Anita Collins delves into her area of expertise – neuro musical research – and gives an explanation as to why quality musical education for all students is an essential part of their academic development …
The teaching value of music education
For primary teachers, music education is just one subject area on a long list of subjects that must be fitted into the timetable, effectively taught and appropriately assessed. However, for the majority of primary teachers, teaching music can be a very daunting task.
Why is it daunting? The overwhelming reason that I hear from primary teachers in NSW sounds something like this: “I’m not musical” or “I can’t sing”. These reasons are not about the curriculum, the need for equipment or the need for teaching resources. These reasons are centred on the primary teacher’s confidence and competency to make music themselves.
This is nothing to be ashamed of or embarrassed about. This is something that needs to be addressed promptly, for both NSW students and NSW teachers. We need to make sure that every NSW teacher feels confident to teach music in their classrooms and has the necessary personal and professional skills and knowledge to do so.
Importantly, this step will lead to teachers feeling a greater sense of efficacy in their everyday work. More than this, research has shown it will also lead to improvements for students in their ability to learn, their general wellbeing, self-regulation skills and sense of safety, and capacity to engage in learning. Teaching music in the classroom is not just teaching students how to sing in tune and read the notes on the board, it is about teaching HOW to learn.
Teaching students how to learn
There is a field of research that lives predominantly in the neuroscience area called neuromusical research. This field used music listening and music learning to understand how the human brain grows and learns. In the mid-1990s, researchers using then new technology that could monitor brain functioning in real time somewhat accidently discovered that listening to music engaged more parts of the brain simultaneously than any other activity.
In the early 2000s, neuroscientists used music listening as a way to understand how the human brain processed all information; made, sorted and retrieved memories, and how the brain healed itself after traumatic injury(Peretz & Zatorre, 2003) [i]. Music was a vital tool in this process as it showed that the auditory processing network processed all sounds for their musical qualities, and our auditory processing network is our largest information gathering sense.
In the late 2010s, the same researchers began to look at children between the ages of 6-12 years who had learned music. Why did they focus on this group of students? The reason was that musically trained students seemed to have brains that learned faster, were more consistently reliable, had greater connectivity and brain density, and displayed greater synchronisation (Hallam & Himonides, 2022). [ii]. This final aspect was possibly the most important one for teachers to understand – students who have brains that exhibit higher levels of synchronisation take less time to incorporate new knowledge, are better at problem solving, can maintain their attention for longer, and can manage frustration in their learning far more effectively (Miendlarzewska & Trost 2014 p279)[iii].
The obvious question arose, was it just the more able and high-performing students who were attracted to music learning; those you might expect to be exhibiting the higher levels of brain function? In short, was it the smarter students who happened to be learning music who were the ones being researched? The answer was no. Randomised control studies were conducted using music learning as the experiment, and improvements in brain structures and functions were observed in all students (Martin-Requejo et al, 2024 pp1 -15)[iv].
The neuromusical research is about to move into its third decade, and the findings have been replicated and rigorously examined. The consensus is that music learning has a small to moderate effect on a student’s ability to learn effectively( Guhn et al,2020 p308.)[v]; it can mediate disadvantage and trauma (Hille & Schupp, 2015)[vi], and can significantly support learners with ASD (Sharda et al, 2018 p231) [vii], ADHD (Puyjarinet et al , 2017 p11550 )[viii] and Dyslexia ( Hornickel & Kraus, 2013 pp3500 -3504)[ix].
It follows that, with this new neuroscientific research pointing to music education as both an enhancement and intervention tool for all students, shouldn’t we be ensuring that every NSW student is receiving a quality, ongoing and sequential music education? Such a focus could have the potential to improve literacy and numeracy levels, help teachers to manage complex learning needs in their classroom, and – possibly the most deeply needed improvement – to make the act of teaching easier, more enjoyable and even more fulfilling.
What is happening with music education in NSW?
The answer is many things are happening in NSW.
In June 2024, the NSW parliamentary Joint Select Committee into Arts and Music Education and Training was established and calls for submissions were made. The Committee is specifically inquiring into the quality and effectiveness of music education and training.
In July 2024, just as the new Creative Arts Syllabus hit the stands, the first public hearing was conducted with key education, music industry, music providers and philanthropic experts appearing before the Committee. A second hearing was held in late August. On 29 November 2024, the Committee is due to release its final report into the current state and future needs of music education in NSW government schools.
The results from this Inquiry will be important for every NSW teacher who has ever thought or said, “I’m not musical” or “I can’t sing”. This Inquiry could prove to be a game-changer: recognising that primary schooling should be much more than numeracy and literacy rankings; actively encouraging and providing tailored, substantial support for classroom teachers; enhanced opportunities for specialist music educators; classroom resources, and improved facilities.
We know that every primary teacher can be supported to bring quality music education to their students with all the benefits that this offers.
The Inquiry is one significant development, delivering the baseline knowledge to inform change is another. And where better to go for this information than to go direct to those in the know: primary teachers themselves.
The Music Education: Right from the Start initiative, in collaboration with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the NSW Department of Education, ran the NSW Primary Teachers Survey. This survey resulted in a statewide picture of the current state and future needs of NSW teachers in the area of music education. The results from this survey are in the process of being publicly released. The aim is to support the NSW Department of Education and school principals to get a better handle on your experience and circumstances for the express purpose of better supporting you in the classroom.
This survey was not for the shelf; it was an opportunity to inform change. It was released into NSW schools during Term 3 2024, and as a NSW primary teacher, you might have seen a request from your school principals to complete the survey. The survey took less than 20 minutes and could have been your contribution to improving not only music education in NSW, but also the use of a tool to improve an enormous number of issues that teachers face every time they enter their classroom.
It is hard to think of a time when you had the Parliament, the government, the department, Teachers Federation, industry, researchers, educators, organisations like ours and those we work with all in sync on the value of a quality, sequential and ongoing music education – and willing to look at what it’s going to take to deliver on the promise. It’s early days, but it’s a pretty good start.
About the author
Dr. Anita Collins is an acclaimed educator, researcher, and writer renowned for her groundbreaking work in the intersection of brain development and music education. She is the creative force behind Bigger Better Brains, an initiative aimed at bridging the gap between neuroscience and practical music education globally.
Recognized for her leadership as the inaugural Creative Chair of Learning & Engagement at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Anita drives innovative educational programs and was instrumental in the acclaimed “Don’t Stop the Music” documentary.
Through her influential writings and advocacy, including the seminal book “The Music Advantage,” Anita continues to shape music education policy and practice, ensuring its integration from the grassroots to national strategy levels.
Endnotes
i. Guhn, M., Emerson, S. D., & Gouzouasis, P. (2020). A population-level analysis of associations between school music participation and academic achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 112(2),
ii. Hallam, S., & Himonides, E. (2022). The power of music: An exploration of the evidence. Open Book Publishers.
iii. Hille, A., & Schupp, J. (2015). How learning a musical instrument affects the development of skills. Economics of Education Review, 44.
iv. Hornickel, J., & Kraus, N. (2013). Unstable representation of sound: a biological marker of dyslexia. Journal of Neuroscience, 33(8),
v. Martin-Requejo, K., González-Andrade, A., Álvarez-Bardón, A., & Santiago-Ramajo, S. (2024). Mediation of study habits and techniques between music training and academic achievement in children. European Journal of Psychology of Education
vi. Miendlarzewska, E. A., & Trost, W. J. (2014). How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward and other modulating variables. Frontiers in neuroscience, 7
vii. Peretz, I., & Zatorre, R. J. (Eds.). (2003). The cognitive neuroscience of music. OUP Oxford.
viii. Puyjarinet, F., Bégel, V., Lopez, R., Dellacherie, D., & Dalla Bella, S. (2017). Children and adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder cannot move to the beat. Scientific Reports, 7(1)
ix. Sharda, M., Tuerk, C., Chowdhury, R., Jamey, K., Foster, N., Custo-Blanch, M., … & Hyde, K. (2018). Music improves social communication and auditory–motor connectivity in children with autism. Translational psychiatry, 8(1)
Misty Adoniou explains why evidence based learning is not a new phenomenon. It has always been a part of a teacher’s pedagogy and is used in every classroom every day…
The Federal government committed $34.6 million in the 2024 Budget ‘to makeevidence-based curriculum and student wellbeing support and professional development materials. In July NSW launched a ‘revamped’ curriculum that is ‘clear, evidence-based and carefully sequenced’. (NSW Government, 2024)
Who can argue? We all want our children taught by methods that have evidence behind them. Yet these political pronouncements, and the accompanying media frenzy, seem to imply that up until now this has not been the case.
But of course, our children have always been taught through evidence-based methods. All teacher education degrees are evidence-based. Departments of Education have always used evidence to develop curricula and provide professional learning for teachers.
Teacher Education has been an academic discipline for over a century. That is about 50 years longer than Macroeconomics, 60 years longer than Cognitive Psychology and 75 years longer than Media Studies.
To be a member of the ‘academy’, the field of Teacher Education fulfils the requirements of being a science. This means conducting studies under defined conditions to ensure validity, reliability and accuracy, and submitting those studies for peer review to have them questioned, clarified, rejected or accepted. This is how knowledge is built in the sciences – including in Teacher Education which has about 130 years of this scientific knowledge building behind it.
The NSW and Federal governments have both declared initiatives to make curricula ‘evidence-based’. Yet, the national Australian Curriculum we have today, and which is taught in some form or other in every Australian school, including NSW, drew on a huge evidence base from domestic and international studies, and several years of research consultations with academics and educators before it was finally released in 2011. It has undergone many reviews since then, making changes in response to new evidence from research studies in curriculum, teaching and learning. The latest review was in 2021, and we are now at Version 9 of our national curriculum. We have always had evidence-based curricula – it has always been the task of the various federal, state and territory curriculum authorities to ensure this.
Victoria’s Education Minister announced in June 2024 that his Department will mandate ‘evidence-based teaching and learning’ from 2025.
Victoria has always provided evidence-based teaching and learning guidance for its teachers, most recently in 2018 with its ten High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS) highlighting clear goals, structured lessons and explicit teaching as its top 3 strategies. These were developed from researcher John Hattie’s evidence base gathered in his synthesis of 800 meta-analyses of research studies on school achievement.
So if we have always used evidence-based practices and curricula in schools, what are these most recent pronouncements about?
Why give this public impression that our teacher education faculties, education departments, school leaders, and teachers have been operating for decades on a whim, rather than on the evidence?
Why? Because ‘Evidence-based teaching’ is actually being used as shorthand for ‘the approach I favour’ or ‘the approach that worked for someone I know’, or even ‘the approach I have a vested interest in’.
And too many of those advocating for these ‘evidence-based practices’ either misunderstand, or deliberately misrepresent what evidence is.
This is what evidence is NOT.
Evidence is NOT proof.
Evidence is NOT static or absolute.
Evidence is NOT neutral.
Evidence IS contextual.
Evidence IS open to interpretation.
Evidence is not neutral. Studies are designed to gather evidence within a theoretical paradigm. Both the goals and the methods of the study are informed by a theory. If the informing theory of learning is behaviourist, where learning is deemed cognitive and moderated by repetition and reward, the research study will look for different evidence than a study situated within a social constructivist theory, where learning is deemed social and moderated by interactions with expert others in the pursuit of meaning.
Evidence is contextual. Each research study context has multiple variables: historical context, socio-economic context, cultural context, situational context, the number, age, gender, social and economic status, the cognitive and emotional wellbeing of the participants. Evidence gathered in one context is not proof similar evidence will be generated in another context.
Indeed the contextual variability of classrooms is a nightmare for clinical scientists, whose methods are highly dependent upon controlling variables. It is impossible to recreate classroom conditions in a lab. And even when studies are conducted in classrooms, it is impossible to control the variables and replicate the conditions from one classroom to another.
However we have always known this challenge. Researchers reviewing data sets or conducting clinical experiments are not the only people gathering evidence to inform teaching practice. Teachers gather evidence every hour, every day, in every classroom in Australia. Teachers are scientists.
It is why teacher education institutions train teachers in the scientific method. Over their 4 year degree, primary school teachers are taught how to conduct their own studies, gathering evidence from their own classrooms to build robust evidence-based practices that work in their contexts for their students. They plan and record these studies in a document called a lesson plan – the equivalent of a lab report – for every lesson they conduct.
The lesson plan starts with a learning goal – or hypothesis – which describes the learning that will occur in the lesson. These goals come directly from the government mandated evidence-based curricula.
The plan then states how achievement against the goal will be measured e.g. through observation, collection of work samples, interviews, testing etc
Materialsand resources required to achieve the learning goal are listed.
Conditions for the learning are described with time allocations, and organisational structures for the lesson. E.g. in pairs, whole class, self-assigned groups, teacher-assigned groups and how much time will be allocated to each task
The plan describes how the teaching will deal with known variables. E.g. audio support for learning impaired student, supplemental written and visual instructions on task cards for student with autism etc
A method is given – a sequential and detailed account of what will occur during the lesson to achieve the learning goal. The method is shaped by the informing theory for the lesson.
An assessment is conducted of the students’ achievements against the learning goal and the results recorded.
Finally an evaluation occurs – a discussion of the results. Was the learning goal achieved – by whom? Why did it work or not work? Were there limitations? What adjustments need to be made for the next lesson?
Teachers conduct this scientific gathering of evidence with every planned lesson they teach, as many as 6 per day. Teachers spend all day every day building evidence-based teaching practices. Yet their voices, and their findings are strangely absent from these most recent and most earnest evidence-based directives from government.
Every time an educator hears the term ‘evidence-based’ practice it is incumbent upon the educational scientist within each of us to ask:
Evidence of what?
Why was it generated – what question were they seeking to answer?
How was the evidence gathered – what was the informing theory?
Where was it generated?
When was it generated?
Who were the study participants?
This allows us to firstly decide whether it is a practice we need to trial in our own context – is it solving a problem that we have, and secondly understand its limitations due to contextual differences and the possible need to make adjustments to its implementation.
For example, let’s say the proposed practice or program has evidence it improves decoding skills in 6 year old monolingual urban students with language delays.
A target school’s testing shows their 6 year olds have good decoding skills but their 10 year olds have poor comprehension skills. Thus there would be no reason for the school to trial the proposed evidence-based practice as it does not address their issue.
Another target school in a low SES regional area has 6 year old multilingual students with poor decoding skills. The school may trial the practice but make adjustments for the fact that the evidence base is for a student cohort in a different location and with different language needs.
If the practice is shown to also be effective for their cohort they should report the results to their peers so the entire education community can learn from their study. Equally, if it is found to be ineffective for their cohort, they should drop the trial, and report the results. They should not continue blindly with an evidence-based practice which is ineffective in their context or irrelevant to their needs simply because it has been ‘mandated’.
