Playing with ‘preparedness’ when positioning ITE
In the recent ERO report Ready, Set Teach: How Prepared and Supported are New Teachers? sweeping claims have been made about the ‘preparedness’ of newly graduated teachers. Evaluating how new teachers answered questions regarding their feelings about their readiness to teach, the report holds initial teacher education (ITE) responsible for their feelings of ‘preparedness’.
These findings are not surprising, helpful or fair. The findings are unsurprising because ‘not feeling fully prepared’ for a complex new role is a common and entirely understandable phenomenon experienced by most, if not all, new professionals. The report is unfair in its limited exploration of ‘preparedness’ and failure to tell the whole story of the journey new teachers take to enter the teaching profession.
What is ‘preparedness’?
Alongside the methodological shortcomings noted by others (see Making System-Level Claims from a Flawed Methodology: A Response to the ERO Report), there are some important issues to raise concerning the report’s central notion of ‘preparedness’ for teaching:
What is meant by ‘preparedness’, and why does preparedness matter?
Prepared for what? What assumptions are made about the nature of teaching and the contexts in which teaching takes place?
‘Preparedness’ is a slippery notion that needs some attention. It is underdefined in the ERO report and appears to hold a range of meanings depending on the claim being made. For instance, preparedness is about being “equipped with essential knowledge and skills” and, on the same page, “how confident new teachers are” (p. 27) and later “how well they could do what is required of them as teachers, in their first term teaching in schools” (p. 42). Furthermore, notions of feeling prepared and being prepared have been conflated – they are not the same thing, and they should not be reported on as if they are. The authors of the report may be confused about whether they are evaluating feelings of preparedness to teach, or the capability to teach ... or something else altogether. The report states, “We wanted [to] find out how well prepared and supported new teachers are” and then goes on to form conclusions about those teachers’ capability based on a simple survey that asked about feelings. The limited clarity, and slippage in meaning, are problematic.
The vision of the Teaching Council
Despite this report being commissioned in partnership with the Teaching Council, the expectation that new teachers are completely prepared for teaching immediately after graduation is at odds with the Council’s own view in their 2022 ITE report that:
“new teachers are still on an ongoing journey to build skills and experience … induction and mentoring play a pivotal part of developing a teacher’s competence (p. 14)”.
Furthermore, asking newly graduated teachers how prepared and capable they felt during their first term in the role is very much dependent on the context that they found themselves in, not just their tertiary initial teacher education (ITE) experiences. Research shows that those new professionals in supported environments that provide them with mentoring and supervision required for the next steps of their preparation feel more confident in their ability to carry out the role.
The Teaching Council’s handbook Te Hāpai Ō: Induction and mentoring in Māori-medium settings, points out that “specific and specialised support” must be provided for new teachers. Guidelines in the handbook are informed by a research programme that “highlighted the potential of intensive, pedagogically focused mentoring to accelerate the learning and expertise of newly qualified teachers (p. 10)”.
The idea that ITE programs should be graduating new teachers who are prepared to take on the whole role of teacher independently and without support, from day one, is not the same as graduating them prepared to enter the profession – and this difference matters. Moreover, as Admiraal and colleagues (2023) found, levels of preparedness are only weakly related to how teachers feel, particularly in relation to pressure they may feel. What had a greater influence was their working conditions.
Prepared for what?
If it was the role of ITE to get teachers ready, then the question must be asked, ready for what? What assumptions are being made in the report about the nature of teaching, and the contexts in which teaching takes place? Teaching is complex and cannot be usefully reduced to a bullet-pointed list of discrete skills or over-generalised areas of practice. Furthermore, ITE is not a factory on the hill, pumping out teachers ready to enter an education system that it is somehow separate from; ITE is integral to and embedded in that system. Importantly, ITE in Aotearoa is concerned with issues of local importance in research and practice with the potential to “shape the Aotearoa New Zealand education system towards more locally-informed and locally-derived solutions” to the sources of inequity in our system (Ell, 2021, p. 126). A simplistic survey of reported ‘feelings of preparedness’ is an entirely inadequate measure of what our new teachers can contribute to, and how ready they are for, the complex role of teacher.
The role of initial teacher education (ITE) within a wider system
An ITE programme is only one step in becoming fully qualified to teach. A student who enters a graduate diploma ITE programme, for instance, has already completed a three- or four-year degree. After graduation from their one-year ITE programme, they then complete two years of mentoring and induction in educational settings/schools. The entire teacher readiness programme is a six- to seven-year progression from student to fully certificated teacher.
The full certification process for teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand signals that ITE programmes should not be solely responsible for preparing teachers, and cannot sit in isolation from the induction and mentoring. It is contradictory to suggest that ITE ensure that new teachers are fully prepared to teach from day one, while simultaneously requiring a two-year mentoring and induction process. It is contradictory to say that new teachers should be fully ready when they can only be provisionally certificated until they provide evidence of their readiness to independently meet the teaching standards after two years in the classroom. The Te Hāpai Ō and Te Amorangi ki Mua processes for induction and mentoring are underpinned by “the notion of ako – teachers as learners and learners as teachers within a philosophy of life-long learning” in alignment with the principle that “every person is a learner from the time they are born (if not before) to the time they die (p. 15)”.
We encourage ERO to consider bigger issues and possibilities. What if placing new teachers alone in classrooms filled with other people’s children, hopes, dreams, and aspirations is not the right thing to do? What if, instead of playing blame games, we used our time and energy to think of alternatives?
Ensure people understand the place of ITE in a six-to-seven-year pathway to become great teachers.
Call for funding and resources that support new teachers, mentors, school leaders and educators to work closely together in mutually beneficial arrangements.
Come up with strengths-based and equity-focused alternatives to support new teachers to thrive, such as providing opportunities to co-teach with mentors until they are ready to weave four to five years of learning into something that they do expertly on their own?
Shift attention to dealing with the more pressing issues in education in New Zealand and Aotearoa more broadly that come from societal pressures on whānau and mokopuna.
Pointing the finger at ITE programmes, and declaring our new teachers unprepared, is an unfortunate distraction from the real issues in our education system. Instead, we must shift our efforts towards building a system with the time, space and resourcing for whānau and communities, educators, researchers and policy-makers to work together to deliver an equitable and locally-relevant education with tamariki and rangatahi at the centre. Let’s focus on preparing schools and centres where everyone – including new teachers – can thrive, and mokopuna have the education they deserve.
References
Admiraal, W., Kittelsen Røberg, K.-I., Wiers-Jenssen, J., & Saab, N. (2023). Mind the gap: Early-career teachers’ level of preparedness, professional development, working conditions, and feelings of distress. Social Psychology of Education, 26(6), 1759–1787. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-023-09819-6
Ell, F., Simpson, A., Mayer, D., McLean Davies, L., Clinton, J., & Dawson, G. (2019). Conceptualising the impact of initial teacher education. The Australian Educational Researcher, 46(1), 177–200. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-018-0294-7
Jenkins, K., Sinclair, E., Harris, P., Morehu, C., & Williams, M. (2012). Te Hāpai Ō: Induction and mentoring in Māori-medium settings. Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Teachers Council.
Dr Raewyn Eden R.Eden@massey.ac.nz
A/Prof Pania Te Maro P.Temaro@massey.ac.nz
Pania is an associate professor and Raewyn is a lecturer in Massey University’s Institute of Education. Both have a passion for working alongside teachers in and beyond their ITE experiences.