Web 2.0 at School
Great little presentation on “A Teacher’s Guide to Web 2.0 at School”. Check it out (hat tip to Off the Hypotenuse)
“Doing School” – A must read for any would-be teacher
"Doing School"
For a brief while (and I’m sure this will be revisited at some stage) I had an addiction to education content on iTunesU. For the uninitiated: iTunesU is a resource provided by Apple and a wide variety of universities to make some of the university content available as either audio or video to the general public. This eventually brought me to a presentation at Stanford University by Denise Clark Pope: essentially promoting her book “Doing School: How We Are Creating A Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students”.
“Doing School” is a compelling and fascinating read. Clark Pope follows five “successful” students from a variety of backgrounds, at a likewise “successful” school, for a whole year. Maintaining the integrity of the study, she looks at the high school education experience only from the point of view of the student: following them for their entire school day (and sometimes in their extra-curricular activities) and interviewing the students themselves across the year.
The stories of these five teenagers are certainly absorbing. Each provides an insight into the pressures placed on high performing students: from parents, teachers, the college admissions system as a whole and certainly the students themselves. But more extraordinary was seeing the impact these pressures had on each student – as they cheated, manipulated, wore themselves into the ground and compromised to build up the all important GPA, or to better their chances with a college admissions board.
While there are undoubtedly parts of the book that are noticeably more relevant for US readers than for us here in Australia, there was nevertheless plenty to be gained for a prospective teacher like myself. While for the most part teachers play only bit-parts in the student’s stories, there were a number of places where teachers showed up: as enablers of poor behaviour, manipulated and naïve cogs in a much bigger machine, and occasionally as wise counsellors – able to see a bigger picture of unhealthy single-mindedness. All in all, “Doing School” represents a sobering look at how (and indeed what) we teach our “best and brightest”. I’d recommend this book very highly to anyone working in education.
But now I know
I’m off to the Northern Metropolitan Region!
A very abstract, very unknown future suddenly has form. Wow.
The Trouble With Not Knowing
As much as I’m really excited about the prospect of the Teach for Australia program next year, and more specifically just getting into a classroom and teaching; there’s something really frustrating about this extended period of not knowing where that’s going to be. That’s no criticism of the program, but it’s just a strange position to be in. The planner in me wants to be able to start working out what it all looks like: sort out housing, work out which church community we might join, decide whether or not we can continue to be a one-car couple. Things like that. But instead, I’m left just wondering.
Teach for Australia in the media
Teach for Australia has been getting quite a bit of media attention recently, and while lots of it reads like a TFA press release, with a token comment from the education union for balance; there has been a couple of things worth highlighting.
I found the Canberra Times article a little amusing. Not only is the sub-editor missing any sense of headline brevity, but they still have the small-town mindset that requires that any Canberra-based influence on a story to be the primary focus:
“Can you learn to be a teacher in just six weeks? Australian National University students Emlyn Cruickshank and Lia van den Bosch think so. But they also readily agree it will be a huge challenge. They are the first two Canberrans to be accepted into the Rudd Government’s Teach for Australia program.” – Program puts pressure on to learn to be teachers in just six weeks – The Canberra Times
But from a more intellectually stimulating point of view, the debate held on Radio National’s “Life Matters” program was very interesting indeed. The discussion puts Professor David Berliner, an academic who has just published a significant study on the sister “Teach for America” program in the states, against Professor Field Rickards, Dean of Melbourne University’s Graduate School of Education. The University of Melbourne will be training Teach for Australia associates. In the debate Berliner outlined some big areas of concern for the Teach for America program, particularly in the area of teacher support once in the classroom, while Rickards talked about the changes Teach for Australia had undergone in order to address some of those issues. It’s an interesting discussion, and a pertinent reminder that this whole program really is a bit of an experiment. Guinea piggery here we come.
The “Teach for Australia” program
Teach for Australia
The paths to becoming a secondary teacher in Australia are well-worn and familiar. Either you complete an Education Bachelor degree, with majors in your specialist areas; or you complete a degree in your chosen field(s) and then (at some stage) put yourself through the one year (or two years part time) of a Graduate Diploma in Education. Then you get to teach. Simple really.