This is actually what evidence-based practice means. Trialling evidence-based research in your own teaching context, seeing whether it works and being agile and informed enough to adjust the practice, or reject it, when it isn’t working.
We can only hope that our Education Ministers have understood this. Their words and actions so far suggest they haven’t.
References
NSW Government Media release (July 24, 2024) Landmark new primary school curriculum to drive better education outcomes
Misty Adoniou is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESOL at the University of Canberra, and a Principal Fellow at Melbourne Graduate School of Education. She has received numerous teaching awards, including a National Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning and the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
She was a lead writer for the national English as an Additional Language Teachers Resource which accompanies the Australian Curriculum. She was a contributing writer for ACARA’s Language Learning Progressions. She also wrote the Federal government’s Orientation curriculum for newly arrived adult refugees.
She believes in the advocacy power of professional voices and the importance of professional associations in corralling that strength. She has served as the President of two national teachers associations – TESOL Greece, and the Australian Council of TESOL Associations. She is currently on the board of Directors of TESOL International, an affiliation of 105 teachers associations around the globe.
She currently works directly with schools, overseas and around Australia, leading professional learning in the teaching of spelling, grammar and writing.
Professor Jenny Gore shares the history of the use of Quality Teaching Rounds in NSW public schools and explores the positive impact of the approach on student outcomes . . .
Lost in the growing call in NSW for a “back-to-basics” approach to curriculum, teaching and learning is recognition of the complex, intellectual work teachers do in every lesson to ensure relevant, meaningful, and powerful learning experiences. More than ever, in the face of growing classroom complexity, burgeoning workloads, budget constraints, high stress and burnout, the realities of teachers’ work should be recognised.
Our research on Quality Teaching Rounds professional development provides such recognition. It supports teachers by building morale, efficacy, and collegiality while simultaneously improving the quality of teaching and lifting student academic achievement.
The Quality Teaching approach
More than 20 years ago, Associate Professor James Ladwig and I were commissioned by the NSW Department of Education to develop an evidence-based pedagogical framework to improve teaching quality across the state. Drawing on a wide body of research and hundreds of hours of lesson observations, the Quality Teaching (QT) Model was born (Ladwig & King, 2003). The Model addresses three key ideas:
Intellectual Quality: Developing deep understanding of important knowledge
Quality Learning Environment: Ensuring positive classrooms that boost student learning
Significance: Connecting learning to students’ lives and the wider world
Under these dimensions sit 18 elements based on evidence of teaching practice that improves student outcomes. Launched in 2003, the QT Model has been the Department’s framework for teaching since. But creating a framework is never enough to change practice and impact teachers and students. We needed a powerful way to support teachers to embed the Model in their everyday work.
A series of research studies between 2009 and 2012 developed and refined the approach to professional development we call Quality Teaching Rounds, or QTR (Bowe & Gore, 2017). QTR brings teachers together to learn from each other and improve their practice. Any four teachers form a professional learning community (face-to-face or online) and then observe, analyse and discuss one another’s lessons using the QT Model across four days of professional learning.
QTR treats teachers as professionals and builds on what they already know and do. Importantly, it doesn’t dictate particular teaching methods but focuses attention on improving pedagogy to make a difference where it matters most – ensuring high quality student learning experiences.
Improving the quality of teaching
In 2014–15, with funding from the NSW Department of Education, we undertook the first randomised controlled trial on QTR. This trial set out to investigate the impact of QTR on the quality of teaching, teacher morale, and sense of recognition and appraisal. The trial, which involved 192 teachers from 24 NSW government schools, found significant positive effects on teaching quality for primary and secondary teachers, those in metropolitan and rural locations, regardless of their years of experience. Importantly, these effects were sustained six months later (Gore et al., 2017).
We also found participation in QTR had significant positive effects on teacher morale and sense of recognition and appraisal, and our qualitative data showed it improved collaboration among teachers, boosted beginning teacher confidence, and rejuvenated experienced teachers (Gore & Bowe, 2015; Gore & Rickards, 2021).
Our theory of change was supported by these findings. Improve the quality of teaching to improve student learning. But we needed to test the causal link between QTR and student achievement.
Funded by a $17.2M philanthropic grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation, the Building Capacity for Quality Teaching in Australian Schools, 2018–2023, remains unprecedented in the Australian education research landscape for its investment, scope, and ambition. The project also received funding and support from the NSW Department of Education, the Australian Research Council, and the University of Newcastle.
Through three interrelated activities – research, scaling, and setting up a sustainable business model – we set out to comprehensively explore what QTR could do for schooling in Australia (Gore et al., 2023).
Australia’s largest education randomised controlled trial
Between 2019 and 2023 we conducted a series of randomised controlled trials to investigate the impact of QTR on student and teacher outcomes in a range of contexts. These trials are the “gold standard” for research because voluntary participants are randomly allocated to either “intervention” (in our case QTR) or “control” (PD as usual) groups.
Randomised controlled trials are common in medicine. But they are much rarer in education because they typically involve “clustered” groups (students within classes within schools) and, therefore, require really large samples of teachers and students to account for this complexity. The need to collect data ourselves, using ACER’s progressive achievement tests (because NAPLAN data wasn’t fit for purpose due to the two year interval), made these trials hugely expensive.
Our first trial in NSW involved almost 500 teachers from 120 public schools and was the largest randomised controlled trial in Australian education. In total our four trials in this program of research involved 1,400 teachers and 14,500 students from 430 schools across New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
As well as experimental evidence in the form of randomised trials, the program of research included case studies, longitudinal research (where we tracked teachers over the five years of the study), and evaluations of a partnership model for whole-school engagement in QTR which focused on improving outcomes for teachers and students in disadvantaged schools.
No other school-based intervention has been so thoroughly tested in Australian schools or amassed such a comprehensive body of evidence.
QTR improves student outcomes
These trials replicated the results of the 2014–15 study, demonstrating that teacher participation in QTR improves the quality of teaching, teacher morale, sense of recognition and appraisal, and school culture. For the first time, we also tested for, and found, increased teacher efficacy.
Most importantly, three of the four trials in the Building Capacity project produced robust evidence of positive effects on student achievement. Excitingly, we found these results were stronger in disadvantaged schools, signalling the potential for QTR to help narrow pervasive equity gaps (Gore et al., 2021; Harris et al., 2022; Povey et al., 2023).
Our studies compared students’ scores on progressive achievement tests in mathematics and reading. Across the four trials (including one conducted by the University of Queensland and one by ACER to provide independent replication), we tested students in Term 1 to provide a baseline score and then again in Term 4 after their teachers had participated in QTR (intervention group) or completed their usual PD (control group).
While we didn’t see an identical set of results in every study, three of the four trials produced statistically significant positive effects on student learning. These improvements ranged from two-to-three months’ worth of additional achievement growth in mathematics and reading for the students whose teachers participated in QTR compared to teachers who didn’t.
Education research is messy. Mixed results are common in education given the complexity of conducting research in schools. An analysis of large-scale education randomised trials in the US and UK found that only one quarter of trials produced a statistically significant result. For example, a trial of Dylan Wiliam’s formative assessment program found improvements of one month’s growth, however, these improvements were not statistically significant.
Achieving significant results in multiple trials is especially rare and even more remarkable considering the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that QTR professional development is “distal” from the student achievement measure – meaning, we changed teachers’ pedagogy and improved academic achievement, rather than a “proximal” intervention focused specifically on the instruction of mathematics or reading.
Importantly, these results were amplified by the qualitative insights of teachers and principals throughout the project. These rich qualitative data enabled a deeper understanding of how, why, and under what conditions QTR is effective (Gore et al., 2023). Here are just two examples:
“Long after the QTR process is done, I don’t think I’ll ever not think about these 18 elements to some level as I go through my practice. Even now when I start thinking about planning the next area or planning the next unit, I will run through the things in my head like, “How am I going to make sure I’m inclusive? How am I going to make sure that I look at different cultural knowledge? Where can I draw on the kids’ background knowledge?” I just find it’s going to be beneficial and helpful long term.” (Ava, teacher in a metropolitan secondary school)
“QTR is the vehicle through which we can achieve our school’s goals. It’s not the end point. It’s enabling that professional learning, that reflection, that dialogue to happen. And that’s going to improve our knowledge of students, improve explicit teaching, improve lesson planning. That’s going to improve all those elements that sit underneath the QT Model. That’s all going to be what we achieve through Rounds.” (Gwen, principal in a metropolitan secondary school)
What next?
Thanks to the funding provided in the Building Capacity project, teachers across Australia can access QTR through our non-profit social enterprise, the QT Academy.
The Australian Government has also provided funding for 1,600 teachers to take part in a free QTR workshop between 2023 and 2026 as part of the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan (Department of Education, 2022). The Strengthening Induction through QTR project aims to improve the morale, confidence, job satisfaction, and retention of early career teachers across Australia (Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, 2024).
Our partnership with Cessnock High School, one of the most disadvantaged schools in NSW, led to the school achieving the greatest NAPLAN growth from Year 7 to 9 in the Hunter region and the 11th greatest in the state by engaging in whole school Quality Teaching Rounds (Duffy, 2024). Simultaneously, teachers reported greater morale and improved school culture, which are critical factors in addressing the current teacher shortage crisis.
“We are really proud of the results we have achieved so far. We’re not just trying to help kids through school here, we’re trying to help the Cessnock community by producing kids who are capable of getting quality jobs, being able to operate as a community member, and adding to our community.” (Peter Riley, Principal, Cessnock High School)
Thanks to additional funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation, this partnership model is now being rolled out to 25 disadvantaged schools in NSW to support teachers and improve outcomes with a key focus on equity.
Our research shows the Quality Teaching approach, which was born here in NSW, has clear potential to address many of the most pressing concerns facing education in this country. By engaging in QTR on a wide scale, we can support the teaching workforce while achieving excellence and more equitable outcomes for Australian students.
Gore, J. M., & Bowe, J.M. (2015). Interrupting attrition? Re-shaping the transition from preservice to inservice teaching through Quality Teaching Rounds. International Journal of Educational Research, 73, 77–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2015.05.006
Gore, J., Lloyd, A., Smith, M., Bowe, J., Ellis,H., & Lubans, D. (2017). Effects of a professional development on the quality of teaching: Results from a randomised controlled trial of Quality Teaching Rounds. Teaching and Teacher Education, 68, 99–113. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.08.007
Gore, J., Miller, A., Fray, L., Harris, J., & Prieto-Rodriguez, E. (2021). Improving student achievement through professional development: Results from a randomised controlled trial of Quality Teaching Rounds. Teaching and Teacher Education, 101, Article 103297. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2021.103297
Gore, J., Miller, A., Fray, L., & Patfield, S. (2023). Building capacity for quality teaching in Australian schools 2018–2023. Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, The University of Newcastle. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1493345
Gore. J. M., & Rickards, B. (2021). Rejuvenating experienced teachers through Quality Teaching Rounds professional development. Journal of Educational Change, 22, 335–354. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-020-09386-z
Harris, J., Miller, D., Gore, J., & Holmes, M. (2022). Building capacity for quality teaching in Australian schools: QTR Digital RCT final report. Teachers and Teaching Research Centre, University of Newcastle. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1471857
Ladwig, J. G., & King, M. B. (2003). Quality teaching in NSW public schools: An annotated bibliography. NSW Department of Education and Training, Professional Support and Curriculum Directorate.
Povey, J., Porter, M., Kennedy, L., Potia, A., Bellotti, M., & Austerberry, S. (2023). Building capacity for quality teaching in Australian Schools: Queensland replication study – final report. Institute for Social Science Research, University of Queensland. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1471855
Laureate Professor Jenny Gore AM is the Director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre at the University of Newcastle. With almost $35 million in external funding since 1992, Jenny’s research is driven by the notion that all children should experience high quality teaching. Her ongoing work with colleagues on Quality Teaching and Quality Teaching Rounds over the last decade has shown how this framework can effectively support teacher professional development, increase teacher satisfaction, enhance teaching quality in schools, and improve student achievement while narrowing equity gaps. Jenny’s research on improving teaching and learning saw the QT Academy established in 2020. She has received awards and recognition from the ACDE, ACEL, AARE, AERA, ASSA, Royal Society of NSW, the Paul Brock Memorial Medal and was most recently awarded a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2024 Australia Day Honours for significant service to tertiary education.
Maurie Mulheron offers a timely analysis of the impact privatisation has had on Australia’s public education system…
Debunking the myth of privatisation’s benefits to education
It was the economist Milton Friedman decades ago who described public education as “an island of socialism in a free market” society.[1] As a high priest of neo-liberal economic theory, the highly influential Friedman and others called for all public services to be privatized including public education, which they argued needed to be turned into a free market characterized by competition and choice. Initially regarded as the viewpoint of extremists this ideology has, certainly since the 1980s, become a political and economic orthodoxy central to policy positions of many governments across the globe, including Australia.
Schools
Australian schooling was always characterized by deep inequalities but, as neo-liberal economics became dominant from the 1980s onwards, the divide between socially advantaged and disadvantaged students widened considerably as policy settings designed to favour private schooling were enacted. Enrolments in private or non-government schools in Australia, almost all of which are owned and run by religions, have now reached approximately 40 per cent of all students.
Private schools have the right to charge uncapped fees, have total autonomy as to which students they enrol, and are exempted from anti-discrimination laws. What this has created is a form of educational apartheid where over 80 per cent of low socio-economic status (SES) students are enrolled in public schools with only approximately 18 per cent enrolled in private schools. Similar enrolment ratios remain constant for Indigenous students, those living in remote locations, students from a refugee background, those with a language background other than English, and students with a disability.
School funding policies introduced to embed ‘competition and choice’ have meant that private schools in Australia receive significant annual federal government funding, including huge grants for capital works. In addition, at the state government level, private schools receive recurrent and capital funding. A landmark review in 2011 created a national Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) intended to measure the amount of additional public funding schools should receive based on student need.[2] Despite this, it is estimated that private schools were over-funded by approximately $1 billion for the period 2020–23 while public schools were under-funded by $19 billion.[3] Essentially, the public system which is doing the ‘heavy lifting’ is vastly under-resourced for the challenges its teachers face on a daily basis.
Successive Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports have confirmed that social segregation is a defining feature of Australian schooling. The ideology of treating schooling as a market-place has resulted in Australia having the highest degree of school choice of any OECD country but with huge concentrations of disadvantaged students, low equity in provision, and social segregation.
