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Education Minister Jan Tinetti has asked officials for a report on a radical overhaul of teacher training methods in Australia.
Australia’s education ministers this month agreed on four core areas that training providers would have to teach or risk losing their accreditation.
That core content includes content on: how thehuman brain learns; teaching practices that support student learning by responding to how the brain learns; how to manage a classroom; and how to teach in ways that are culturally and contextually appropriate and responsive.
“I will be asking for advice from officials about whether the changes in Australia are relevant to the New Zealand context and what we can learn from their experience,” Tinetti told the Herald.
Tinetti said she was watching Australia with interest and agreed it was “essential” the way teachers are taught was led by evidence.
She said she had already had conversations with tertiary education providers about how to improve teacher education to ensure it was fit for purpose within the New Zealand context.
Tinetti said the former Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins, agreed to a work programme to further improve and strengthen teacher training in July last year. It initially focuses on training, induction and mentoring of new teachers.
The Ministry of Education was also working with providers to update courses to teach the refreshed curriculum, new NCEA assessment standards and common practice model for how to teach maths and literacy, she said.
National Party education spokeswoman Erica Stanford said the issues in New Zealand were much the same and she would not rule out following Australia’s lead.
She said teacher training here was also failing to give new teachers the skills they needed to teach effectively, manage a class or understand how the brain learns.
“We have been letting down teachers for a long time and schools are having to backfill the problem. Every school that I go into, without doubt, brings up initial teacher education as a huge problem,” she said.
“I’ve spoken to many graduate teachers who have said to me that they feel completely unprepared to teach in the classroom. They don’t know effective pedagogy, they don’t know how to teach a child to read.”
National Party education spokeswoman Erica Stanford says teacher training needs to be overhauled. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Stanford said Australia had taken a pretty hard-line approach, and she was looking at whether that was needed here or if there were existing tools which could be used to ensure the content was taught.
One of those tools was introducing a common practice model heavily focused on the science of learning, she said.
Changes to both the Teachers’ Council requirements to become registered and the national learning priorities in education were other tools that could be used to “shake up” teacher training.
“Whether or not those levers are strong enough to make sure that the universities do these things is what we’re looking into at the moment. If we need to use stronger levers, we will.”
Education Hub founder Nina Hood said she believed mandating some core content for those training to be primary or secondary teachers would be valuable in New Zealand.
She said many of the issues raised in the report, including the lack of training in the science of learning, were relevant in New Zealand too and were worthy of serious conversation and consideration.
“The four topics the report identifies reflect what high-quality evidence consistently finds is part of a fundamental knowledge base for effective teaching,” she said.
But teachers needed to know more than just the core content, including the curriculum, and not all content should be prescribed, Hood said.
Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood supports mandating some core content for teacher training.
New Zealand Initiative senior fellow Michael Johnston agreed all the problems the Australians were seeking to address were issues in New Zealand too, and the core concepts needed to be part of our country’s teacher training.
Johnston is currently undertaking a review of all 250 courses offered by initial teacher education providers and said there was no reference to the science of learning in any of them.
He believed there was too much focus on the idea children would discover things for themselves and teachers should not teach so much as “facilitate” learning.
“There is a place for some of that in education, but if that is all there is, then you run an enormous risk that a lot of kids will be left behind.”
While he believed the core concepts identified in the Australian report were essential, he did not think teacher training should be politicised through the mandating of what was taught.
Instead, he suggested setting up a number of different teacher registration bodies with different characteristics and core qualities.
A Teachers’ Council spokeswoman said they did keep an eye on developments in Australia but needed to consider “our own unique cultural context”.
She said the council had recently done its own review which resulted in new training programmes being delivered that they were confident in.
New Zealand Initiative senior fellow Michael Johnston says the issues with teacher training are much the same in Australia and New Zealand.
The spokeswoman said the curriculum refresh and common practice model were good examples of changes implemented by the Ministry of Education that will result in teacher training providers adapting their programmes.
“Providers work closely with schools to design key teaching tasks that involve core skills such as reading, writing and mathematics, as well as pedagogy and other skills that new teachers need to master,” she said.
Amy Wiggins is an Auckland-based reporter who covers education. She joined the Herald in 2017 and has worked as a journalist for 12 years.
