Admin Bar Home > Stirring it up > Managing teacher registration

Managing teacher registration

Posted on 16 March 2010 - 8:51 AM

My intention is not to quibble with the debate recently entered into by two readers of this blog site (my Google stats tell me there are many more!), however, I would like to reflect on some issues that debate raised as well as one hinted at in my last posting.

Let me begin with that: I suggested that the Teacher's Council should devote more energy to ensure that higher quality undergraduates enter pre-service programmes. As we are so infatuated by 'the evidence' in modern education, let me quote some research emanating from McKinsey & Company ((2007) How the world's best performing systems come out on top). This research can be found on the McKinsey website or on the NZSTA website, as it is used by the Trustees' Association to better inform boards.

This research concludes that 'high performing school systems get the right people to become teachers', and they do this 'by making entry to teacher training highly selective' and 'developing effective processes for selecting the right applicants to become teachers'. Specifically, this report notes that such systems recruit teachers from the top 1/3 of their school leavers, and quotes two examples, South Korea (top 5%) and Finland (top 10%).

The usual response to this kind of evidence is "oh but NZ is diverse and these countries are not'. It has been shown, however, that between 1991 & 2003, the number of foreign born Finnish citizens & residents doubled and the total number whose first language is not Finnish trebled between 1992 & 2004 to 3% of the total population (see Sahlberg (2007)). But anyway - is diversity an excuse for ineptitude?

Notwithstanding the problem of how we figure out the top 5 - 30% of school leavers under NCEA, the reality is that if we were serious about having a profession with status that is taken seriously, we would spend more time and money gatekeeping at the gate rather than trying to show some people the exit, or worse still, spending hours and dollars on trying to teach them what they should have known to begin with.

So, yes, senior staff and principals might sign off a teacher in one breath and try to nail them with a competency process in the other, but as anyone who has been in that position can verify, the drama around denying sign-off is about as tiresome & debilitating as managing competency.

So why does that situation exist? For one thing, successive governments have pared teacher education back so drastically, that some BT's come to the classroom not much more knowledgeable or skilled than they were as first year undergraduates. The problem then shifts to schools which now have to monitor, nurse & guide these teachers through their 'internship' - a system our education system likes to laud, but forgets what pressure it creates on workloads in schools. Little wonder some schools are particular about not taking on BTs.

Another reason of course for challenges around both sign-off and managing competency is that the process of 'professionalisation' means that a teacher literally has to be a health & safety hazard to get the sack or be struck-off. 'Incompetents' can be marginal, whose practice waxes and wanes. This can be especially demanding and draining of a school's resource, not to mention the patience and good humour of the senior staff and principal.

For these marginal people, such masses of documentation have to be accumulated and hundreds of dollars poured into their professional 'support' and development, that it is sometimes possibly better to simply put the gazette into their pigeon hole whenever it comes out.

New Zealand schools of course rely heavily on immigrant teachers, but here too gatekeeping could be more effective. Getting in the door is altogether too easy - getting people back out the door is a much tougher prospect. The point is, the tougher it is to get that first invitation to come in, the sooner the quality should improve. And that way, the resources of the Teachers' Council will be put to better use.

Comments

No comments have been made on this post.