to platforms and protocols implies the production of research artefacts (including acronyms, mnemonic devices, abbreviations) based on research undertaken in local contexts.

The next paper by Clark and Newberry uses theoretical ideas of teacher self-efficacy and survey instruments to measure self-efficacy in ITE primary education programs in one state in the Western U.S. The data were collected at the end of the ITE program from two surveys: Teachers’ Sense of Self Efficacy Scale (TSES) and the Preservice Teacher Survey (PTS). Clark and Newberry draw on Bandura’s overall concept of self-efficacy, but question whether the survey measures honour this theoretical construct of self-efficacy. The PTS seems to be administered at the end of ITE courses, while the TSES was administered by the authors. Clark and Newberry suggest that the results of the survey data indicate that the preservice teachers left their programs with high levels of teacher efficacy. There is a need for additional research, the authors suggest, to explain the complexity of ITE students’ experiences of their programs, and how these diverse experiences may boost self-efficacy.

Thompson and Woodman take up Bandura’s construct of self-efficacy and design a scale to investigate teacher efficacy beliefs within the Japanese context. They suggest that this scale and interpretation of Bandura’s work might be usefully adapted and adopted in other foreign language contexts.

We propose that it is timely to think about the ways in which Bandura’s theoretical framework of self-efficacy (which was developed in the 1970s to explore factors that might induce psychological change in individuals) has been appropriated in particular ways within ITE research across the globe. Why the focus on individual psychological change? What survey instruments are used to assess psychological change? What responsibility and accountabilities are placed on TE to bring about this change? There seems to be an alignment between the psychological/medical model of research promoted through discourses of self-efficacy and the neo-liberal policy logic which places responsibility and accountability for performance outcomes squarely on individual teachers and students.

Chen, Chien and Kao report on research into the online and evaluation search strategies of pre-service and in-service preschool teachers in Taiwan. They draw on data generated by a survey instrument. The authors suggest that research strategies, such as online searching for information and evaluating the quality of this material, is increasingly important to the teaching profession. Significantly, the authors argue that information search skills are far more than techniques, rules and principles. Rather, information search skills are based on epistemological beliefs, as well as self-efficacy and positive/negative feelings about undertaking such work. The authors differentiate between the knowledge, confidence and skill sets of pre- and in-service teachers, and argue, similar to other studies, that teachers’ online information seeking behaviour has an impact on students’ skills in this domain. In other words, teachers who are good problem-solvers and develop advanced information search and evaluation strategies are more likely to pass this knowledge and set of behaviours on to their students.

Page, Boyle, McKay and Mavropoulou use a qualitative research design to explore teachers’ perceptions of inclusive education around Special Educational Needs policies in mainstream classrooms in the Cook Islands. The authors report a number of findings: (1) lack of formal diagnosis of students with special needs; (2) a medical-based binary approach to disability (slow, deficit vs no additional help required); (3) negative attitudes towards students who require additional assistance; and the (4) importance of, but not over-reliance on, teacher aides to support inclusive practices in mainstream classrooms.

Across the globe, ITE programs are being reshaped by a policy agenda around professional standards, professional learning, and classroom readiness. In addition, teachers’ work, learning and sense of professionalism is being reshaped by this policy agenda. As teacher educators and researchers in the field of teachers’ work and teacher education, we are caught up in these struggles. The papers in this edition all engage with these policy discourses reshaping teacher professionalism, teacher education, teachers’ work, and teacher education research practices.