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Teacher certification system requires extensive development Last year, the federal government announced a modified version of the Reward Payments for Great Teachers initiative. While the revised version is now firmly grounded in teaching standards, major challenges remain before we will have an effective certification scheme for promoting professional learning and linking pay to performance. One challenge is to develop valid and efficient methods for gathering evidence that together cover all three standards domains: professional knowledge; teaching practice; and professional engagement. New methods will be needed, for example, for assessing the standards for teacher knowledge, particularly knowledge about teaching different kinds of content. The National Professional Standards for Teaching developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) properly emphasise the importance of such knowledge, but as yet we have no validated methods for assessing it. Developing a set of assessments that covers all the standards is only the first step. Carefully structured guidelines will also need to be developed to assist teachers in preparing evidence of their teaching and students’ learning over time for assessment purposes in comparable ways. Procedures for training assessors of this evidence to high levels of reliability and for weighting the various forms of evidence will then need to be developed before work on the final stage of setting the standard for certification can be attempted. The federal government’s plan is to implement the scheme in 2013 at both the Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher levels. This will leave only 2012 for development, which is unlikely to be enough time to develop and trial assessment methods for their validity and feasibility, or to check reliability and fairness in the systems for scoring the evidence. Instead, the federal government should re-frame the initial 2012-2015 period of funding as a period for research, development and trialling of assessment methods, for building understanding and engagement from the teaching profession, and for training assessors and setting standards for the Highly Accomplished level only. The Lead Teacher level will require different types of assessment tasks based more on evidence of leadership than classroom practice—such methods are not even on the horizon yet in Australia—and should therefore be left till later when benefit can be gained from lessons learned. In 2012, several assessment development teams will be needed: one for each of the several kinds of assessment methods under consideration. Hundreds of teachers will be needed in conducting preliminary pilots of the assessment methods, revising guidelines, involved in scoring, and ensuring worthwhile reporting to ensure all teachers grow and benefit from involvement (regardless of outcome). At the field testing stage, the participation of several thousand teacher volunteers will be necessary so that the psychometric properties of the assessments can be evaluated. It should be expected that the field tests in 2013 will indicate the need for further work, both on the standards and the assessment methods, which will in turn will lead to the need for refinements to be evaluated in 2014, before the certification system goes ‘live’ in 2015. By that time, it is to be hoped that employing authorities and the public will have been convinced that the process is rigorous and ready to go to scale - and that teachers who gain certification are worth rewarding with a longer-term salary increase and recognition of their expertise, not a one-off bonus. The establishment of a credible professional certification system will provide a valuable service to employing authorities committed to promoting teacher quality. Development of such a system could be the biggest step forward in the professionalisation of teachers in decades. It could restore teachers’ esteem in the community because of the emphasis on quality, and it could led to attracting better people into teaching as quality will clearly be seen to matter. This opinion article by ACER Principal Research Fellow Dr Lawrence Ingvarson is adapted from a longer version published in the Australian College of Educators’ Professional Educator magazine in February 2012. Read the full article at http://austcolled.com.au/article/national-certification-let%E2%80%99s-make-sure-we-get-it-right « Back to eNews
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Last year, the federal government announced a modified version of the Reward Payments for Great Teachers initiative. While the revised version is now firmly grounded in teaching standards, major challenges remain before we will have an effective certification scheme for promoting professional learning and linking pay to performance.

One challenge is to develop valid and efficient methods for gathering evidence that together cover all three standards domains: professional knowledge; teaching practice; and professional engagement.

New methods will be needed, for example, for assessing the standards for teacher knowledge, particularly knowledge about teaching different kinds of content. The National Professional Standards for Teaching developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) properly emphasise the importance of such knowledge, but as yet we have no validated methods for assessing it.

Developing a set of assessments that covers all the standards is only the first step. Carefully structured guidelines will also need to be developed to assist teachers in preparing evidence of their teaching and students’ learning over time for assessment purposes in comparable ways. Procedures for training assessors of this evidence to high levels of reliability and for weighting the various forms of evidence will then need to be developed before work on the final stage of setting the standard for certification can be attempted.

The federal government’s plan is to implement the scheme in 2013 at both the Highly Accomplished and Lead Teacher levels. This will leave only 2012 for development, which is unlikely to be enough time to develop and trial assessment methods for their validity and feasibility, or to check reliability and fairness in the systems for scoring the evidence.

Instead, the federal government should re-frame the initial 2012-2015 period of funding as a period for research, development and trialling of assessment methods, for building understanding and engagement from the teaching profession, and for training assessors and setting standards for the Highly Accomplished level only. The Lead Teacher level will require different types of assessment tasks based more on evidence of leadership than classroom practice—such methods are not even on the horizon yet in Australia—and should therefore be left till later when benefit can be gained from lessons learned.

In 2012, several assessment development teams will be needed: one for each of the several kinds of assessment methods under consideration. Hundreds of teachers will be needed in conducting preliminary pilots of the assessment methods, revising guidelines, involved in scoring, and ensuring worthwhile reporting to ensure all teachers grow and benefit from involvement (regardless of outcome).

At the field testing stage, the participation of several thousand teacher volunteers will be necessary so that the psychometric properties of the assessments can be evaluated. It should be expected that the field tests in 2013 will indicate the need for further work, both on the standards and the assessment methods, which will in turn will lead to the need for refinements to be evaluated in 2014, before the certification system goes ‘live’ in 2015.

By that time, it is to be hoped that employing authorities and the public will have been convinced that the process is rigorous and ready to go to scale - and that teachers who gain certification are worth rewarding with a longer-term salary increase and recognition of their expertise, not a one-off bonus.

The establishment of a credible professional certification system will provide a valuable service to employing authorities committed to promoting teacher quality. Development of such a system could be the biggest step forward in the professionalisation of teachers in decades. It could restore teachers’ esteem in the community because of the emphasis on quality, and it could led to attracting better people into teaching as quality will clearly be seen to matter.

This opinion article by ACER Principal Research Fellow Dr Lawrence Ingvarson is adapted from a longer version published in the Australian College of Educators’ Professional Educator magazine in February 2012.

Read the full article at http://austcolled.com.au/article/national-certification-let%E2%80%99s-make-sure-we-get-it-right

Teacher certification system requires extensive development