QJER: QR 6, 1990: Connors - quality of education and the improvement of the teaching-learning processes

[ Contents Vol 6, 1990 ] [ QJER Home ]

The quality of education and the improvement of the teaching-learning processes: Impact of research on educational policy and practice

Lyndsay Connors

Lyndsay Connors is Chairperson, Schools Council, National Board of Employment Education and Training.

I want to begin by thanking the Queensland Institute for inviting me to give the J.A. Robinson Memorial Lecture this year. I have taken the invitation as a mark of your interest in and commitment to the work of the Schools Council as a national-level policy advisory body to the Commonwealth Government.

On that basis, it seems appropriate to take the opportunity to speak tonight about aspects of the work that the Council is undertaking currently; then, from the perspective of one member of a national policy advisory body, to raise some questions about education research in Australia - where we are and where we are going? I should say now that these questions are based at this stage on what are really no more than personal observations, reflections of my own experience on both the Commonwealth Schools Commission and, now, the Schools Council.

In this way, I will at least have given this important group a briefing on what the Schools Council and the National Board have been doing; and a preview of the significant report we are currently preparing on one of the major educational issues of the decade: teachers and teaching and the quality of both.

The fact that the quality of teachers and teaching generally has become a major issue on the national political agenda at this time is in itself an illustration of the perversity of the policy context.

The fact is that the quality of teachers and teaching in Australian school systems is high by world standards, and higher than ever by Australian standards. Australian teachers are better qualified and longer trained than at any time in our history. In these circumstances, what factors have caused teacher quality to become such a big public issue? The range of social, political, economic and educational factors that has led to this circumstance is worth exploring briefly.

Social Factors

The educational expectations of the Australian community expanded rapidly when the so-called 'post-war baby-boomers' became parents. Having benefited from the opening up of secondary and higher education opportunities in the post-war years, we generally placed a high value on our children's education, as a means of securing their futures as well as a source of personal growth and fulfilment. To this has now been added widespread acceptance that for reasons for economic competitiveness, social competence in maintaining and developing a workable democracy, and the protection of individual human rights, Australians need to grow 'smarter'.

Those with conservative ideologies and a highly selective view of history have preferred to attribute the current gap between educational aspirations and actual achievements less to rising expectations than to declining standards.

It has been fashionable, for over a decade now, to advance simplistic and largely unsubstantiated claims that primary and secondary schools, and in particular public schools, have undergone a terrible decline in quality from their former heights.

Teachers and teaching are centrally implicated in these allegations of decline.

The current situation of teaching is damaged further by the myth that the status, as distinct from the condition, of teaching has declined. On the contrary, if we can believe the evidence, including from literature, there was never a time when teachers were regarded as other than a lowly profession, albeit one in which individuals often enjoyed the esteem and respect of their own students.

Political Factors

Significant challenges have emerged to traditional assumptions about hierarchies of knowledge, about who controls certain forms of knowledge and who gains access to them. This has led to challenges of the authority of all so-called professions.

Teachers are also affected by the fact that ours is a society where having, rearing and educating children is unprofitable in the short term for almost all concerned. With the attempt to target and contain public spending, support for these activities tends to become more tightly targeted (in the form of handouts for stigmatised individuals and groups) rather than to be provided in the form of benefits that affirm the collective value of these activities. When great emphasis is being placed on things that are profitable in the short term, those groups whose work is to serve the relatively powerless and to provide them with costly services - the sick, the young - may themselves become vulnerable to attack.

Economic Factors

Narrow and simplistic definitions of what constitutes 'productive' work have contributed to an unwillingness to invest in the public sector activities necessary to sustain a productive workforce. Few families with school age children can afford to meet privately, given the kinds of schooling generally considered appropriate to contemporary and predicted demands, the full, ongoing costs of their children's tuition. The costs of training and paying teachers, of providing adequate teachers for our schools in terms of both quantity and quality, are met from public funds and there is no likelihood that this situation will change.

Deteriorating economic conditions have created a context in which the public is unwilling to invest its funds in teacher salaries, which consume a considerable share of the public payroll, without higher returns in the form of more effective teaching and improved levels of student achievement.

