High quality teaching is all about relationships.

I was recently asked by a group of CRTs (and pre-service teachers looking to enter the CRT workforce) about why the Intro to Relief online course I worked on is so heavily focused on understanding how professional relationships factor into relief work.  Today I though I might address that question.

Having been involved in supporting relief teachers to excel for over 7 years now, I have made many observances over the years.  Today's observance starts with "The Professional Identity of Relief Teachers" by Dawn Colcott.

Many CRTs find it difficult to recognise their practice in the standards. They assume that their practice is different from that of teachers in full time school employment and don’t see how they can meet the standards. This causes anxiety about their registration and the renewal process, which requires them to maintain the standards of professional practice. CRTs also feel that the nature of their work restricts them from having opportunities to demonstrate all standards. For instance, they don’t believe that they plan or assess for effective learning. Often CRTs fail to recognise that they are continuously making assessments of prior learning and engagement with learning tasks as they teach and that the revision of their practice in response to these assessments involves planning on the run. Their view of planning and assessment relates to the formal documentation of curriculum and reporting of results.

This is where it starts but planning and assessment is only one example of how CRTs often aren't supported to understand the most effective way to undertake their role in the profession.

When talking "teacher induction" a couple of posts ago, one of the cornerstones that builds successful induction strategies is the formation of professional identity.  The idea is to support teachers to generate positive beliefs that promote them taking part in high quality practices as Teachers.  Teachers entering the profession as CRTs have a markedly different experience than those entering via classroom roles and this makes a distinct difference to how their professional identity is formed.

As in the passage above relief teachers are utilised by schools in a specific role that actively prevents many observing our role in education with a clear perspective on how it relates to "high quality practice". How being a "quality teacher" is about more than "quality teaching"; how more than our performance in the classroom counts even though this is the majority of what we do.  Of course as relief teachers the way in which we work does not always provide the opportunities to observe or engage in quality collegial and public interactions.  We come into schools and do our jobs in a relatively isolated way and then we drift out again. 

Over time many relief teachers begin to ally themselves with a small number of schools and are given a much higher level of opportunity to both observe and partake in high quality interactions such as those.  Many early career CRTs, however, do not have exposure to a solid example of how these interactions fit into "high quality teaching practice".

So today I am going to give you an activity to do!  Its an interesting exercise though, I promise ;).

What I would like you to do is start at the top and then go down the National Professional Standards for Teachers and have a look at the differences between "proficient" and "highly accomplished" columns.  As you do so, remember that "highly accomplished" is still for classroom teachers and leadership has it's own set of standards again.

http://www.aitsl.edu.au/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers/standards/list

Proficient is all about the classroom in one way or another, even when it's about collegial interaction. It's all about "doing".  Highly accomplished is all about something else...  Did you 'get it'?

I'll be back in a few days to round this one up in the Relief Teaching context.

Regards,

Mel.