There are now massive gaps across Australia in academic achievement between high SES and low SES students of up to several years of schooling. For example, recent national testing data reveals that 29% of low SES Year 9 students (15 years of age) were below the writing standard and 16 percent were below the numeracy standard. For Year 9 Indigenous students, the proportion not achieving the national reading standard is 11 times higher than for high SES students.[4]
Choice has not enlarged the educational opportunities of the poor. Indeed, the tendency for choice to segregate children in the lower bands of socio-economic status has created worsening conditions for the populations who most depend on the effectiveness of public schools. Growth in public and private spending in the non-government sector has operated to remove more culturally advantaged children and young people from the public systems, leaving these systems less supported culturally by a balanced mix of students from different family backgrounds.[5]
While the history of how Australia found itself in this situation is as complex as it is torturous, the experience of prioritizing private advantage over social good contrasts with other countries as shown in a 2013 comparative study of Australia and Canada,
The relationship between school SES and student outcomes is generally stronger in Australia than in Canada. An important and visible difference between the Australian and Canadian educational systems is the degree to which they are marked by school choice, privatisation, and social segregation. In Australia, these features of educational marketization have provided unequal access to resources and “good” schools and have led to levels of social exclusion and segregation higher than in comparable, highly developed countries such as Canada.[6]
Of course, while funding policies have weakened the public education system in Australia, there are other forces at play. Governments in Australia, as elsewhere, no longer regard the provision of public services as primarily their responsibility with privatisation occurring throughout the public sector including in: postal and communication services, transport, roads, shipping ports, airports, health care, welfare, prisons, security services, employment services, housing, and energy. It could be argued that schooling is the last great public enterprise. But since the 1980s national systems of education have been left unprotected from an emerging global education industry that sees compulsory schooling as an under-capitalized market with a permanent and ever-increasing customer base, children.
Governments have created the conditions for the commercialization of education services. National testing regimes, such as the Australian National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) along with accompanying accountability and data infrastructures, have gifted enormous influence to education technology giants, sidelining teachers and too often wresting control of the curriculum from them. Further, as government education departments retreat from providing professional support and resources to teachers, the vacuum is filled by firms in the obvious areas of student assessment, but also in school administration, student well-being, teacher professional development, and curriculum delivery. “Commercialization is big business. Many commercial providers generate large profits for shareholders by selling goods and services to schools, districts, and systems.”[7]
However, the role of large corporations is much more opaque at the government level. Global consultancy firms, such as the “Big 4”: PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), Deloitte, and Ernst and Young, work inside of government departments such as the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education with direct influence over policy development and strategic planning. In the state of NSW, tens of millions of dollars have been paid to these firms, without consultation with the teaching profession and in the absence of public scrutiny.[8] In a report commissioned by the NSW Teachers Federation the researchers found that:
The reduced capacity of the state has opened up spaces and opportunities for edu-businesses to expand their role in schools and schooling systems, largely on a for-profit basis. Private corporations have also sought an enhanced role in all stages of the policy cycle in education (from agenda setting, research for policy, policy text production, policy implementation and evaluation, provision of related professional development, and resources) in what has been referred to as the ‘privatisation of the education policy community’.[9]
Since the report was published, the direct influence of the corporate consultancies and edu-businesses has increased dramatically. It should come as no surprise that the Big 4 consultancy firms are generous donors to Australia’s two major political parties.[10]
Vocational Education and Training: A case study
The most striking example of the catastrophic impact of the application of market forces to education is in the area of Australia’s post-compulsory Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector.
Until relatively recently, the provision of vocational education and training was largely the responsibility of the public system known as Technical and Further Education (TAFE). It existed as a national system in every state and territory of Australia, administered at a state level, and with an enormous reach into local communities. Despite chronic underfunding compared to other sectors, TAFE was highly regarded, providing skills training for industries, trades, small business, and emerging professions. In addition, it provided more general and further education, particularly to those re-joining the workforce, or those mature age citizens seeking additional qualifications including entry to university. In contrast to the Australian university sector, enrolments by students from a disadvantaged background was much higher in TAFE.
The watershed moment was April 2012 when all state and territory governments met with the federal government at a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting and agreed to introduce a radical restructuring of vocational education and training. Within a short period, a new funding regime based on the market model was introduced. There were two key requirements which became the architecture for the privatisation of the sector and the destruction of the public provider, TAFE. Firstly, what was called entitlement funding was introduced. This was simply a voucher system. Secondly, a student loan scheme, an income contingent loan model, was introduced. Both these mechanisms were underpinned by a requirement that state governments had to open up all funding to the private sector and that the funding had to be allocated on a competitive basis.
It soon became clear what the national agreement meant. Voucher funding detached the funding from the actual TAFE college and attached it to the individual student. The connection between funding and the TAFE college was severed. In short, the public provider’s funding was now precarious, no longer guaranteed.
VET students were to pay the full cost of a qualification, without any government subsidy, to either private for-profit providers – which under the national agreement were allowed to charge fees up to AUD$99,000 – or to TAFE. This became the incentive for private for-profit training companies to increase tuition fees dramatically, and offer only those courses that would maximize profits. Students and their families soon found that the charging of fees was completely unregulated. Within the first two years of the scheme, 84% of income contingent loans from government to students went to private for-profit companies.
Student debt ballooned but many students also discovered that the private training organisations did not necessarily complete the course or even offer the actual training. Students in this situation were left with the debt but no qualification. Media stories began to appear of private training organisations aggressively targeting disadvantaged students with brokers waiting outside employment agencies to sign up students or setting up kiosks in suburban shopping malls offering incentives such as free iPads.
The impact of the 2012 national agreement on the teachers in TAFE was devastating. Without guaranteed funding, the employer attacked salaries and working conditions. In some states of Australia, the levels of casualisation grew to 80% of the workforce. Across Australia some TAFE colleges closed, courses were scrapped, and student numbers plummeted. In 2012, the number of permanent and temporary teaching positions in New South Wales, was 17,104. By 2022, ten years on from the national agreement this had dropped to 8,197, a net loss of 8,907 teachers from the public system in just one state.
Of course, VET teachers, through their national and state unions, and academics working in this area had warned government of the dire consequences if the market model was introduced.[11] They were ignored.
Conclusion
While education has always been an area of public policy that has been contested, where historically, tensions between church and the state have played out, where individual privilege keeps challenging the very idea of public good, and where social conservatives have consistently attempted to control the school curriculum, in recent years we have witnessed a much more aggressive, coherent, and global campaign against public education that is underpinned by the ideology of the market. It is this influence of neoliberal ideology that is having the most dramatic effect on public education around the world. It is up to teachers, professional allies, and the community to be alert to the dangers and to fight to retain control. Our children and young people deserve nothing less.
*This article was originally published as “Public education and privatization in Australia” in the December 2023 edition of Education Forum, the official magazine of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF). Republished with permission. See Public education and privatization in Australia – Education Forum (education-forum.ca)
About the author
Maurie was a teacher and principal with 34 years of experience teaching in public high schools in rural, regional and metropolitan New South Wales. From 2012-2020, he served as President of the NSW Teachers Federation, and concurrently as Deputy Federal President of the Australian Education Union from 2015-2020. During this time, Maurie was a key member of Education International’s Global Response Network which coordinated international opposition to the growing commercialisation and privatisation of education.
Endnotes
[1] Fiala, Thomas J. and Owens, Deborah (April 23, 2010) “Education Policy and Friedmanomics: Free Market Ideology and Its Impact on School Reform” Paper presented at the 68th Annual National Conference of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, USA p22.
[5] Teese, R. (2011), From opportunity to outcomes. The changing role of public schooling in Australia and national funding arrangements, Centre for Research on Education Systems, University of Melbourne.
[6] Perry, Laura B and McConney, Andrew (2013) “School socioeconomic status and student outcomes in reading and mathematics: A comparison of Australia and Canada” Australian Journal of Education 57(2) p138.
[7] Hogan, Anna and Thompson, Greg (December 2017) “Commercialization in Education” in Noblit, G W (Ed.) Oxford research encyclopedia of education. Oxford University Press, United Kingdom, pp. 1-19.
[8] “NSW Education pays Deloitte $9.1m to write documents for NSW Treasury” (3 March 2021) Australian Financial Review.
[9] Lingard, Bob; Sellar, Sam; Hogan, Anna; and Thompson, Greg; (2017) “Commercialisation in Public Schooling (CIPS)”. New South Wales Teachers Federation: Sydney, NSW. pp7-8.
[11] Wheelahan, Leesa “The race to the bottom in the VET market & why TAFE cannot win” (1 May 2013) Submission to House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Employment Inquiry into TAFE.
Following on from the JPL article on assessment that he wrote in 2020, Professor Jim Tognolini gives teachers a comprehensive insight into why teacher professional judgement is at the heart of assessment...
Introduction
Assessment is an integral part of the teaching and learning process. Tognolini and Stanley (2007) suggested that assessment involves professional judgment about student progress along a developmental continuum.
Central to such judgment are the images formed by the observed performance of students and knowledge of the standards that differentiate performance within the curriculum. Teachers are closest to their students and have many opportunities to observe and test their performance. They are also the primary agents in assessment and assess informally every day. However, the interest in assessment goes beyond the classroom. There are many other players who have a stake in assessment and in understanding what it means.
Many of the misapplications of assessment come from divorcing it from its natural role in the teaching and learning process and from misunderstandings about its nature and function in that process. This article shows how conceptualising learning as progress along a developmental continuum brings together curriculum, teaching and learning, and assessment as parts of one continuous process centralised on the teacher.
Assessment is used to track growth
Assessment is about evidence of progress in the growth of knowledge, understanding and skills. This developmental emphasis shifts the focus of attention in assessment towards monitoring student progress in learning. The key idea is that the students’ progress or growth, in what is required to be learned, is monitored along a developmental continuum.
Development is a fundamental concept in education. Teachers’ interactions with students facilitates their progressive development of knowledge, skills and understanding. Classroom activities are designed in a context of curriculum and syllabus specification about the content, level of knowledge and skills to be developed.
The developmental continuum
The monitoring of student growth along a continuum requires the continuum to be defined and levels of performance to be articulated using pre-determined standards of performance. Effective curriculum frameworks and syllabus documents set out a developmental sequence, commonly in the form of statements of learning or outcomes. Outcomes describe what students are expected to know and be able to do at different stages along the continuum. They provide the basis for the development of the teaching and learning (including assessment) sequence and activity within a subject or course.
Curriculum requirements differ across systems in the degree of explicitness about content to be taught and mastered. This can be seen in a developmental sequence of outcomes from a primary syllabus which is shown in Figure 1. It shows a sequence of outcomes for understanding whole numbers.
Figure 1: Developmental sequence for understanding whole numbers
Classroom activities are designed to enable students to progress through the developmental sequence and evidence of progress needs to be obtained for each student through appropriate assessment opportunities provided by the teacher. The developmental process is often represented in terms of a series of stages.
Progression from one stage to the next commonly involves a transition process. During transition performance may go backwards before it improves. This may be due to the next stage of learning requiring an ability to re-organise previous understanding into a new perspective. Consequently, there may be some uncertainty and inconsistency in performance until the new perspective is dominant.
Development implies improvement in performance. If there is no evidence of students improving, then there is no evidence of learning occurring. Whether formal or informal, assessment provides the evidence as to where a student is located on the developmental continuum which underpins the curriculum. To this extent curriculum, assessment, teaching and learning need to be closely integrated. A good question to ask when preparing lessons and associated assessments is: How are we helping our students move along each developmental sequence of knowledge?
Teaching and assessing for developmental progression
When designing an assessment program, the purpose is to provide information, which helps teachers understand student progress along the developmental continuum, which underpins the curriculum. To progress along the continuum, students must become more proficient in the subject. Outcomes that are further along the continuum are intended to be more cognitively demanding for the students. They require more of the ‘attribute’, ‘trait’ or ‘construct’ that enables the students to demonstrate proficiency. Progressing along the continuum means that students are becoming more proficient in the subject.
Progress is generally represented by a series of stages that are cumulative in nature. Skills, understanding and knowledge that students demonstrate, at different stages along the developmental continuum for a subject or learning, are typically captured by generic descriptors with broad descriptions of standards. Teachers in schools can locate students along these developmental continua by comparing their ‘images’ of students, informed by the assessments, to these broad standards and using their professional judgement say, on balance, that the student is located at a ‘stage 3’ (or ‘level 3’ or ‘band 3’) at this point in their learning because the description of the standard best aligns with the image of the student.
The image
The concept of image is a central aspect of teachers’ professional judgement about student growth.
Teachers build images of what students know and can do based upon all the information that is collected from various assessment techniques, not just formal or standardised assessments. The image of a given student is built up from such information and, if new evidence comes in, then the image of that student will need to take account of the latest evidence. The image is critical to the teaching and learning process. It is not based on subjective opinion because it needs to be consistent with evidence.
Generally, the information that emerges from students completing classroom tasks, answering questions, from students talking to each other, and taking classroom tests, standardised tests or examinations is expected to be consistent with the images.
Sometimes it is not, and the teacher then asks the question, “Why not?” There are many students who perform well in classroom activities and yet perform poorly on a standardised test or examinations; this atypical performance is of interest to teachers. It could be that a student has some difficulties which have been identified by the performance on the test and there is a need to collect further evidence to see if there is a need to adjust the image of that student. Alternatively, it could be that the result may have been caused through other reasons that would not warrant a substantive change in the image e.g., the student was sick on the day of the assessment or did not try to do well on the assessment.
In summary, therefore, teachers use assessments to form an image of what students know and can do. As more information becomes available from a variety of assessment sources, it is incorporated into the image. The various sources of assessment are targeting the same material from different, but interrelated perspectives. Consequently the “fairest image” emerges when teachers use a range of assessment techniques and assimilate the information from the multiple sources using their professional judgment. Teachers are constantly assessing students or their actions, taking the latest information back to the image and making informed decisions as to what to do next. In this way assessment is fully integrated into teaching.
Figure 2 shows the usefulness to teachers of various assessment activities ordered from more-useful to less-useful in producing the image.
The key point is that assessment is teacher centric. All data, whether it has been collected from classroom interactions or formal tests should be interpreted by the teacher using professional judgement. One of the questions that is often asked by teachers around the world is “How do we bring together formative and summative assessments?”. The response is that it is done through the process of professional judgement described above. Summative tests and formal assessments provide just one more piece of evidence that is used to inform the image which is used to monitor student growth.
Figure 2: Usefulness to teachers of various assessment methods in developing the image
Using the image to monitor student performance against standards using teacher professional judgement
There are numerous advantages for students and teachers in using a system whereby student images are referenced, using teacher professional judgement, to pre-specified standards of performance. One advantage is that reporting of student performance is focused on individual progress on the developmental continuum rather than on performance relative to other students or on so called “mastery” of content. That is, there is a desire to see growth in the individual student and that is outcome is provided by the developmental continuum. A second is that continua, with descriptions of performance, provide a picture of what it means to improve in learning in different areas. A third is that teachers can help students (and others) know what is required and what it is that they must do to progress along the developmental continuum.