Educational Factors

The so-called knowledge explosion has exacerbated the problems of selection and generated uncertainties and conflicts that have damaged public confidence in schooling and for which teachers have been quite unjustly blamed. It is as if we have been saying to teachers for at least the last decade "We are not able to agree on what schools should be teaching, but now that we have seen what you are actually doing we do know that isn't it."

A Profession in a Downward Spiral

In the absence of conclusive evidence, it appears that the teaching profession is in a downward spiral in Australia, as in other, comparable countries.

The public appears unwilling to guarantee teachers recognition and authority, and elevate their salaries, without a concomitant guarantee of more effective teaching. Able individuals appear less willing to enter teaching without the prospect of advancement and professional compensation. Schools of education have no incentive to alter curriculum and entry standards and risk declining admissions. The delicate ecology of the teaching profession has been damaged. The balance between individual commitment, work and rewards has been disturbed.

Increasing Recognition of the Significance of Schooling

At the same time that the profession is in a downward spiral, education and schooling are being recognised by governments, as well as by individuals and families, as increasingly important.

The convergence between economic imperatives and the traditional roles of schooling is accelerating because of the growing recognition of the importance of the 'human factors' - human skills and ingenuity, human relationships and general competence - in raising productivity. Australians no longer view their continent as a site to be exploited for short-term gains. Literacy will now be demanded in its fullest sense to develop innovative capabilities and to tackle cultural impediments. These factors, along with changing technologies, are beginning to transform the relationship between schooling and the wider society.

While the significance of teachers' work has been growing, the work itself has been getting harder. Over the past two decades, successive policy shifts have affected the circumstances in which teachers work, as well as the actual tasks they perform.

The findings of the Karmel report, Schools in Australia, nearly twenty years ago, heralded a period of educational experimentation and innovation, hard on the heels of the need to accommodate a burgeoning school population in the post-war years which had left serious deficiencies in the recurrent and capital resources available generally to schools; and gross inequities in the distribution of school resources and educational opportunities.

This economically buoyant period of the early 1970s was also a time when many of the conventional structures and values of society were questioned.

By the mid 1970s, Australia was moving into a period dominated by social concerns. Schools were asked to take on increased responsibility, for example, for:

redressing disadvantages arising from sex, race and ethnicity differences, and from physical and intellectual disabilities; and
responding to social problems: poverty; class discrimination; smoking; alcohol and other drug abuse; negative consequences of sexual behaviour; road safety; and delinquency.

Then followed economic downturn and an emphasis on public spending restraint. This had an immediate effect on schools. It became fashionable, for a time, to blame schools, teachers and young people themselves for the onset of youth unemployment. Schools were exhorted to pay more attention to the direct preparation of students for finding work. It soon became clear that the contraction of the youth labour market was not a temporary phenomenon. A new cohort of students who would not previously have continued their education into the senior secondary years began to be absorbed by schools, and the importance of a well-educated workforce and citizenry in achieving the goals of economic re-structuring started to underpin policy changes.

Of course, the policy shifts are by no means as discrete as such listing and labelling may suggest. In terms of policy articulation and translation into practice, these shifts overlap, so that they are felt cumulatively and unevenly by teachers in classrooms around the country, and are experienced in new forms by the successive cohorts of students and their parents entering and moving through schools each year.

In the harsher economic climate of the l990s, the Australian community is seeking a greater sense of security in, and more knowledge about, what is being taught and learned in schools. This has led to an emphasis on institutionalising, generalising and consolidating the educational gains made through successive waves of reform that began in the 1970s.

Evidence of the cumulative force of these policy trends in changing teachers' work can be found in the range of actual programs introduced by Commonwealth governments to give expression to imperatives that have emerged since the 1970s. These include the Disadvantaged Schools Program; the Special Projects (Innovations) Program; the Special Education Program; the Migrant Education (later English as a Second Language) and the Multicultural Education Programs; the Country Areas Program; various Aboriginal education programs; the Choice and Diversity Program; the School to Work Transition Program; and the Participation and Equity Program; the Computer Education Program; the Basic Learning in Primary Schools Program.

Demands for innovation and experimentation; for school-based decision making, curriculum development, research and evaluation; for more sophisticated forms of assessment; for more effective harnessing of technologies - these are all factors that have added cumulatively to teachers' work and to the pressures that work entails.

