During 2020, we saw the traditional classroom all but disappear. We can expect education to face other types of disruption. In an uncertain future, teachers need more than classroom-readiness.
Demand is high for teachers with expertise in STEM subjects like maths. But students also deserve expert English, history, civics or geography teachers. Maybe your favourite teacher did an arts degree.
The vast majority of K-12 teachers are white.
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Teachers have never been more appreciated than during COVID-19. But neither expressions of support, nor cheaper degrees will overcome the four big structural challenges facing the profession.
Student teachers need to pass a test to put them in the top 30% of Australia’s literacy and numeracy abilities. This test costs more money than some students have and can be discriminatory.
Our model on an expert career path for top teachers would transform school education, further professionalise learning and lead to students gaining about 18 months of extra learning by age 15.
Despite challenges, teacher education offers a path to begin righting inequities and injustice. Here, people stand on a map from the Indigenous Peoples Atlas of Canada at a launch in Toronto in 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Mark Blinch
Decolonized education means working with settler teachers to overcome guilt and find the courage to acknowledge privilege, racism and colonialism to work in partnership for a better future.
Fatima, a nine-year-old Syrian refugee to Sweden, is featured in photojournalist Magnus Wennman’s documentary film Fatima’s Drawings.
Magnus Wennman
As ‘tiny historians of their age,’ children with testimonies of war provide teachers with both historical insight and critical instruction.
A student speaks with Holocaust survivor William Morgan using an interactive virtual conversation exhibit at the the Holocaust Museum Houston in January 2019.
David J. Phillip/AP
In anticipation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a scholar explains how digital technologies can help close knowledge gaps about the catastrophe that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.
Starting this year, teaching students won’t be able to register as teachers unless they pass a literacy and numeracy test.
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Some universities accept students into their teaching degree programs with an ATAR as low as 35. Do we need to raise the bar, or are other factors more important than a high ATAR for teachers?
There are now several new gate-keeping measures to test teacher quality introduced by universities in the last two to three years.
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Australia’s decline in PISA rankings and criticisms of NAPLAN tell us we should also be looking at how we assess teacher quality.
The programs are long and intense, the creativity and relationships aspect of the vocation has been eroded, there is pervasive negativity in the media, and comparatively poor salary and working conditions.
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There’s been a drop in the number of people enrolling in teacher preparation courses. This is due to problems such as pay, professional autonomy, and a national obsession with standardised testing.
Education research is inherently political, and can never be objective and value-free.
AAP/David Crosling
Primary school children who belong to ethnic minorities are especially vulnerable to dropping out of school early. If teachers were better equipped to deal with multiculturalism, this could change.
University “transformation” has a unique meaning in South Africa.
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