For students to demonstrate where they are along a developmental continuum, they must be given the opportunity to show what they know and can do in relation to the outcomes of the subject. Tasks, activities and test items provide them with this opportunity. This is important in differentiating learning. If very able students are not given the opportunity to show that they have developed in their learning, by giving them opportunities to demonstrate greater levels of cognitive depth, then it is not possible to locate them on the developmental continuum with a degree of consistency or accuracy. This is not fair for the students.
Vygotsky (1978) used the concept of the zone of proximal development as the region on the developmental continuum to describe where students can learn best. Located between that which is too easy and that which is too hard, it is where the guidance of a person more competent in a task (generally the teacher, but could be a student’s peers, parents, etc.) can help a student to reach his or her potential. The most effective way in meeting the learning needs of individual students is to locate the student on the developmental continuum and then work within the region where they are located.
Differences in the pace of student learning can be due to some having a slower path of development, reaching a plateau at a lower level of performance to others or needing to develop other capacities first. While such differences are quite common, especially in non-streamed school classes, many believe that growth paths should ‘close the gap’ between the lowest and the highest performers. However, in practice this may lead to holding back students who reach the need for the next step earlier. The important task is to help all students to progress along the developmental continuum as quickly as they can. As Masters (2013) has argued current school organisation and grading practices do not deal adequately with individual differences in growth.
Teacher judgement of student progress affects how they structure teaching and learning activities to enable students to progress through the developmental sequence in achievable steps. Evidence of student growth can take many forms but should be considered in terms of how well it satisfies the needs for practicality, fairness, validity and whether it provides feedback to assist the next step in the developmental pathway for an individual. Timely feedback is essential to assist learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).
Different sources of evidence about student growth should converge. For example, if in a particular case there are different signals coming from external tests than classroom observation, rather than discarding one source there will be value in adopting a forensic approach to understanding why such discrepancy has occurred. The product of such analysis should lead to a more effective understanding of and eventually improvement in student learning.
Challenges in implementing and monitoring a consistent approach to growth
The consequences of such a model of assessment requires re-negotiating the processes of curriculum, teaching and assessment towards a holistic emphasis on how growth occurs and on what evidence should be gathered to show that it is occurring. If curriculum requirements are not organised with respect to developmental outcomes, which clarify expected learning pathways and progress maps, then teaching programs are unlikely to yield evidence of depth of learning.
It takes time and resources to develop research-based learning developmental continua and, so far, most attention to such development has been in areas such as literacy, numeracy and science (e.g. see Black et al., 2011; McNamara & Hill, 2011). These areas have been given special attention because of their core nature and apparent tractability to a developmental pathway.
Digital technologies have much potential to assist in the process of learning. They can present varied assessment tasks with useful feedback customised to individual developmental levels. One senses many opportunities for improved assessment from educational use of such technologies.
The image of a student formed by professional judgement
From the discussion to this point, it should be clear that the image of the student formed by professional judgment is central to modern assessment in education.
The image of a student is defined in terms of the observation and experienced-based impression of their current level of performance. When this point of view is expressed to teachers and students, one of the first responses is that the image appears to be a very subjective concept.
This leads to some potentially awkward questions: Is not good assessment supposed to be objective and unbiased? Why is such a subjective term like image considered central?
Clearly, there is a need for assessment to be fair and unbiased, and it is important to examine how this can be achieved in practice. Recognising the centrality of professional judgment in assessment does not mean that assessment is primarily a subjective activity, where ‘subjective’ implies arbitrariness or inconsistency.
Observation in science involves professional judgment using agreed protocols for collecting evidence. This evidence is then tested against other evidence. The outcome of such observation is accepted as part of the scientific endeavour and is not considered subjective. Similarly in assessment it is possible to have confidence in the outcomes, provided careful attention is paid to the processes of observation and how the conclusions about student performance are determined. It does require a level of assessment literacy of teachers that may or may not be evident at this point. However, building the capacity of teachers in assessing and making consistent judgments of student performance against standards would seem to be a worthy goal given the importance of assessment and data literacy to teaching and student learning.
There is a need to consider how acceptable information can be generated to test and refine the image developed of a student. It is important to look carefully at the different sources of information and their respective contribution to the overall image.
All evidence collected needs to be considered carefully. This includes so-called ‘objective’ test data. Just because a multiple-choice test can be marked objectively does not mean that it is free from professional judgment in its construction, or that it always gives more valid information. The person writing objective test items has an image in mind of what knowledge and skills can be demonstrated by students responding to the test. This image is used to make decisions regarding choice of test format and item content.
For some purposes, a multiple-choice item may be the most efficient way of testing particular knowledge. In other cases, by providing a frame for student responses, the construction of a multiple-choice item may be seen to limit the opportunities for students to show creative use of the knowledge and skill they possess.
Depending on the purpose of the assessment, a better solution may be achieved by substituting an open ended short-answer question for the multiple-choice item. Every time a formal test is devised there is a series of judgments that need to be made to ensure that the information gained helps our understanding of student achievement.
The key to good assessment is to understand both the centrality of professional judgment in the collection of information that leads to the formation of the image of the student being assessed and ways of ensuring that the professional judgement is well grounded in evidence.
The initial image may well be formed by partial information and hearsay. It is important to move beyond this to classroom observation, more formal and informal data informing the image that is used to drive teaching and learning.
Why is this so important? The literature on teacher expectation suggests that untested impressions are likely to be unfair and lead to unsound and unproductive further teacher-student interactions.
Most teachers have heard of the Pygmalion Effect studied by Rosenthal & Jacobson (1968) in which it was claimed that impressions of students’ ability formed by teachers influenced their actual student achievement. Ever since then concerns about teacher expectation effects and self-fulfilling prophecies have led to worry about judgments by teachers leading to unfair and biased outcomes for students.
Being worried about it is a good sign. Knowing the potential effects of unfounded and untested assumptions about the students is essential if teachers are to avoid making mistakes about them.
Subsequent debate about the relationship between expectancy and performance suggests that it could be just as easily claimed that teacher expectation effects were due to student effects on teachers rather than the other way around (Brophy & Good, 1970). Like most controversy, there is some evidence in favour of both directions of expectancy effects. Interactions with students provide a strong basis for our understanding of what they can do.
While there may be contexts in which the expectations of performance are not well formed by evidence, this is not ground for asserting that all images of the performance capability of students are necessarily subjective and untrustworthy.
The image a teacher may have of a student is initially formed by expectation and professional judgement and needs to be continually challenged and revised by evidence collected during everyday classroom experience as well as test data. As mentioned previously, assimilating information about performance of students from several sources and over several occasions leads to more reliable and valid images.
Teachers must always believe in the possibility that their students will continue to develop. The image that each student presents in terms of performance and achievements should help guide the teacher in the next step to develop the student. However, for the next step to be achievable, there is a need to have a well-grounded view of the student’s current level of knowledge and skill. To achieve this does not mean that that there is a need to collect a large amount of evidence. Sometimes uneasiness about how much evidence is needed to have an appropriate image of their students leads teachers to become overzealous in collecting a large portfolio of student work.
To have a well-grounded basis for the image of students, teachers must have confidence in the observations they make about student performance. The quality of the evidence is more important than the amount of evidence. Classroom engagement with students through discussion and observation adds to any assignment or test data in forming the image.
Reliability of classroom assessment
Observing and making professional judgements about students every day, as they engage in classroom activities and conversations, is an integrated part of the work of teachers and of good teaching. As the interactions are many, and occur over several occasions, assessment based on these interactions is more reliable than assessments made based on a one-off test. In principle the reliability of assessment increases with the number of observations made.
Nevertheless, there are concerns about how to ensure the reliability and validity of teacher assessment, especially where there is performance management based on student outcomes. External standardised tests often claim to be more reliable and independent even if they can be perceived to be limiting the scope of what is taken as evidence of student achievement.
Much of the educational research literature on the reliability or validity of teacher assessment is embedded in contexts, that may not fit well into modern system-wide reporting and accountability frameworks
In considering classroom assessment practice it is essential to distinguish between judgments based on formal written work, such as essays and assignments of varying structure and content, and those based on dynamic interactions in the classroom.
Different classroom teaching and learning situations vary in opportunities to observe and record information to inform judgments about student achievement. Teacher assessment practices differ in the extent of data collection and recording (ranging from detailed protocols to ‘on-balance’ judgments of achievement of assessment criteria). As with external tests and examinations, it would be expected that different requirements would show different degrees of reliability.
Reliability of a measure may be improved in two ways – by making the assessment(s) underpinning the measure longer and by improving the properties of the assessment tasks.
Tasks may be critiqued to remove ambiguities, or the difficulty of the tasks may be adjusted to make them more consistent with the average ability of the student group being tested. Some parts of the task may be substituted with items that are inherently more reliable (e.g. short answer or multiple-choice) or the marking scale may be refined to obtain greater clarity of the relationship between the quality of an answer and the marks/grade awarded.
Importantly the key point in this article is that as teachers base their images on data collected every day and in multiple ways throughout the school year, the image is based on many, many more observations than a standardised assessment and, because of this, outcomes from the assessments are likely to be more reliable.
Workload issues
In classroom assessment there are inevitable tensions, that arise from the interaction of the following aspects:
• The range and quantity of work on which teachers’ judgments are made
• The manageability of making such judgments during teaching
• The recording and storage of evidence
To ensure the validity and authenticity of assessment, it is desirable that teachers’ judgments are based on observations of a student performance on a wide range of activities. This is to ensure that a student is given every opportunity to show their level of functioning in relation to the curriculum standards. However, tension arises as to the manageability of recording such observations for all students in the context of a busy classroom.
Concerns about the reliability and validity of school and classroom-based assessment sometimes creates a tension between quality of measurement and good teaching practices. The former places an emphasis on standardisation so that students are being compared fairly on the same or similar tasks. On the other hand, the latter often requires differentiation, where teachers may give more structure and more help to lower ability students and greater autonomy to high ability students.
Some classroom assessment systems like the English Assessing Pupil’s Progress (APP) suggested that the teacher take notes on every observation that might contribute to an assessment. While this has the virtue of giving a complete picture of the student over the full range of educational activities, teachers tend to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data collected. Moreover, students may feel that they are always under observation. Such effects may interfere with the normal teaching process (Stanley et al., 2009).
Another approach lets the cumulative effect of informal observations create a judgment of what a student knows and can do. This more informal approach is not dissimilar to how teachers usually form an image of their students’ capabilities. Memorable observations that indicate atypical performance are recorded to check the confidence of the teacher that the student has reached the presumed level of performance.
Summary
The central concept in the teaching and learning process is the idea of developmental continua underlying the domains of knowledge and skills being taught. Assessment enables the progress of students to be monitored along these continua and provides essential feedback to assist in designing the next step in student learning. There needs to be close alignment between the curriculum, teaching and learning and assessment.
The central concept of this article is that teachers are assessing their students continuously and building an image of what they know, can do and understand. Using this image, and a defined underlying developmental continuum based on agreed upon standards, student progress can be defined, observed and communicated in tangible ways and the teaching and learning process can be modified to take individual student needs into account without overwhelming the teacher with formal assessment processes or data. Furthermore, it is likely the corpus of information, collected in such a manner, will be as, if not more valid and reliable than one-off assessments conducted at a single point in time, typically encountered in standardised test.While such assessments provide good quality data, they are just one more piece of evidence the teacher should use to adjust their image of their students relative to the developmental continuum.
The view of assessment advanced in this article puts the teacher at the centre of assessment relative to the teaching and learning process. Finally, this process will only work if there is close alignment between the curriculum, what is taught and what is measured by the assessments.
References
Black, P., Wilson, M. & Yao, S. (2011). Road maps for learning: A guide to the navigation of learning progressions. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, 9,2-3, 71-123.
Hattie, J. & Timperley, H. (2007). The power of feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77 (1), 81-112.
Krajcik, J. (2011), Learning progressions provide road maps for the development of assessments and curriculum materials. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, 9, 2-3, 155-158.
Masters, G.N. (2013). Reforming educational assessment: Imperatives, principles and challenges. Australian Education Review Number 57.
McNamara, T. & Hill, K. (2012). A response from languages. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, 10(3), 176-183.
Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (1968). Pygmalion in the classroom: Teacher expectation and pupil intellectual development. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Stanley, G., MacCann, R., Gardner, J., Reynolds, L. & Wild, I. (2009). Review of teacher assessment: Evidence of what works best and issues for development. Report on QCA Contract 2686. http://www.qcda.gov.uk/27194.aspx.
Tognolini, J. & Stanley, G. (2007). Standards-based assessment: A tool and means to the development of human capital and capacity building in education. Australian Journal of Education, 51(2), 129-145.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society: Development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
About the author
Professor Jim Tognolini is Director of The Centre for Educational Measurement and Assessment (CEMA) which is situated within the University of Sydney School of Education and Social Work. The work of the Centre is focused on the broad areas of teaching, research, consulting and professional learning for teachers.
The Centre is currently providing consultancy support to a number of schools. These projects include developing a methodology for measuring creativity; measuring 21st Century Skills; developing school-wide practice in formative assessment. We have a number of experts in the field: most notably, Professor Jim Tognolini, who in addition to conducting research offers practical and school-focused support.
In this inspiring new CPL course participants will hear about the professional journey (highs and tribulations) of a number of current and former female leaders and colleagues in our profession. Participants will have the opportunity to explore a lens for their own career paths (through networking, collaborations, shared experiences and questions).
Host presenter Lila Mularczyk will take you through the issues, circumstances, contexts and initiatives that have framed the path of many female education leaders in our system.
Case studies will be delivered by the leaders as they live(d) their work life. This will include system and school contexts that influence career passage.
Primary, Secondary and TAFE teachers and leaders are encouraged to apply to attend this course.
Participants will have the opportunity to listen, interact with leading female colleagues, network and consider further professional career options now and into the future.
Wednesday 29 April 2026, Surry Hills
All CPL courses run from 9am to 3pm.
$220
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Lila Mularczyk
Lila Mularczyk’s commitment to education was recognised by being honoured with the Order of Australia Medal (OAM). Lila has been contributing to public education for 40 years. She currently is undertaking a portfolio of work including leading or participating on multiple National and State Education Boards and Reference Groups and projects (including, PEF, ACE, UTS, UNSW, NSWTF and CPL.) tertiary professional experience officer, coach and mentor, UNSW Gonski Institute, State and Vice Chair ACE, supporting HALT’s, tertiary lecturer, work in and for schools, research, contract work, critical friend, innovation projects etc.
Prior, Lila was the Director, Secondary Education, at the Department of Education. Immediately prior to this, Lila was President of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council (SPC) from 2012 to 2016. As President and as a school Principal, Lila represented Public Education around Australia, and frequently globally, at conferences over many years. Lila was Principal at Merrylands High School for 15 years until 2016.