In sum, teachers' work has become more demanding and complex because of the changes in:

the composition of the student population;
teachers' social roles; and
teachers' professional roles.

A report earlier this year from the OECD, The Condition of Teaching, summarised the situation across member countries thus: 'What once would have been seen as exceptional devotion to duty has now become seen as normal practice. 'This aptly describes the situation in Australia.

Demands for schools to respond more directly to economic goals and circumstances

Where earlier policy shifts could be argued to have been, at least in part, responses to demands and pressures from within the school community, notably from teachers and parents, the policy directions of more recent times have emanated more directly from governments, in the context of attempts to improve Australia's trade balance and promote greater productivity. In terms of what is being taught, teachers are being asked to make greater efforts to link theoretical and academic knowledge with its applications, with a view to redressing the lower prestige accorded to applied knowledge. Greater emphasis is being placed on vocational aspects of schooling, including increasing students' awareness of the world of work and of educational and employment options. This shift in policy is signalled in the report by Commonwealth Minister Dawkins in 1988, Strengthening Australia's Schools. At the same time, the last decade has seen significant extension of teachers' involvement in school management, particularly through the devolution of control over finance and resources previously exercised centrally by State/Territory system authorities.

Educational equality

The education policy shift that has affected teaching most profoundly, in my view in both practical and psychological terms, was foreshadowed in Schools in Australia in 1973. The report reinforced a view of education and, in particular, schooling as a powerful means for social advancement; and held out the prospect of a significantly larger group of the population having an entitlement to a higher level of education than had been generally hitherto accepted. It also argued that just as schooling could be the means of producing social advancement, so too it could be the means of reproducing social inequality and disadvantage. This meant a transfer, in schools policy and practice, of a greater share of the responsibility for successful schooling to schools themselves, and away from individual students and their families. A response was required from systems, schools and teachers to growing public and community interest, including among teachers themselves, in expanding educational opportunities for girls and for particular groups such as Aboriginal students, students from other ethnic minority groups, socio-economically disadvantaged students and geographically isolated students. This reinforced the professional role of teachers as curriculum researchers, developers and evaluators, taking their share of responsibility for providing all students, irrespective of their background or circumstances, with educational programs capable of leading to successful outcomes. Inevitably, this has resulted in greater public scrutiny of the work of teachers and its outcomes.

When a job becomes harder, one response is to improve the education and training for it. Thus it was that, in November last year, the Schools Council, following extensive national consultation and a major seminar, produced its report Teacher Quality.

The Teacher Quality Report

The Report focused on the deliberate activities that can be taken to influence teacher quality through education and training, arguing that such professional education and training is a necessary, though far from sufficient, condition to guarantee the general quality of teaching.

It draws on the substantial consensus that emerges from the considerable number of reports that reflect the Australian and overseas experience and point to a need to examine and improve:

the provision of pre-service education;
the further education of teachers;
the role and efficiency of practice teaching;
the co-ordination, role and efforts of higher education institutions, education systems, and State and Commonwealth governments in pre-service and in-service teacher education;
the accreditation of courses that teachers take: formal and informal, award and non-award; and
the preparation of teachers in specific disciplines, e.g. mathematics and science.

In elucidating these and other issues the Schools Council's report treats professional development of teachers as a continuum, commencing at pre-service, moving through entry and induction and continuing with regular in-service throughout the teacher's career of a nature and type relevant to experience, career position and the school community's need at that time.

The Council put forward a series of recommendations including:

a model for an average of ten days of in-service education and training per teacher per year;
bilateral agreements between the Commonwealth and employing authorities as to employer contributions to in-service and pre-service education; and
the establishment of a national advisory committee on teacher education.

The report also stated:

'That, as the Schools Council believes that sooner or later four year training must be a necessary minimum for the majority of teachers, more data be gathered on its costs and on a scaled implementation related to the supply and demand situation.'