I haven’t signed up for a traditional Graduate Diploma program. Instead, I’m part of the inaugural intake of a program called “Teach for Australia“: an initiative to “improve student outcomes in areas of educational disadvantage by attracting and supporting graduates to teach in disadvantaged schools for two years.” (“Our approach – Teach for Australia“) Teach for Australia is modeled on the “Teach for America” and “Teach First” programs in the USA and UK respectively, where they have been running for some time. So instead of finding a way to scrape through part-time study and some semblance of full-time work: I’ll instead be involved in quite a different approach to how teachers are trained and equipped.
Starting in late November and running up until school is almost ready to start, I’ll be at the Teach for Australia “Academy”: the six week training program (no, my maths isn’t that bad – there’s a break over Christmas) run by the University of Melbourne. It’ll be living on campus (which my wife isn’t as excited about) and fully catered with a “living allowance” (which my wife is more pleased with). This will be pretty intense training as far as I can tell, and will form the bulk of the theoretical component of the eventual graduate diploma. Apparently there will be some ongoing education throughout the next two years, but it is unclear exactly what form that will take.
Starting in Term 1 next year, I’ll commence teaching an 80% load in an “educationally disadvantaged” school in Victoria. At this stage I’m not even certain where that will be, though we have been able to enter preferences for which general area of the state we would like to teach in. The Teach for Australia placement represents a two year commitment: with the understanding that there is significant support and ongoing training and development.
While there has been some controversy over the introduction of such a different teacher-training model, most teachers I’ve spoken with about the approach have tended to be fairly positive: pointing out that the vast majority of learning to become a teacher happens in your first year rather than during the degree. But I guess only time will tell, but one thing is for certain. The next two years will be quite an adventure!
Redefining “Work”
For all of my employment career so far, “work” has been a place as much as it has been an activity. Work has clearly specified hours, and any work that takes place outside of those hours has an even more beautiful name: “overtime”. But all that is about to change.
You don’t have to have grown up around teachers to understand that teaching is a violent departure from the 40 hour, 8 hours a day lifestyle I am so accustomed to, but it doesn’t hurt. I have vivid memories of parents spending every spare moment in the dining room for seemingly evenings on end, marking the latest tests or assignments, while us kids sat watching the TV. I remember that for the three or four weeks it took for the timetable to get settled during Mum’s years as timetable coordinator we’d just find any excuse to stay out of the way.
But deep down, it’s an exciting change. For starters, there is a degree of flexibility around the when and where of non-classroom related work. More than that though: I’m desperate to be doing work that I care about. So while I’m certain that the prevailing image in my head of how teaching will be must be a highly romanticized one, I am feeling quite at peace with the thought of sitting down of an evening with a glass of wine to sort out some marking.
Because I’m really hoping that teaching won’t be my next job. I’m hoping instead to have found a sense of vocation.
The Son of a Teacher Man
“The only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a preacher man”- Dusty Springfield, “Son of a Preacher Man”
Well, not quite. I am the son of two teachers, though my father has given up teaching to work for a church (so, preacher man?!). My younger sister is in her second year of primary teaching, and at the age of 25, it feels like I have spent half my life finding reasons why I wouldn’t become a teacher. But after 3 years of study and close on 5 years of working in Information Technology, it seems that teaching has been calling me after all.
I’ve signed up as an associate of “Teach for Australia“, a program designed to recruit high-achieving graduates into a 2 year program: teaching in disadvantaged schools. 2010 will be the first year that the program is running, and will only run in Victoria for the initial launch. At this stage I don’t know which school I’ll be teaching in, though we now have a better indication of which regions of the state the schools are situated.
The plan at this embryonic point will be to blog my experiences, as well as content around educational theory and specifically (given that I’ve got an IT background) the use of computers and technology in the secondary classroom. I’m a passionate person, and I get excited about improving the educational experience of students: so hopefully we can carry that through once I get to the classroom.
Welcome to the beginning.