Lorraine Beveridge makes the case for high quality writing experiences in every classroom…
A concerning, declining trend in writing national data over time (NSW Department of Education, 2017) suggests that the teaching of writing could possibly be “a neglected R” (Graham, Hebert and Harris, 2015; Korth, et al., 2017 and Sessions, Kang and Womack, 2016). Writing is a literacy skill, relevant to all key learning areas in school and a necessary communication skill in life. Early literacy includes the interdependent skills of reading, writing and oral language, and it has been suggested that the prioritised focus on reading has led to limited attention to teaching writing as well as inadequate research on early writing instruction (Korth et al., 2017). Declining writing results “casts a light on our teaching practice”, (Fisher, Frey and Hattie, 2017 p167), how we teach writing, including the component writing skills and writing processes, our understanding of how students learn to write and suggest a need to investigate writing strategies independent of other literacy skills. Writing is a crucial skill linked to reading and academic success, and engagement in society more broadly (Cutler and Graham, 2008; Gerde, Bingham and Wasik, 2012; Mackenzie and Petriwskyj, 2017). This paper is a result of my research and reflection on practice.
I begin with a focus on an historical overview of learning to write. Then, I outline strategies identified in the literature that work in improving student writing skills and outline examples from my research and the wider literature of best practice in the teaching of writing. The paper concludes with how we, as a teaching profession, can move “onwards and upwards” in ensuring that students are effective written communicators who are also passionate writers and, as a result, their love of writing and chances of success at school and beyond are maximised.
Historical overview of learning to write
Teachers need a shared understanding of how children learn to write as a starting point in improving student writing. (Calkins and Ehrenworth, 2016). Learning to write is often described as a progression from scribbles on a page to conventional text (Genishi and Dyson, 2009), but it is so much more, linked to emotions and communication, and the progression is not always a linear one (Mackenzie and Petriwskyi, 2017). Beginning writing behaviour usually includes exposure to quality texts, models of good writing, classroom talk, drawing and captioning pictures, and tracing over words. In addition to copying captions, students replicate words from around the room and environmental print. Copying print leads to students remembering word forms and writing them independently. At the same time, students are inventing spellings of words that they wish to use in their independent writing, eager to share the stories that are important to them, based on their growing oral language, phonemic awareness, alphabetic knowledge and sight word vocabulary, in doing so, learning about the writing process through writing (Clay, 1979; Fountas and Pinnell, 1996). In the beginning stages, it is common to see pretend writing, scribble, and copying text. By encouraging early writing experimentation, which includes miscellaneous marks as students master letter formations, a range of print conventions and the use of invented spelling, students are encouraged to create meaning from print and share the messages that are important to them, fostering a love of writing and utilising students’ growing graphological and phonological knowledge.
Through partaking in early writing, students are making connections between graphemes (letters) and phonemes (sounds). They are learning about the skills that constitute writing, and that writing is a process that conveys meaning to the reader. Students have a meaningful context to practise and apply their growing awareness of how language works. It can certainly be challenging to decipher students’ early independent writing attempts. However, it is important that we as teachers work hard to determine the message that students are attempting to convey. By seeking to understand students’ intended written message, we are valuing their work, and encouraging them to expand their writing repertoire and take pleasure in it. We are modelling the purpose of writing, which is to convey a message to the reader, “through responding to and composing texts…, and learn(ing) about the power, value and art of the English language for communication, knowledge and enjoyment” (Board of Studies, 2012 p10).
Figure 1: Supporting students’ early independent writing attempts
Student writing can be viewed through a formative assessment lens (Wiliam, 2011, 2016, 2018), as a measure of writing growth, an indicator of the impact of teacher practice and to signpost where to next in writing instruction for individual students. Student writing samples provide rich evidence of learning, reducing the over-reliance on narrow test scores to monitor progress (Mackenzie and Petriwskyi, 2017; Fisher, Frey and Hattie, 2017). By keeping regular chronological logs of student writing, teachers and students have evidence of writing growth, as a basis for where students are at, and where they need to go to next in their learning, “monitoring student success criteria” (Hattie, 2012 p19). Syllabus scope and sequences, as in the NSW English syllabus (NSW Board of Studies, 2012) and the National Literacy Learning Progressions (NLLP) (ACARA, 2018) are useful tools for teachers to identify achievement and plan for individual student instruction across the various elements of literacy. Additionally, the
NLLP are potentially useful for students to determine their own learning intentions and success criteria (Wiliam, 2018), providing a framework for them to self-monitor their progress.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) released the Literacy Learning Progressions (NLLP) in 2018, to assist Australian teachers in identifying, understanding and addressing students’ literacy learning needs. In NSW, the NLLP, although not mandatory, are an additional tool to support teachers in implementing the English syllabus (NESA, 2012), which drives teaching and learning in classrooms. Teachers use evidence of student writing to appraise practice, drawing on the English syllabus and NLLP to inform decision making on where to next for individual students, in doing so personalising writing instruction. Similarly, by familiarising students with the indicators of the progressions, they have access to tools to monitor their own learning (Fisher, Frey and Hattie, 2017). By students identifying what they can do using their own writing, and using the progressions as a guide, they are formulating future writing learning goals, and taking ownership of their learning. Student self-assessment is identified as a powerful formative assessment technique (William & Leahy, 2015).
In a recent classroom study, Korth et al., (2017) found that it is rare to observe teachers modelling or scaffolding writing for their students, opportunities for students to write in the classroom are decreasing, possibly due to a myriad of pressures on teachers and a crowded curriculum, and most important of all, teachers explicitly modelling writing processes to students makes a difference to student writing progress. Teacher modelling is a form of direct instruction, specifically targeting identified student needs. Through participating in writing in the classroom, teachers are demonstrating the importance of writing and their enjoyment of writing to their students, including drafting, editing and proof-reading. Modelling writing powerfully demonstrates the writing process, providing opportunities for mentoring and instructional sharing of skills in-context (Calkins, 1986). Through teacher modelling, students see the importance of writing through teachers demonstrating their love of writing and, at the same time, explicitly addressing identified student writing needs.
When they write, young children learn to use sounds and corresponding symbols. During composing, beginning writers say words slowly, and stretch words out to identify, then write, the individual sounds that they hear. Early writing attempts often contain grammar errors. These lessen as students’ grammatical competence increases through direct teaching and immersion in quality texts, increasing their oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension (McCarrier, Pinnell and Fountas, 1999; CIS, 2018), similar skills that students draw on in learning to be readers. Through writing, children manipulate sounds using symbols and learn how written language works.
Figure 2: Example of early writing attempt
Reading and writing are complementary processes. Just as it is important to model early reading skills explicitly for students, it is equally important to model early writing skills. For example, directionality can be taught using quality texts as models, as can the place of spaces between words.
A small number of letters can make many words, drawing on students’ graphological and phonological skills, establishing mental models and increasing their control over written language (Beck and Beck, 2013). Through building on what is already known, students rapidly extend their written vocabulary. Sentence starters are commonly used to teach basic grammatical knowledge and to scaffold students’ early writing attempts. For example, the sentence stem, “Here is…” is an example of the recurring principle (Clay, 1979) that students can build on in their own writing. Many children’s picture books are based on this principle.
Figure 2: Innovation on text using the recurring principle
Holland (2016) encourages teachers to find quality texts containing features that they wish to explore with their students, matching texts to lesson objectives and identified student learning needs, while at the same time providing authentic models for students to draw on whilst writing, propelling them forward in their writing learning journey. ACARA released a text complexity appendix to the NLLP, which explicitly states that “throughout their school years, students will be exposed to texts with a range of complexity” (ACARA, 2018b p2). The text complexity appendix identifies four broad levels of texts, which are simple, predictable, moderately complex and sophisticated texts. These text levels are referenced throughout the NLLP. Simple texts are the simplest form of continuous texts, with common usage vocabulary, language, structure and content. Predictable texts include a more diverse vocabulary than simple texts, there are a range of sentence types and the text structure is usually predictable. Moderately complex texts increase in difficulty in terms of the subject specific language used, use of figurative language and more complex language structures. Finally, the fourth level of texts complexity refers to sophisticated texts, which may draw on academic and extensive technical language. Sophisticated texts contain a wide range of sentence types, complex structures, content and print layout features. The purpose of the text complexity appendix is to encourage teachers to consider the features of texts that they use in their class English programs to ensure that the texts match student identified learning needs and the specific purpose that teachers are targeting in their teaching.
Strategies that improve the teaching and learning of writing
The teaching of writing does need to be a priority. We as a profession need to ensure that those conditions that accelerate student growth in writing are being practised in classrooms and are available to all students. Although it is unrealistic to expect that all strategies would be successful for all students, the literature identifies clear instructional strategies that are more likely to achieve student writing success than others.
Logic dictates that increased, dedicated time to write in schools will improve student writing (Korth et al., 2017; Mo et al., 2014; Bromley, 2007). Mo et al. (2014) calls for a “writing revolution” in which the time spent writing at school is doubled. This strategy not only includes providing regular writing opportunities for students to write frequently and fluently using a growing repertoire of skills, but also teachers providing intentional, regular instruction that addresses students’ specific writing needs, often referred to as point-of-need “mini lessons” (Korth et al., 2017). It is important for students to have time to write daily in an unstructured way, including free personal choice writing that will not be critiqued, writing in which they can engage their emotions and tell the stories that they dearly wish to write about. This may take the form of journal writing or some other developmentally appropriate task for emergent writers, possibly symbolic representations, including “think- draw- write”. By putting school-wide structures and systems in place to ensure that all students write every day, schools are growing a culture that values writing and the messages that students’ writing contain. When students are also provided with explicit and regular feedback on their writing, research suggests that students’ writing skills increase dramatically (Hattie, 2012; Simmerman et al., 2012; Cutler and Graham, 2008).
Undeniably, writing is a complex task. Cutler and Graham (2008) also identify the need to spend more time teaching writing. They find that many teachers take an eclectic approach to teaching writing and call for a more balanced instructional line of attack between time spent independently writing and learning writing skills and processes. There are two clear components to effective writing teaching, the explicit teaching of writing skills, which sits alongside the second, possibly more important component, which is teaching the writing process. Writing instruction focusing on a skills-based approach is not enough. It does not evoke a passion for writing. Writers go through a process, a series of steps to compose a piece of writing that needs to be modelled and taught explicitly. The writing process includes collecting and organising information, writing a draft, revising, editing and rewriting. To learn about the writing process, students require protected time to write, choice over the topic they wish to write about and targeted feedback from teachers (Calkins and Ehrenworth, 2016; Cutler and Graham, 2008; Korth et al., 2017).
Education systems need to do a better job of providing targeted teacher professional learning in writing that addresses school and students’ identified writing needs. (Mo et al., 2014; Cutler and Graham, 2008). A focus of a recent professional learning course for middle school teachers delivered over a term, and spanning 12 schools, was teachers, collaboratively reflecting on the cognitive dimension of teaching writing, as Oz (2011) describes writing as, “the operation of putting information, structured in the brain, into print” (p251) . Teachers were thinking about and sharing how writing is taught in their local context, and brainstorming how they could possibly do it better, an example of the power of collaborative professional learning, in which teachers learn with and from each other (Beveridge, 2015).
Figure 4: Middle Years Writing Course reflection (2017)
In the middle years writing course (Brassil, Bridge and Sindrey, 2012), teachers identified what they regard as going well in the teaching of writing, what still needs be a focus and ideas for improvement. Table 1 below lists participating teachers’ responses as to how they were addressing the teaching of writing in their schools and where they needed to go to next in the teaching of writing in their local contexts to address the learning needs of their particular students.
What’s going well in the teaching of writing?
What still needs to improve?
What are ideas for improvement?
ALARM[1] (cognitive scaffold, framework for writing).
Clarify the learning intention at the lesson outset (and encourage all staff to use this language).
Identifying audience and purpose of writing. Unpacking rubrics together so students are clear about what the task involves. Co-writing rubrics with students drawing on syllabus/ progression indicators to increase student ownership of learning.
Students to reflect on their writing (self /peer-assess).
Activities and strategies that improve sentence structure. Teacher professional learning on grammar with a shared focus and understanding of how language works.
Using writing tools; a range of writing apps
Discussing ideas together before we begin writing (dialogic teaching).
Identifying the writing demands of the key learning areas and map the commonalities across KLAs.
Sharing of ideas/ writing strategies with staff facilitates professional discussion.
Coherence and consistency of teaching writing across the grades.
Building subject specific vocabulary to draw on when writing. Subject-specific teachers to agree on a consistent approach for teaching writing school-wide.
Making writing a school focus and linking effective teaching of writing to other school foci.
Assessment of writing from a school-wide perspective that all staff share ownership of.
Improving grammar knowledge in context, through explicit teaching and using quality texts as writing models.
Students believe that they can write, irrespective of skill level.
Providing students with quality writing models / texts and explicit quality criteria for writing.
Generating ideas to write about together at the outset of a lesson (in creative ways, to put the magic back in the teaching of writing).
Table 1: Writing in the Middle Years course reflection (2017)
Increasing classroom discourse, where the teacher and students together discuss and clarify complex tasks, has an effect size of .82, double the effect size of .4, which is generally regarded as one year’s teaching for one year’s growth (Fisher, Frey and Hattie, 2017 p3). In the writing classroom, this may look like the students and teacher participating in joint writing construction, and modelling metacognitive processes, which could involve asking self-questions (for metacognition and self-reflection) whilst writing. Self-questions relate to the learning intentions of the lesson, and whether students have explicitly addressed these in their writing.
Figure 5: Tools to support students asking self-questions.
For example, in Figure 5 above, the pedagogical framework strategies “WILF and WALT” provide visual prompts to students of the learning intention: What are we learning today? (WALT), and success criteria: What am I looking for? (WILF). Such lessons support students in self-monitoring and evaluating their writing. Self-questions students may ask from the WILT and WALT framework include:
Have I used adjectives in my writing? Where are they? How do they make my writing more interesting?
Where are my spaces between words, full stops and capital letters? Have I used them correctly? How do they help my writing make sense to the reader?
What language choices have I made to make my writing more interesting? How successful was I in achieving this?
Calkins and Ehrenworth (2016) outline three guiding principles for teachers to keep in mind when teaching writing:
Students are actively involved in the writing process
They share what they write
They perceive themselves as writers.
Increasing classroom discourse may look like students discussing their current performance and the criteria that they will use to measure their writing success. It has been stated that “the more clearly they [students] can see the goals, the more motivated they will be [to achieve them]” (Fisher, Frey and Hattie p43). Overall but not exclusively, the aim of classroom discourse in writing lessons is for teachers to gradually release writing responsibilities to students (Kaya and Ates, 2016, Pearson and Gallagher, 1983). To become expert teachers of writing, teachers must become skilled at supporting students in achieving their (self-) identified success criteria (Hattie, 2012). The NLLP are a useful guide for students to identify what they can do, and where they need to go to next in their writing learning journey.