At the same time, the Higher Education Council was convinced that any automatic lengthening of teacher education courses at the discretion of higher education institutions needed to be examined in the context of:

the claims on such resources for a greater level of in-service training of teachers;
the need to explore the possibility of increasing the teaching time in a calendar year;
the best time to apply the resources of a fourth year in the professional life of a teacher;
the fact that in some States the ratio of the number of primary graduates produced to the placement of those graduates in full-time teacher employment was low; and
award restructuring and the trend toward a more differentiated teaching profession.

A joint position statement has now emerged from the two Councils. Its most significant points are:

teaching at all levels, early childhood, primary and secondary, should have a degree as its initial professional award;
in principle, the lengthening of any course of initial pre-service teacher training beyond three years should only occur if there is a negotiated agreement between higher education institutions, employers, State systems and the profession for an integrated program of professional work and further study which is acceptable to funding authorities;
higher education institutions should consider programming the full length of each of the three calendar years as part of an initial course before any consideration is given to increasing the length of the initial training course; and
any strengthening of the first three years of initial training, or the one year following a first degree not be at the expense of the practicum.

The joint statement also stressed that pre-service and in-service teacher education should be planned as a coherent whole and that there should be greater involvement of employers, the profession and the whole of the disciplines in a higher education institution in teacher education to include resource support and time commitment.

The Broader Context: The Quality of Teaching

High quality education and training throughout the continuum of a teacher's career - from pre-service, moving through entry and induction to continuing training and development - is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition to guarantee the quality of teaching. Hence, the Schools Council decided to extend our work and to consider the broader range of factors which contribute to the quality of teaching. If teachers' work has become harder and more complex as the Schools Council contends, if teaching has become more stressful and in some ways less attractive as a career, then, besides improving education and training, there are three possible responses.

The first is to take steps to simplify it. While teaching will always be a complex activity, it may be possible to examine issues like role overload and ambiguity, and the array of competing and conflicting demands, with a view to reducing the sense of ineffectuality and diffusion of effort. Clearer definitions of what can reasonably be expected through the assignment of clear priorities and discarding of lower priority items must be attempted.

The second is to find ways of teaching more productively, in terms of learning outcomes - that is, ways of teachers performing their work which lead to better outcomes for the effort they invest. This is an area of much debate, but again there appear to be constructive possibilities.

The third is to increase the rewards available and to improve the conditions of teachers' work.

Attempting to improve the quality of teaching requires dealing not just with the quality of performance by teachers, but with the structure, terms and conditions of their employment in a broad sense, and with the development of public confidence and support. Failing to relate these three factors - commitment, reward and support - will lead to frustration.

At this stage, my paper really becomes something of a work-in-progress report. I must stress that I am speaking now of operations rather than achievements; and taking this opportunity to share the ideas on which we are still working - ideas and proposals that do not yet have the formal endorsement of the Schools Council. The Schools Council is now in the process of developing a report on the quality of teaching which draws together, analyses and synthesises what we know about teachers and teaching. This is a tall order. The Council is being assisted in the preparation of its report by an experienced consultant Mr David McRae and Mr Robert Bluer, Counsellor to the National Board. The Council's Working Party is headed by Mr George Berkeley. We will need to consider the characteristics of the Australian teaching force; the perspectives from which teaching can be viewed (as labour, craft, profession, art, vocation); and what teachers value about their work (the social, economic and psychological factors that make teaching a rewarding, or a thankless task).

Our report, which we hope to complete this year, will need to examine the extent to which teachers' work can be defined; and the extent to which the work varies according to context. It must re-establish the primacy of what happens in the classroom, while giving consideration to the role of the teacher in the school and, thus to school leadership, and in the wider community. It will need to address the way in which teachers' work is structured and how this might be improved to enable new educational possibilities and to allow teachers to concentrate time and energy more directly on what is happening in their classrooms.

The Schools Council will also be considering teaching as a career, with a view to examining how this can be structured in ways which enable personal and professional growth, development and renewal. Finally, the Council's report will consider ways of establishing educationally useful forms of teacher appraisal which contribute both to career satisfaction for teachers and to legitimate public demand for information about the performance of teachers and students.

The Schools Council intends its report on Australia's teachers as a significant contribution to defining what might be called the educational and the professional agenda for the next decade. Consistent with what I see as the important role of the Council in acting as a conduit between government, the education community and the teaching profession, I believe our forthcoming report will complement the political and industrial agenda that are already shaping.