Writing at school has infinite possibilities to integrate learning across the key learning areas which include various genres inclusive of imaginative, persuasive and information texts (Board of Studies, 2012). An emphasis on writing across different content areas reinforces the integrative nature of writing and its high gravitas in all key learning areas at school, and in life. For example, writing class books about a specific topic or activity, describing the attributes of characters or animals and writing expositional texts in science, are all evidence that writing is much more than narrative. Students need to write arguments and information texts; in fact, a wide range of texts across all subjects. In turn, teachers need to clearly state how writing skills learned in one classroom or key learning area can support developing writing skills and processes in another, making explicit and strengthening the writing links across the key learning areas for students.
School leaders have a responsibility to facilitate the organisation of opportunities for teachers and students to develop and share what good writing looks like. This can be achieved through ensuring teachers have time to collaboratively plan for and review student writing. This could involve using the samples provided in the Assessment Resource Centre as authoritative sources, analysing student exemplars locally and collectively studying published writing and quality texts. By developing shared teacher understandings of what good writing looks like across the school, writing expectations for students are aligned and cohere, clarifying and democratising writing instruction from one classroom to another (Wiggins, 2000).
Through exposure to and deconstruction of a range of quality texts, students learn writing strategies through engaging with real authors and identifying how they engage readers in their texts. At the Australian Literacy Educators (ALEA) National Conference in Adelaide in 2016, I attended a writing session presented by an Australian Capital Territory (ACT) community of schools. The schools reported that the most significant factor that contributed to their collective, improved and sustained writing results, and increased student engagement in writing, was a shared “Visiting Children’s Author Program” in which students learned to “write like a writer”. Exposure to quality texts improves student writing through providing inspiration that they talk about, share and build on in their own writing. A rich diet of a wide variety of texts provides opportunities for critical and creative thinking, and sustained conversations about authors, real texts and aspects of texts that engage readers (Haland, 2016).
At a recent middle school writers’ workshop at a local high school, it was reported to me that the first activity of the day involved students voting with their feet. They moved to a specific corner of the room if they enjoyed writing at school and considered themselves good writers. Similarly, students who considered themselves poor writers and didn’t enjoy writing at school moved to the opposite corner. Students placed themselves along the human continuum based on their feelings about writing in the school context. Overwhelmingly, the vast majority of the group of around 90 students from the local high school and its primary feeder schools, regarded themselves as poor writers who did not enjoy writing at school.
Whether this informal poll is generalisable data is admittedly dubious. However, when I arrived at the school at the end of the day for teacher professional learning, I found a group of highly engaged, happy and proud students, eager to share their writing with me. The lucky students had spent the day being motivated to write by a high profile children’s author who shared his authentic secret business in relation to “writing like a writer” with the students. He provided them with insights and writing models from (his) quality texts, narrative, humour and multimodality that totally engaged and engrossed students in the writing process. Students’ shared excitement and pride in their writing efforts and their successes were tangible and infectious. The students had been mentored in writing by a “real” writer, providing a genuine context for their writing. The author worked hard in encouraging students to weave their emotions into their writing, delving into the affective domain, which involved a coming together of their hearts and minds in the act of writing.
It is suggested that the creativity and originality that promotes imagination, expressiveness and risk taking in the writing process is what is missing in the way that writing is taught in schools today, possibly as a result of the way writing is currently measured (Ewing, 2018, Frawley and McLean-Davis, 2015). Increasingly, the decline in writing results Australia-wide is attributed to the movement away from students engaging with processes linked to the creative arts, including imagination, creativity, flexibility and problem solving, processes that have transformative potential (Rieber and Carton, 1987). It has been suggested that the creative magic of writing is possibly what is missing in the teaching of writing in schools today. “What if we brought the magic back into the teaching of writing? It’s in teachers’ hands” (Adoniou, 2018).
Figure 6: Middle Years Writing workshop (2017)
Teaching writing in the digital age
Our students are products of a digital world, and they seem to not respond well to the writing teaching practices of the past (Johnson, 2016; Kaya and Ates, 2016; Vue et al., 2016, Engestrom, 2001). Table 2 below shows how our digitally mediated culture has impacted the way we teach writing, classified by Engestrom (2001) as the old and new way to teach writing. Teaching writing with new technologies requires a shift in how teachers conceptualise writing teaching in their classrooms.
This is now
That was then
Process approach sits alongside writing skills focus.
Product based approach.
Draws on methods and motivators used by published authors. Learning to “write like a writer”.
Teaching writing usually the domain of the classroom teacher.
Both writing skills and processes taught together.
Skills-based focus.
Writing tasks have real-world purpose. Focus on communicative action/ meaning.
Compliance discourse, for example, praise for product.
New understandings and models of authoring and publishing texts. Focus on how language works. Functional view of grammar.
Grammar focus.
Use of an increasing range of digital writing tools and web based apps and programs.
Pencil/pen and paper writing tools.
Writing and sharing to a wider [often electronic] audience.
Traditional publishing of stories and books.
Authentic writing tasks across all key learning areas.
Writing was the domain of subject English.
Need to combine digital and non-digital media in teaching writing.
Writing was taught using non-digital media.
Table 2: Writing in a digitally mediated culture (adapted from Engestrom, 2001)
Students (and adults) are forever writing, in the forms of text messages, blogs, emails, snapchats, Facebook posts, Tweets, Instagram posts and so on, suggesting high and increased engagement in, and importance of, writing as a result of our digitally mediated culture. The use of digital tools has changed the composing and publishing process. Yet there seems to be a divide between school writing, typified by low engagement and writing in the real world, typically a high engagement task. We need to build a bridge between school and home writing, so teachers and students alike see the high gravitas of both as forms of written communication and making meaning. Digital tools are increasingly part of our world. Well-considered professional development and support is required, to address teacher dispositions in relation to using digital tools in the writing process while, at the same time, building teacher and student skills and expertise that will be sustained and built upon in practice.
As we discover more about neuroscience and human cognition, we are increasingly learning about how multiple formats of texts (multimedia) have a positive effect on learning through reducing the cognitive load on working memory, resulting in improved information processing and understanding (Johnson, 2016; Vue et al., 2016; Wilson and Czik, 2016). Computers do need to be a more integral part of the writing classroom. However, we need to authentically integrate them into learning tasks to improve pedagogy (Cutler and Graham, 2008). Most students have access to digital technology and use it to stay connected. It is their preferred mode of text-based communication. The challenge as we learn more through research seems to be how we can increasingly integrate digital tools to promote quality writing through real-world, authentic and semiotic (meaning-making) writing tasks; and at the same time “hook into” the high student engagement associated with digitally mediated communication (Johnson, 2016; Jones, 2015).
I witnessed one school’s attempt to span the home-school writing divide, similar to the “bridgeable knowledge gap” (Hattie and Yates, 2013). Stage 3 students wrote stories, illustrated them, captured them digitally, they then displayed them as QR codes in their classrooms accessed via their mobile phones. In this way, the old and new ways of teaching writing come together in an engaging format, easily shared both locally and with a wider electronic audience. However, focusing on digital tools in the writing process is not enough, as these can fail on application, and students need to be independently competent written communicators, to succeed at school and in life. The goal is for students to achieve capability writing in authentic ways, to the real world. Authentic writing involves students understanding the relevance and importance of what they are writing, often publishing to a wider, electronic audience.
Turning around school writing results: a case study
In 2013, I surveyed 160 schools and from these data, selected 4 case-study schools to determine the impact and sustainability of collaborative professional learning (Beveridge, 2015). One of these schools had an ongoing focus on the teaching of writing which resulted in a significant and sustained “turn around” in their writing results. They achieved this enviable outcome through a range of whole school strategies that other schools could possibly learn from, and are worthy of sharing to a wider education audience. The school is classified as a metropolitan government primary school, with an enrolment of 166 students (ACARA, 2012). There are seven full-time teaching staff, a non-teaching principal and one class per grade. It is a small country school, situated on the outskirts of a large regional centre. Contrary to the extant literature (Little, 2006; Louis, Marks and Kruse, 1996; Stoll et al., 2006), I did not find that school size is a clear determinant of whether professional learning is sustained, as this school, as well as a large high school case study, both sustained their learning over a number of years, whilst my other two case study schools did not. It seemed to have more to do with a school culture of collaboration and sharing that facilitated the changes that resulted in professional learning being sustained (Beveridge, 2016).
Specific strategies the school had firmly in place that supported a sustained improvement in writing, are loosely coupled to the framework of factors that sustain collaborative professional learning (Beveridge, 2016), and include:
Leadership strategies
The Principal was engaged in professional learning as an equal partner, and participated in team teaching sessions alongside teachers.
The school leadership team monitored teacher workloads to prevent teachers from taking on too much change at any one time.
Teachers were allocated 30 minutes additional release, to discuss and focus on the writing progress of three targeted students per week with the Principal.
The Principal and the class teacher jointly monitored student writing data.
The Principal was aware of and actively interested in students’ writing progress.
School-level strategies
Writing time was a priority in all classrooms, at a set time, every day.
There was whole school buy-in of a spelling program that staff co-designed, daily, at an assigned time. There was ongoing reflection on and adjustment of the spelling program based on formative assessment data and identified student learning needs.
Teacher professional learning was regarded as a high priority. Regular collaborative professional learning meetings where teachers discussed latest research, how to implement relevant writing strategies in their classrooms and what they looked like in practice, was facilitated by an external literacy coach. The literacy coach worked towards making herself redundant by building school capacity that would remain in the school when she moved on.
Teachers had between session tasks to complete in their classroom, concretely linking theory with their daily practice of teaching writing.
Collaborative reflection on what worked in the local context, based on evidence, was a feature of professional learning meetings.
Professional learning cohered with the school plan and focused on one target at a time, with leadership support.
Teacher-level strategies
A literacy coach worked in-class, shoulder to shoulder alongside teachers. She also had timetabled one-to-one regular release time with teachers to reflect, and provide feedback on their individual goals, teaching practice and student learning.
The class teacher targeted three students per week to discuss writing goals with the Principal and literacy coach, who supported them in-class in achieving their goals. In this way, over a term, each student received specific, intensive individualised writing instruction in addition to their regular class support.
Teachers organised and implemented their own peer evaluation and feedback sessions with whomever they felt most comfortable among their colleagues. Peer observation and feedback sessions were timetabled regularly.
The literacy coach observed teachers’ lessons, and provided targeted feedback to assist them in achieving their jointly planned professional learning goals. Class teachers put a lot of effort into showing the literacy coach that they were using her advice in practice. Professional trust was tangible.
A range of multimodal writing tools were used by teachers and students to create texts, share their texts with a wider audience and stay connected both inside and outside the classroom.
I have viewed a number of conference presentations and teach-meets at which teachers from the school presented their writing program, and shared their exemplary practice with wider educational audience. The staff and students shared a love of writing. The strategies that the staff learned were firmly embedded in their daily practice, have been expanded and built upon, and are now regarded as “the way we do things around here” (Deal and Kennedy, 1982; Fullan and Hargreaves, 1991; Schuck, et al, 2012). Additionally, other schools visit the school to view first-hand teaching practice that resulted in them not only “turning around” their writing results but also sustaining their improved results over time. In opening up their writing classrooms to others, teachers were sharing the good news about what works in the teaching of writing across the broader education landscape.
…we collect data for writing and it’s really specific data for each student. Every student in my class gets feedback at least once a week on a piece of writing and that’s all part of what we’re doing. It’s hard. You see the improvement in student outcomes and it’s so worth every bit. (Natalie, team leader)
There was a clear, coherent developmental path to improving writing. It had both an individual and collective focus. There was ongoing teacher support from colleagues, a literacy coach, who was a “knowledgeable outsider” (Beveridge, Mockler and Gore, 2017) and acted as a critical friend to the school, as well as supportive school leadership. Strategies such as timetabled teacher meetings and team teaching sessions with the literacy coach, as well as data tracking meetings with the Principal, ensured that teachers were supported and learning was targeted to address both teacher and student needs. Professional learning which focused on improving student writing was like a continuum, a complex interplay of affect, cognition, and metacognition, where teachers acted and collaboratively reflected on learning processes and ways to improve them in an ongoing cycle of improvement and reflexivity.
The “neglected R”: onwards and upwards
Reading and writing are complementary processes. Like reading, writing needs to be a priority across all grades and key learning areas, every day… both electronic and traditional writing, to get our message across and make ourselves understood. Too often in the literature it is termed “the neglected R” (Mo et al., 2014; Sessions, Kang and Womack, 2016; Graham, Hebert and Harris, 2015). A stronger systems focus on teaching writing is required to move and improve student writing results. Teachers are in a privileged position to be able to ignite students’ passions in writing, and “put the magic back” (Adoniou, 2018) into the teaching of writing. One means of fostering a love of writing is by engaging students in writing through drawing on quality texts. In this way, students know and experience what great writing looks like, and jointly (and individually) experience the emotions that quality writing evoke. Through dialogic instruction, teachers are able to explicitly teach those skills that students demonstrate that they need in their independent writing, at the same time ensuring that there is designated, frequent class time for students to write and share their own written messages. Students require regular, authentic opportunities to write and share their work with others because writing is a communicative tool, the goal of which is to convey meaning to the reader and engage readers in meaning making Do you think our identities as teachers of English and literacy more closely align with reading than writing? Have we unconsciously devalued writing? (Frawley and McLean-Davis, 2015)
[1] ALARM is a learning and responding matrix to support student learning.
[2] SEAL and TXXXC are student writing scaffolds.
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Dr Lorraine Beveridge has been a NSWTF member for all of her 35 years teaching in the NSW Department of Education. She has held a range of executive roles, both in schools and supporting schools, building teacher capacity across the state. She currently works in curriculum. Her passion is building a love of literacy in students and teachers, and Quality Teaching. Lorraine’s PhD research is in the area of collaborative teacher professional learning.
Nicole Mockler summarises her extensive analysis of how teachers are represented in the Australian media, and the links between the resulting deficit-based discussions and education politics and policy . . .
In October 2023, the ‘Be That Teacher’ campaign, the national advertising campaign designed to make teaching look more attractive as a career and to stem the teacher shortage, launched. At the time, Federal Minister for Education, Jason Clare, said:
This campaign is all about changing the way we as a country think about our teachers, and the way our teachers think our country thinks of them. (Clare, 2024)
At the time of the joint launch, the NSW Minister for Education, Prue Car, similarly noted that “restoring pride and respect to the teaching profession is key to our plan” (Clare, 2024).