Defining and Clarifying the Task
Increasing the Effectiveness of Teaching
Increasing the Rewards

At its next meeting, the Schools Council will be considering practical steps that can be taken to improve the quality of teaching in Australia through this three-pronged strategy.

Defining and Clarifying the Task of Teaching

It is unreasonable, of course, to expect teachers to work effectively, with any confident sense of purpose, in the absence of a reasonable degree of consensus in society about the fundamental purposes of education. Our report will, in a sense, take this as given. There is, after all, a reasonable degree of agreement in the Australian community that schooling should serve an accumulation of personal, social, cultural and economic purposes. Debate is largely over where the balance among these elements should lie.

The Council is of the view that much could be gained by making teaching a more conscious and explicit process, an organised effort with a clear notion of intended outcomes. Many teachers already engage in such a process. It is hard to argue that teaching has occurred where learning has not been the outcome. Teaching is an act of communication. Teachers must view themselves as teachers of all, rather than as instructors of the able.

Achieving 'quality teaching' depends on knowing what teaching is. We believe that the way to improve the quality of teaching and learning in their most exact sense is through focussing on the working relationship of teachers and students in classrooms.

Mindful of its own requests for explicitness, the Council is considering proposing a list of qualities that, possibly in a more considered and refined form, could become a charter which guides teacher preparation, appraisal and professional development, and some forms of promotion.

Such a charter could not be exhaustive but could help to establish boundaries for the territory and identify what we believe to be the most important landmarks.

A Charter for Teaching could include the following:

Teachers must believe in the educability of their students.
Teachers need an understanding of how students develop and learn.
Teachers need to recognise and respond to individual differences in their students.
Teachers need to treat students justly, to be alert to the consequences of their own behaviour, and to encourage students to do the same.
Teachers need to treat students fairly.
Teachers need to believe in, express and be able to justify the value of what is being taught.
Teachers need to have a thorough grasp of the content of what they are teaching. Their knowledge should be sufficient to have developed an understanding of the underlying structure of their subject matter, and how that structure relates to other areas of knowledge. They should appreciate and be able to convey its complexity and richness.
Teachers need to appreciate that process and content of learning are inextricably interwoven, and that an education, or view of education, which concentrates excessively on either one or the other is unsatisfactory.
Teachers need to be able to adapt the content of what is being taught to their students and to the context in which they are teaching.
Teachers need a wide repertoire of teaching strategies.
Teachers need to be able to structure learning tasks effectively by
- fostering motivation and engagement;
- explaining;
- establishing expectations for students which are clear, challenging and achievable; and
- transferring responsibility for learning to the learner.
Teachers need to use the assessment of individual pieces of student work regularly as a fundamental part of the process of teaching and learning.
Teachers need to monitor student progress consistently and provide feedback on that progress.
Teachers need to be well informed about the purposes, nature and uses of a wide variety of strategies of assessment.
Teachers need, above all, to make their teaching practice-explicit.

Working More Effectively

Making teachers' work more effective really means finding ways to align ends and means more closely.

In terms of structuring the task of teaching more effectively I believe that there is a need to recognise the inextricable link between teaching and learning. If we focus on the centrality of learning, it can be argued that schools are still very much organised around a kind of basic transmission model of teaching and learning - with the teacher as instructor and the students regularly assembled in standard-size groups - a model now reinforced by rigid industrial agreements and practices. The Schools Council's debates to date suggest that its members see teaching as a complex and largely holistic activity. Attempting to tease apart the various elements of teachers' work, in isolation from the implications for learning, is unlikely in my view to produce educational improvements. There are clear limits to the gains that can be made by transferring many of the functions performed by teachers to aides or para-professionals.

What we now know about the range of ways in which students learn seems to offer far more productive avenues for exploring ways in which to organise student groupings; to make more effective use of student and teacher time in and out of the school; to design and provide facilities and equipment, including the use of technologies; and to improve staff relations, student-teacher relationships and the relationships between schools and their communities, including parents.

The Schools Council is continuing to refine and develop the strategies put forward in our earlier report, Teacher Quality, with an emphasis on professional development as a means to enable the teacher to work more effectively, more quickly, do more difficult things and assume greater responsibility for a greater range of tasks and thus to contribute to the 'productivity of the enterprise' - in this case - schooling.

Teachers' work, and the path they follow over their careers cannot be separated from the idea of professional development as growth in maturity, experience and capacity of a teacher. In this sense professional development is equivalent to career development. What happens to a teacher's career in terms of pay, conditions, promotion possibilities, working environment, opportunities to work in various settings, initial and continuing education will all play an important role in the development of a teacher's professional posture.

For these reasons the report will stress the need to focus on the careers of teachers and how such careers can be structured to allow for the greatest possibilities for growth in maturity and capacity. Further it will suggest a number of environmental issues which may make this process of the development of new and better careers for teachers a real possibility. It will also consider how the idea of careers, which is clearly related to teachers' work, is itself related to work organisation, job design and job redesign.

Award Restructuring

Award restructuring, in a general sense, represents an attempt to establish a workforce driven by awards which give rewards for education and training, the assumption being that a simplification of a complex series of award classifications, together with career paths emphasising the skill formation dimension, will improve productivity and the performance of the industry.

The Commonwealth Minister for Employment, Education and Training (John Dawkins) has proposed a National Negotiation of teachers, employers and the Commonwealth, designed to maximise the possibilities and potentialities of award restructuring as it applies to the enterprise of schooling. In an initial statement (Quality of Teaching - An Issue for All) the Commonwealth pointed to examples of structural inefficiencies and rigidities in teaching.

The statement reinforces the need for on the job training as follows:

"For many teachers, on the job training and skill development is a one-off affair. It is often unsystematic, uncoordinated and unaccredited. Following award restructuring, teachers - like other workers - will be required to continue their training throughout their working lives. Continued training and development is essential to the maintenance of a higher skilled teaching force and employers need to recognise and reward teachers by providing opportunities for upgrading their skills."

As well as proposing principles and practices that should underpin initial preparation for and induction into teaching as a career, the Schools Council suggests that there should be four basic types of INSET:

Those designed to support system or agency initiatives.
Those designed by schools in line with their development, improvement or management plans.
Those provided through a partnership of systems, agencies and higher education institutions to meet the needs of individual teachers. These should include, at least, refresher courses in content areas, individually tailored courses to improve the quality of teaching practice, school leadership training courses, and a range of courses related to school priorities.
Those designed to enable teachers to upgrade their formal qualifications to meet established requirements.

The Schools Council is now considering whether to propose an annual entitlement of five release days and five pupil free days for professional development with the possibility of:

using the five 'pupil free' days for the first two purposes suggested above, and
considering that while the five additional days should be an annual entitlement, they could be accrued over time for use for the third purpose suggested above.

These factors together represent a new environment for the consideration of teachers' careers. The virtue of concentrating on teachers' careers as the driving force for the professional growth of teachers is that it provides a framework within which to provide the necessary incentives and opportunities on a systematic basis during a teacher's working life. It brings together the industrial and the professional dimensions of working life in a way designed to achieve the objectives of award restructuring, which are to increase the effectiveness of learning and to provide workers with better conditions and better paid jobs.

A career path emphasising the professional development of the teacher should be built around the following three elements:

entitlements to the teacher;
requirements/obligations of the teacher; and
options available to the teacher.

Entitlements might include the right of teachers to certain paid leave on the completion of a requisite period of service as well as further education and training, or time during on-duty hours to pursue specific projects. Other entitlements might include a greater proportion of dedicated school support staff available to the teacher, including access to a greater range of school-based services such as telephones, facsimiles, computers. Requirements will obviously include forms of appraisal which are of critical importance to the whole concept of career/ professional development but which will not be elaborated here in any detail. Options include those relating to additional experience, and various forms and dispositions of paid and unpaid leave and promotion.