As a researcher with a focus on how teachers and their work are represented in the public space, this interested me greatly. While there’s a lot that could be said about the ‘Be That Teacher’ campaign, the question that interests me the most about it is how far an advertising campaign can be expected to counter ideas about teaching and teachers’ work that are aired over and over again in media and policy spaces?
I started thinking about representations of teachers in the media almost 20 years ago, in the course of my doctoral studies. For the next 15 years or so I conducted quite a few small-scale studies, where I analysed a small and well-chosen collection of articles, usually around a set focus and/or timeframe, to identify themes and patterns. In some of this work, I explored media attention to things such as the MySchool website (Mockler, 2013), and the National Plan for School Improvement (Mockler, 2014); and also media representations of early career teachers (Mockler, 2019). Small studies like these allow you to engage deeply with individual texts and to really illustrate how and where particular assumptions and ideas are embedded and how they then get amplified into the public space. What they don’t do is allow you to identify and track patterns over time, or to make broader statements about the work of the print media in relation to education. And so, in 2018 when I found myself in the very privileged position of having a two-year research fellowship that allowed me to learn a new set of research methods, I set about conducting a 25-year analysis of representations of teachers in the print media, which was published in the book Constructing Teacher Identities (Mockler) in 2022. To conduct the analysis, I used a set of methods that fall under the umbrella of ‘corpus assisted discourse analysis’. First, I constructed what I call the ‘Australian Teacher Corpus’ or ATC, a collection of all media articles from the twelve national and capital city daily newspapers that include the words teacher and/or teachers three times or more. The book reported on the analysis of the 65,604 articles published from 1996 to 2020, but the ATC has since been extended to include articles published in 2021, 2022 and 2023, so it now includes over 71,000 articles. That’s an average of about 50 articles a week, every week, for 28 years. We talk about teachers a lot.
Back in 2021, I did a quick search for how many articles came up using the same parameters for accountants, public servants, nurses, lawyers and doctors, and found that far more column inches were devoted to teachers. About twice as many, for example, as were devoted to nurses in the years from 1996 to 2020. So clearly there’s a large appetite on the part of journalists, editors, and, presumably, readers of newspapers for stories about teachers and schools.
Given that there’s such a lot of coverage, there’s also a lot of findings out of this analysis, so I’m going to focus here on just three aspects of the analysis.
First, the ATC is replete with words and phrases that essentialise or homogenise teachers: teachers should…; all teachers…; every teacher…, and so on. These constructions appeal to the news value of ‘superlativeness’, one of a number of strategies whereby newspapers develop a sense of newsworthiness in stories (Bednarek & Caple 2017). The effect of this is to first, emphasise high intensity, and second, to make teachers’ work appear simple, as though there is a single right choice in any given circumstance.
‘Teachers should’ provides a good example of this:
This small cross-section of the approximately 2300 instances of teachers should points to many contradictory positions on what teachers should do (e.g. teachers should be given clear, concise road-maps of what to teach vs teachers should not adopt a cookie-cutter approach to learning). They contain advice for teachers about the need to affirm, respect and support children, to get to know their students, and to arrive in classes prepared [having] thought about how they are going to present material, suggesting that these things are not already part of teachers’ professional repertoires. Teachers should also points to level of disrespect displayed toward teachers in the print media, from the insulting claim that teachers should grow up to at least the age level of those who they are supposed to be teaching, to the no less insulting but arguably more tempered teachers should be paid according to how their students succeed. Statements such as these, just two examples amongst a great many in the ATC, amplify messages of contempt toward teachers while also rendering their work simple and denying its complexity. All of which undermines teacher professionalism, normalising these attitudes for their readers.
Second, I was able to track through this analysis, the rise of the discourse of teacher quality since the mid-2000s, with attention to teacher quality outstripping general discussions of quality (for example of teaching, or of education or schools) in the ATC.
My analysis highlighted that discussions of teacher quality are almost invariably linked to a deficit assessment of teachers: stories of high or outstanding teacher quality are rare, while stories about declining teacher quality, or the need to improve it, dominate. When they’re prevalent in the media, discourses of teacher quality have the effect of making teachers responsible for the structural and systemic issues that proliferate in education, rather than pointing to what needs to be done at a structural level. The emphasis on teacher quality effectively lays blame for systemic failures on individual teachers, in a way that more nuanced discussions of teaching practice, even when we’re talking about the possibility of improving it, do not. Good teaching is practised rather than embodied (Gore, et al., 2004) – it’s a set of practices we engage in rather than a state of being – and real improvements in quality require good professional learning and support for teachers from early career into and beyond mid-career.
Finally, the ebb and flow of the three quality discourses shown in the graph above, highlight the way that discussions of teachers and their work, and particularly deficit-based discussions, are intimately linked to education politics and policy. The height of the teacher quality discourse, in 2012/13, was closely linked to the Gillard Government’s National Plan for School Improvement (2012), which constituted the Government’s response to the original Gonski review and was the catalyst for the Australian Education Act (2013). Similarly, the 2007/8 peak reflected the early years of the Rudd-Gillard ‘Education Revolution’, while the 2019 peak coincided with the release of the 2018 PISA results and discussions by Education Ministers and other policymakers around curriculum and teacher quality reform.
So, while it’s admirable that our Federal and State education ministers hold aspirations around “changing the way we as a country think about our teachers” (Clare, 2023), a systematic analysis of 28 years of print media coverage suggests that an advertising campaign, on its own, is unlikely to get us there. Media coverage of education, and specifically of teachers and their work, is heavily tied to discussions of education policy, largely led by politicians themselves. With the common positioning of teachers within those policy and media discussions infused with notions of deficit, it’s unlikely that the way we as a country think about our teachers will change without these discussions themselves changing. And for that we’re going to need more than promises of greater respect.
Bednarek, M., & Caple, H. (2017). The discourse of news values: How news organizations create newsworthiness. Oxford University Press.
Gore, J., Griffiths, T., & Ladwig, J. G. (2004). Towards better teaching: Productive pedagogy as a framework for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(4), 375-387.
Mockler, N. (2013). Reporting the ‘education revolution’: MySchool.edu.au in the print media. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 34(1), 1-16.
Mockler, N. (2014). Simple solutions to complex problems: moral panic and the fluid shift from ‘equity’ to ‘quality’ in education. Review of Education, 2(2), 115-143.
Mockler, N. (2019). Shifting the Frame: Representations of Early Career Teachers in the Australian Print Media. In A. M. Sullivan, B. Johnson, & M. Simons (Eds.), Attracting and keeping the best teachers: Issues and Opportunities (pp. 63-82). Springer. Mockler, N. (2022). Constructing Teacher Identities: How the Print Media Define and Represent Teachers and their Work. Bloomsbury Academic.
Dr Nicole Mockler is Professor of Education within the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney and Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. She was awarded her PhD in Education at the University of Sydney in 2008, and also holds a Master of Arts in History/Gender Studies and a Master of Science in Applied Statistics. Nicole’s research interests are in the areas of teachers’ work and professional learning; education policy and politics; and curriculum and pedagogy. In 2022 Nicole was awarded the Australian Council for Educational Leadership NSW Dr Paul Brock Memorial Medal.
Steven Kolber, et al highlight the role of global think tanks, lobby groups, ideological entrepreneurs, and social media in the formation of Australian education policy; and provide us with some simple steps to stem the flow of ‘fast policy’. . .
Have you ever been reading or watching the news about education and thought to yourself: “How on earth did the politicians come up with that idea? Have they ever spoken to a real teacher?” Our study (Heggart et al., 2023) examined this process, and found that a small number of actors are working to insert the ideas of overseas think tanks and lobby groups into Australia’s media ecosystem with a view to influencing educational policy making and practice. In the study discussed below, we found that these ideas were being used to directly shape the latest revision of the Australian Curriculum. This raises serious questions about the role played by various think tanks and lobby groups in the formation of Australian education policy – and what teachers and their organisations might do about that.
Fast policy and policy borrowing
This is a feature of globalisation that has been written about in a general sense before (see, for example, Peck, 2015), but it hasn’t been applied to the development of educational policy. In short, globalisation has meant that ideas can easily travel across borders and are ripe for adoption in new jurisdictions/countries even when they don’t really make much sense in these new contexts. Education, central as it is to the concerns of parents, politicians and the wider public, represents a site that is especially vulnerable to this kind of influence, and popular and populist ideas can have a direct, and almost immediate, impact.
Fast policy and policy borrowing are two concepts that can be used to understand the ways that policies can be very quickly adopted from nation to nation. One of the challenges facing education, as a whole, is the lack of, or limited, evaluation of various policies. A thorough evaluation of different policies would indicate how successful each was, and question their relevance to the various parts of the Australian education system. Such evaluations are rarely implemented, however, due to a variety of reasons, including time constraints, disregard for the expertise of teachers, and a lack of political will to address the hard questions. This means that there are limited impediments to policies traveling from one jurisdiction to the next very quickly. In these cases, there is less attention paid to the educational value of the policy; rather, the important factor is that it is an ‘announceable’ for a politician. Fast policy is the way in which societies have adapted to globalisation in such a way as to allow for the simplification of policy development – so that policies themselves can be traded across borders.
Policy borrowing is a closely linked phenomenon. It is the idea that, like fast food, policies can be used in a ‘grab and go’ way without making many changes for context or local climate. While it is probably true to say that there might be good policies that can be adopted from other locations as examples of best practice, ideally after a period of consultation and contextualisation, the essence of fast policy is that this does not occur. Rather, policies are selected and deployed ‘off-the shelf’ – to the detriment of all involved.
A well-known example of this are the various ‘Teach for….’ policy approaches that aim to address teacher quality, and the teacher shortage, by fast-tracking teacher training. This approach began in the United States as ‘Teach for America’ and although it has had limited benefit for teachers or students, it has been adopted both in the United Kingdom (UK) as ‘Teach First’ and then later ‘Teach for Australia’ within most Australian jurisdictions. To reiterate the power of fast policy as a tool: there is very limited evidence that any of these variants of the ‘Teach First’ policies have had any material effect on both teacher shortages or student learning outcomes. Despite this, the policies have been adopted and continue to be funded.
Ideological entrepreneurs
The way education policy is formulated and implemented within the context of policy borrowing and fast policy is not simple; rather, decisions about policies are contested by various interests. One of the key features of fast policy is that it has enabled specific groups to have a global reach and influence – something that these organisations have been quick to capitalise on, through the formation of far-ranging matrices such as The Atlas Network. This means that at any specific time, there are think tanks and lobby groups, as well as individuals, that are seeking to influence the formation of policy on both a local and a global scale. Those who make a career out of attempting to influence policy are termed ‘Ideological entrepreneurs’ within our study (Atwell et al., 2024). They are shaping and reshaping ideas, in this case conservative narratives with a focus on virality and reach, rather than any true pursuit of good policy. The educational sphere is fertile soil for the ideological entrepreneur, considering its inherently ideological nature. One way that ideological entrepreneurs seek to do this is by shifting the political frame.
Political framing
Political framing is the way that politicians frame and reframe ideas until they become acceptable to voters. The Overton window is a rhetorical device used to understand this. Imagine the round window from play school, what’s inside the circle is acceptable opinions to hold. Everything outside is less acceptable and more extreme, the types of opinions that might get one ‘cancelled’ online. The job of the policy influencer online (much as it was in legacy media) is to move more extreme ideas into the frame of the window. One way this can be done is by advancing extreme points of view on particular topics (such as Critical Race Theory in the curriculum, as we discuss below), knowing that this will be rejected, but recognising that it will allow for debate about the wider topic and, hence, shifting the window in the sought direction. Our research examined the way this played out in the recent revisions of the Australian Curriculum and especially in History. In order to understand the way that these ideological entrepreneurs work globally and locally, and the influence that this has upon politicians and policy, we need to examine the game board: social media.
The game board of Social Media and Old Media
For many teachers, the use of social media is something that we could not live without as it is a source of resources, advice and connection. Social media has, due to its virality and scaleabiltiy, – as well as the algorithms that govern what is seen on social media – changed the way politicians and members of the public engage with topics of debate. Indeed, the slow decline of ‘old media’ and traditional newspapers style coverage also has an important role to play here. As more experienced journalists within education are less likely to remain in their jobs due to extensive layoffs (Waller, 2012), the ensuing shortage of experienced journalists means that think-tanks and other groups that appear influential by their presence in news and social media, can have a much greater impact upon public opinion. Politicians are quick to tap into the debates about popular topics being framed or discussed in a certain way and can thus lend legitimacy to points of views that are at odds with public opinion – regardless of how they are presented via social media. The case study below describes this process.
Our case study: From Rufo to Latham
Ideological entrepreneur Christopher Rufo, from the Manhattan Institute, is where the story of Critical Race Theory (CRT) moves from an idea most closely explored within the United States to Australia and begins to have an impact upon the Australian Curriculum. Through analysing Rufo’s online engagement, it is possible to track his attempts to capture and define the educational policy landscape. The graph below tracks the posts he made and articles he wrote about CRT over the course of early 2021.His writing, speaking and posting around CRT wasn’t especially viral until he stumbled upon the idea of linking schools and children with CRT, at which point this idea took off: he had ‘gone viral’.
Source: Heggart et al., 2023, Page 3
This virality was quickly seized upon by Australian politicians. In the same year, One Nations’ Mark Latham pronounced that there would be no inclusion of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in the Australian curriculum. This was a strange announcement: there already was no mention of Critical Race Theory within the curriculum and, for the most part, the consultation phase of the latest version of the curriculum had concluded and all that was required was some proofreading and revision of the curriculum document. Yet, this set in action another revision by the Education Minister at the time, who suddenly started talking to various news outlets about patriotism and the need for young Australians to fight for their country – a marked departure from previous commentaries on the newest version of the Australian Curriculum. As a result, the almost-completed version was sent back for redrafting to reflect this new, hardline focus.
In this short example, we highlight the way that the ideas described above – policy borrowing, political framing and ideological entrepreneurship – are enacted across social media and have a material effect upon the Australian Curriculum. We note that the space itself is conflicted: there were battles between Mark Latham and various Liberal education ministers to seize the initiative about this topic, but the effect of these battles meant that the political frame of History and Civics and Citizenship Education shifted towards a focus on patriotism and duty. We can clearly see all of the elements of fast policy and ideological entrepreneurship in play here. Despite the obvious absurdity of an idea that didn’t really hold sway within Australia, it should be concerning to teachers that the Australian Curriculum became an object of political interference so swiftly.
So what?
Considering how quickly educational ideas can be adopted from other contexts and cemented into policy, it is important for teachers, unionists, and activists to be aware of these processes. When considering the funding and support that back some of these idea factories, such as think tanks and ideological entrepreneurs, it can make us feel powerless by comparison. But there are clear pathways to becoming more aware of these processes through training, and by using such training to inform your actions both online and offline. Choosing the way to respond is important because ideas are supported and thrive upon virality. Consider the last time you saw a dramatic headline about teaching that you then read and shared with your online network or discussed with your colleagues. Giving these ideas traction in this way may, in fact, be feeding the very thing you are trying to stop. This could mean that you need to check the sources quoted, think about whose ideas are being platformed and whether you’re helping or harming the situation by sharing them.