Within this sort of approach it may be possible to see three phases of a teacher's career/professional life as follows:

Year 1 to Year 4 of teaching which could include the requirement of an induction/appraisal process and the entitlement of a certain quantum of ongoing education and training but relatively few, if any, options.
Years 4 to 8/10 of teaching which could include entitlements to paid study leave at the end of ten years effective (and appraised) service or a specified fraction of time during on-duty hours to pursue school based or system-based projects, the requirement of a proportion of own-time ongoing education and training as well as further appraisal linked with both professional growth and deliberate learning activities (INSET), and the options of additional outside school experience as well as school and system promotion.
Years 8/10 to retirement of teaching which could include a much greater range of options and entitlements, although it would be expected that many such options and entitlements would be linked with appropriate forms of appraisal (requirements). The concept of the Advanced Skills Teacher is likely to enter at this stage of a teacher's career. It is possible to imagine these dimensions of advanced skill as follows:
- excellent classroom teachers who, after appropriate appraisal, seek and obtain positions as ASTs with perhaps added responsibility in the areas of beginning teachers and discipline expertise;
- special purpose advanced skills teachers requiring specialised and accredited training, e.g. special education, careers, multicultural education, Aboriginal education, and community education;
- leadership positions at the AST level requiring both appraisal and specialised training.

The above examples are indicative only but they give the flavour of how the elements of entitlements, requirements and options might be linked during a teacher's professional life to ensure the best possible career growth. Appraisal stands at the centre of this process and provides it with its drive and integrity.

Appraisal

The Council will be examining the introduction of more systematic forms of teacher appraisal tied, where relevant, to professional development, with its nature determined by its purpose. Appraisal is a crucial part of teachers' professional growth and of the process of producing professional dialogue designed to make the task more explicit. It could also contribute significantly to teachers' sense of purpose and professional worth.

Appraisals should be governed by a set of principles along the following lines. They should be:

clearly and closely related to their stated purpose;
fair, with all those involved having a clear idea of the intent, nature and potential outcomes of the process;
dispassionate, focusing on the work and not the person;
sound, in that a number of relevant sources of data are used and they should be conducted in a capable and thorough manner;
timely, in that they should relate appropriately to teachers' needs and the stages of their careers;
informative, providing useful feedback to the subject of the appraisal; and
oriented so that there is some clear and productive course of action as a result.

The outcomes of such appraisals should include:

informative and comprehensive feedback to the teacher; and
relevant forms of professional development. Undergoing a required appraisal should entitle a teacher to participate in a program of professional development.

Access to a range of forms of promotion should be contingent on undergoing relevant appraisal.

The Council will be examining comprehensive forms of appraisal to sustain these various stages and elements of professional growth, drawing on the kinds of criteria proposed, for example, by Scriven (1989: 121-131) which include such areas as:

knowledge of duties (including relevant law, regulations and policies, as well as more specific functional knowledge);
knowledge of school and community;
knowledge of subject matter;
instructional design: including course design, selection and creation of materials, use of other resources, needs of special groups, and evaluation of courses, materials, teaching and curriculum;
instructional ability: including communication skills and management skills;
assessing student achievement: including skill in testing, knowledge about testing, and grading;
reporting student achievement: including reports to each student, reports to administrators, and reports to teachers, parents, and other appropriate authorities;
other service to the school; and
professionalism: including professional attitude, professional ethics, professional development, and service to the profession.

Consistent with its suggestions for defining teachers' work, the Schools Council will need to propose appraisals that encompass professional attitudes, content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.

Increasing Rewards

The Quality of Teaching: An Issue for All statement argues that the major aims of award restructuring for teachers should be:

improved career paths for teachers;
increased training opportunities;
better pay and conditions; and
removing barriers to job mobility.

The Advanced Skills Teacher (AST) Scale is an attempt to focus on the role and value of the teacher. It is intended to reward teachers for excellence in teaching, and for their skills in generating learning and developing positive attitudes to learning.

The proposals I have foreshadowed above reflect a number of assumptions. The first is that the most significant and general reward which teachers get from their work is the work itself. The second is that teachers' careers conform to a number of broad patterns consisting of phases in which their needs differ. The third is that teaching is work that requires regular refreshment of one sort or another. The fourth is that teachers will benefit by having a more varied but better defined career structure, with varied goals to aim for and options to take up or ignore. The fifth is that such a career structure can be provided in cost-effective terms, and be provided in cost neutral terms. The introduction of the Advanced Skills Classification makes that impossible. However a strong consideration in framing the proposal was recognising that a large amount of funding newly dedicated to education is unlikely to appear and that it will be necessary to reorient and systematise activities already in place in some form in most systems.