And if we were to learn these skills and apply them in our work, then we would also need to begin passing these same skills down to our students. It could even mean more teachers engaging around professional matters on social media, or unions taking a hold of this ‘game board’ as well and fighting the ideological war wherever it might be won. Alternatively, as schools can be relatively isolated from these kinds of debates, influential teachers in their contexts might engage their colleagues in ‘counter-practices’ early on that challenge these ideas before they have the chance to gain a foothold. As always there is a need for teachers to get their voices out into the world, but having the skills to recognise when, and how, this might best be leveraged is an important ability to develop.
Attwell, K., Hannah, A., Drislane, S., Harper, T., Savage, G. C., & Tchilingirian, J. (2024). Media actors as policy entrepreneurs: a case study of “No Jab, No Play” and “No Jab, No Pay” mandatory vaccination policies in Australia. Policy Sciences, 1-23.
Heggart, K., Barnes, N., Kolber, S., Mahoney, T., & Malcher, C. (2023). The Australian Curriculum gambit: playing knowledge games with education policy. Curriculum Perspectives, 1-11.
Peck, J. (2015). Fast policy : experimental statecraft at the thresholds of neoliberalism / Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore. University of Minnesota Press.
Waller, L. J. (2012). Learning in both worlds: Academic journalism as a research outcome. Research Journalism, 2(1), 1
Steven Kolber is a Curriculum Writer at the Faculty of Education, within the University of Melbourne. He was a proud public school teacher for 12 years, being named a top 50 finalist in the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize. His most recent publication, ‘Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schooling: Perspectives from Australia’, co-edited with Keith Heggart explores these topics further. Steven has represented teachers globally for Education International, at the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the OECDs Global Teaching Insights, and UNESCOs Teacher Task Force 2030.
Tom Mahoney is a teacher and educator of secondary VCE Mathematics and Psychology students, currently completing a PhD in Educational Philosophy part time through Deakin University. His research currently revolves around the influence of dominant educational ideologies on teacher subjectivity. In particular, he is interested in the ways in which ideologies of neoliberalism and social efficiency contribute to limiting teacher agency and the teacher’s ability to engage educationally in schools.
Dr Keith Heggart is an early career researcher with a focus on learning and instructional design, educational technology and civics and citizenship education. He is currently exploring the way that online learning platforms can assist in the formation of active citizenship amongst Australian youth. Keith is a former high school teacher, having worked as a school leader in Australia and overseas, in government and non-government sectors. In addition, he has worked as an Organiser for the Independent Education Union of Australia, and as an independent Learning Designer for a range of organisations.
Dr Naomi Barnes is a Senior Lecturer interested in how crisis influences education politics. With a specific focus on moral panics, she has demonstrated how online communication has influenced education politics in Australia, the US and the UK. She has analysed and developed network models to show the effect of moral panics on the Australian curriculum and how it is taught. Naomi is also regularly asked to comment on how Australian teachers should respond to perceived threats to Australian nationalism, identity, and democracy. Naomi lectures future teachers in Modern History, Civics and Citizenship and Writing Studies. She has worked for Education Queensland as a Senior Writer and has worked as a Secondary Humanities and Social Science teacher in the government, Catholic and Independent schooling sectors.
Cameron Malcher teaches English, Drama and EAL/D in NSW public high schools. He has a Master’s in Educational Psychology from the University of Sydney and is currently undertaking a Master’s in TESOL at the University of Wollongong. Cameron has produced the Teachers’ Education Review Podcast since 2013, and his brief attempt at a PhD was on teachers’ engagement with podcasts and social media as professional learning activities, which he hopes to return to in the near future.
Cathie Burgess and Katrina Thorpe share the processes and results of a five-year teaching and research project to support all teachers to develop an Aboriginal curriculum narrative using a framework based on building relationships and listening to Aboriginal people and Country. . .
As Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal authors, we are two members of a team of four researchers who undertook a five-year teaching and research project we called Learning from Country in the City (LFC) (Burgess, et al., 2022a). This project emerged from an ongoing commitment to Aboriginal[1] education and Aboriginal Studies along with our personal and professional engagement in local Aboriginal community contexts. The project was undertaken with preservice teachers, early-career teachers, and Aboriginal community-based educators[2] from 2018-2022 at the University of Sydney, situated on Gadigal Land of the Eora Nation (now referred to as Sydney). We recognise the many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators before us who have worked tirelessly to ensure that Aboriginal voices are foregrounded, and knowledges are embedded in Australia education systems (Holt, 2021). We continue to support these goals by working with preservice teachers to develop their capability to meaningful engage with local Aboriginal communities and move beyond surface-level and tokenistic approaches to the inclusion of Aboriginal curriculum content and pedagogies in their classrooms.
In our teaching, Learning from Country involves immersive learning experiences outside the classroom on Country. Here, preservice teachers walk with Aboriginal community-based educators while listening to, learning from, and observing the layered stories of local Country.
In this article we share our insights to the significance of connecting preservice teachers, teachers, and students to Country-centred learning. A Learning from Country Framework is used to represent the key processes of engagement and learning, which shifts the focus of Aboriginal curriculum planning and implementation from thinking about what “Aboriginal content” we might “add” to the curriculum (although this can be one outcome of LFC) to foregrounding the ethical practices and processes that you can undertake to open up opportunities for building connections to local Country and Aboriginal people.
Firstly though, we must acknowledge that learning from/on/with Country is not new and, indeed, has been practised in Australia for thousands of years. The expanding literature that centres Country and Aboriginal knowledges in curriculum is a testament to the continuity, resilience and significance of these pedagogical practices for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and teachers in Australia now and in the future (e.g., Burgess et al., 2022a, 2022b; Country et al, 2020; Dolan et al, 2020; Harrison, 2013; Lowe et al. 2021; McKnight, 2016; Spillman et al., 2023; Thorpe, et al., 2021).
What does the research in Aboriginal education tell us?
In 2019, 13 academics, from across ten universities, conducted ten systematic reviews analysing over 13,000 research studies reported on from 2006 to 2017 (Guenther et al., 2019). These reviews covered key Indigenous Education topics in the areas of curriculum, pedagogy, leadership, professional learning, racism, literacy, numeracy, language and culture, community engagement, and remote education. Key findings across the reviews found that successful schools did the following:
engage honestly and respectfully with parents and community.
demonstrate deep understanding of the local socio-cultural and political context resulting from colonisation.
focus on holistic, wrap – around and culturally responsive strategies to support student, family, and community needs.
articulate high expectations of students, teachers, and leaders.
ensure curriculum, pedagogy and assessment reflects students’ cultural backgrounds and interests, and is clearly scaffolded and supported.
implement culture and language programs to deepen students’ sense of belonging to build confident, engaged learners.
Acknowledging yet overcoming the challenges of doing this work
Many educators are challenged by working in this area for many reasons (Captain & Burgess, 2022). Significantly, teachers themselves have often had little or no education on Aboriginal Australia and feel vulnerable and unprepared. Not wishing to offend Aboriginal students and their families (Rose, 2015), and overwhelmed by a constantly growing and changing curriculum, teachers often avoid this area unless it is mandatory. Compounding this inertia, the Aboriginal content in the Australian Curriculum is limited and while the NSW curriculum improves on this, there is still no coherent, scoped and sequenced Aboriginal curriculum narrative across the Key Learning Areas and Stages, as there is in ‘mainstream’ subjects. We suggest an Aboriginal curriculum narrative is “a combination and construction of the stories that teachers know (and have probably experienced) about a particular subject or content area that provides knowledge, understandings, and therefore guidance about how and what to teach” (Burgess et al., 2022b, p. 158). This can result in teachers wondering how to start to build this narrative rather than add piecemeal and decontextualised Aboriginal content into the curriculum.
Unfortunately, the impact of racism still permeates education, and some teachers are influenced by the overgeneralisations, stereotypes and deficit discourses that position Aboriginal students and their families as the problem and, through a perceived inability to assimilate, as responsible for their lack of success (Bodkin-Andrews & Carlson, 2014). Fortunately, many teachers are beginning to listen to Aboriginal voices, embrace truth telling and implement inclusive classrooms where controversial and uncomfortable knowledges can be discussed respectfully.
Educational policies supporting Learning from Country
Importantly, Aboriginal curriculum is necessary for ALL students; it has not been constructed with only Aboriginal students in mind. In NSW, the Department of Education Aboriginal Education Policy has been mandatory since 1987. Rather than summarising the current policy, we look back to the 1996 version for its clear and simple articulation of three key tenets that underpin all versions of the policy:
“Aboriginal students: Curriculum, teaching and assessment programs will be challenging and culturally appropriate. Schools will have a supportive learning environment.
Aboriginal communities: Aboriginal communities and the Department of School Education will become partners in the whole educational process.
All staff – all students – all schools: All Department of School Education staff and students will have knowledge and understanding of, and respect for, Aboriginal Australia”.
This and subsequent Aboriginal education policies are also reflected in two of the Australian Institute for Teachers and School Leadership (AITSL), Australian Professional Standards for Teachers:
1.4.2 Design and implement effective teaching strategies that are responsive to the local community and cultural setting, linguistic background, and histories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
2.4.2 Provide opportunities for students to develop understanding of, and respect for, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories, cultures and languages.
While past and present Aboriginal education policies provide teachers with the policy parameters to work within, teachers are yet to “heed the call” to enact the Aboriginal education imperatives (White et al., 2022) that have been articulated over many decades.
The Australian Curriculum’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cross Curriculum Priority (ACARA, 2011) is designed for application across KLAs and Stages. It consists of three interconnected aspects: Country/Place, Culture, and People, with three organising ideas in each. While these provide a reasonable base to work from, there are clear omissions that not all teachers will recognise or address. These include the lack of breadth and depth of Aboriginal content where concepts such as self-determination, Aboriginal resistance, treaty, truth telling, and racism are absent (Lowe & Yunkaporta, 2013). Moreover, while there has been a plethora of resources developed over the last decade or so, they have‘unfortunately been left to sit on the “virtual shelf” to date, with minimal uptake by the teaching profession’(White et al., 2022, p. 13)
The Learning from Country Framework
We have created an LFC framework that can be used by teachers to localise curriculum, build relationships with community, engage learners, and create culturally responsive and sustaining classrooms. In describing the processes in Figure 1, we acknowledge the nonlinear, reflexive nature of Aboriginal Country-centred learning that links the past, present, and future.
The graphic was designed by Dharawal artist Michael Fardon. It can be described as follows:
The dark blue acknowledges that Country is strong—it is “full” of knowledge. The light blue circles represent the “activity” emanating and rippling throughout the Learning from Country processes which include deep listening to Aboriginal community voices and truth telling … As each waterhole ripples with new knowledge and impacts on existing knowledge, it flows into the next waterhole. The connecting waterways between the waterholes represent the ebb and flow of knowledges and understandings that ripple through each waterhole. (Burgess et al., 2022a, p. 164)
Country-centred relationships requires listening to local Aboriginal people about the cultural and socio-political history and current issues in the local area. Once you have begun this journey, you will be able to see, and enact, ways of bringing Country into the classroom, as well as explore Country beyond the classroom door. This makes learning more ‘hands on’ and engaging for students and contributes to a local Aboriginal narrative for use in your curriculum.
Relating deepens these connections through truth telling which includes listening to Aboriginal lived experiences of colonisation in this country. While this can be uncomfortable or even distressing, it is important to emotionally engage with these narratives to build empathy and understanding and to create a sense of belonging for everyone involved in this process. The Aboriginal community-based educators often talk about the healing power of these experiences and their sense of empowerment in educating future generations. To ensure you are being respectful, speak to Aboriginal staff and get to know your students and families to seek advice. All education systems have some level of regional and/or statewide support for teachers, and the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group (AECG) has local branch meetings you can attend.
Critical engagement occurs when you reflect on the emotional and intellectual learning you have encountered through LFC experiences and prompts you to reflect on how this impacts your personal and professional identity. By positioning yourself as a learner rather than a teacher, new ways of knowing, being and doing through an Aboriginal lens, helps you reimagine what an Aboriginal curriculum narrative might look like.
The ‘doing’ occurs as you develop culturally nourishing and sustaining teaching and learning practices that engage all students and brings the school-community closer together. This occurs throughout the LFC processes as you continue to think about how you will enact LFC in your classroom and maintain the relationships necessary to do this work.
Conclusion
We acknowledge that this is challenging work as it asks you to rethink how you experienced education, but once the processes are underway, you will be rewarded by increased confidence in your curriculum and pedagogy, more engaged learners and calmer classrooms. Building relationships and listening to Aboriginal people and Country, is the place to start to develop an Aboriginal curriculum narrative. At the same time, you should explore resources and build your own knowledge of Aboriginal histories and cultures and reflect on these in relation to your local community. Truth telling, listening to Aboriginal community narratives, and Learning from Country reveals paths of resistance, resilience, and activism to mobilise genuine educational change for future generations.
[1] We use the term ‘Aboriginal’ as this is the preferred term in our local communities and the preferred term of the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group Inc. We acknowledge there are many Torres Strait Islander students, teachers and parents and we respectfully include Torres Strait Islander peoples within this.
[2] Aboriginal community-based educators agreed on this term to describe themselves which includes Elders, community workers, knowledge holders, political activists, cultural educators, Department of Education workers.
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Dr Cathie Burgess is an Associate Professor in Aboriginal Studies/Education, Aboriginal Community Engagement, Learning from Country and Leadership in Aboriginal Education programs at the Sydney School of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney. She has extensive teaching and leadership experience in secondary schools and maintains strong connections with school-communities through teacher professional learning and research projects. Along with co-author Kylie Captain, Cathie published ‘Be that Teacher who makes a Difference and Lead Aboriginal Education for all Students’ Amazon Best Selling bookbased on over 40 years’ of educational experience in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Cathie’s work in Aboriginal Education/Aboriginal Studies is acknowledged through an Honorary Life Member, NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group and Life Member, Aboriginal Studies Association NSW.
Dr Katrina Thorpe is an Associate Professor at Nura Gili: Centre for Indigenous Programs, UNSW, Sydney. Katrina’s research focuses on educational approaches that engage students in Country-centred ‘Learning from Country’ pedagogies. Katrina is passionate about developing culturally responsive pedagogies that facilitate connections between students and Aboriginal people, communities and Country. Katrina has over 25 years’ experience teaching mandatory Indigenous Studies across a number of disciplines including education, social work, nursing, health and community development.