I have given you an outline of the Schools Council's recent and ongoing work on the quality of teaching.

I want to continue by offering you some brief reflections and observations on school-related education research in Australia. These reflections have arisen in the course of the most recent policy project.

The report that the Schools Council is producing will draw heavily on education research. As it happens, it will draw more on overseas research than Australian. This may reflect the fact that the particular combination of circumstances that has led to a demand for greater teacher effectiveness and accountability, in a context of public spending restraint, occurred or was recognised earlier in some overseas countries than in Australia, stimulating relevant research. The research on which the report will draw most heavily will be what I would label 'explanatory' research: research that attempts to explain differences in educational outcomes among individual and groups of students and schools, focusing on those things that are amenable to influence by public policy. This is the large body of research on school and teacher effectiveness, school improvement, and school-community relationships.

For its material on the characteristics of the Australian teaching force, the report will rely primarily on the Profile of Teachers in Australian Schools, undertaken jointly by the Australian College of Education, the University of Queensland and what was then the Brisbane College of Advanced Education, with funding support from the National Board.

The fact that the Council has drawn heavily on overseas research for this major policy work may point to questions that should be asked about education research in Australia.

Both as a member of the Commonwealth Schools Commission and of the Schools Council, I have formed the impression not that there is a dearth of research to guide education policy, but that the existing research is rather fragmented and 'stand-alone' and has not been subjected to scholarly debate to establish its real meaning and significance in the Australian context. That is what we seem to be missing: scholarly consensus, or possibly a demonstrated lack of consensus, about research findings as a basis for policy development and for informed community debate.

In a recent paper on research in higher education, Professor Don Aitkin, head of the Australian Research Council, commented:

It is hard to escape the conclusion that our problem is not in producing research - we are conspicuous over-achievers in that; but in organising that production. To adapt a familiar metaphor, we have let a million flowers bloom, but we have forgotten to develop a cut-flower market. (How Research Came to Dominate Higher Education and What Ought to be Done About It, Don Aitkin, 1990).

I would not say that we have let so many flowers bloom in the area of research on schooling. But his remarks do have some relevance. In producing its report on teachers and teaching in Australia, the Schools Council will have to take a significant responsibility for organising and distilling existing knowledge. I believe we would be able to feel more confident if our own debates had been strengthened by more vigorous debate among scholars. Of course, it is one of our own roles to promote that debate.

It could be argued that we have produced a system of research funding, in the higher education sector particularly, that places more of a premium on attracting funds and grants for research than on engaging in scholarly debates about the findings; or on contributing to a coherent body of research.

We may be better served, certainly from the perspective of bodies such as the Schools Council, by a more cooperative and systematic approach to research, from within the education profession itself, to establish coherent and consolidated themes and structures. The Australian Council for Education Research has attempted to grapple with this issue of establishing priorities and themes within its own areas of work. The Australian Research Council is also encouraging such an approach through providing infrastructure support for the development of research capacity in institutions from the former advanced education sector. These grants are aimed at allocating limiting resources in the most effective manner to strengthen or develop research potential. The funding is not provided as untargeted institutional funding, nor as support for individual research projects.

This program provides an opportunity to establish for example what could virtually be a Centre for Research for the Advancement of Teaching, bringing together a network of researchers based around the country, supported co-operatively by the major partners in schooling. Ventures of this kind would require co-operation among researchers (including those who tend to be funded from consultancy rather than research grants) authorities, and policy bodies to identify themes and develop networks.

Pooling our wisdom and resources to build up more systematic and coherent bodies of knowledge would assist in meeting the criteria identified by my colleague, George Berkeley, in his address to this Institute two years ago. He pointed then to the need for research that is timely and in useable form, if it is to influence real policy.

It is interesting to speculate what difference, if any, the existence of such a centre for research on teaching in Australia would make to the work of the Schools Council and its forthcoming report. It would certainly tend to provide a focus for and, in that sense, encourage scholarly debate. Such debate would have allowed us to advance our own ideas more confidently and to present them to a better informed audience.

Even if such a body of well-debated Australian research had existed, I doubt that it would have been the primary source of influence upon the Schools Council. It would also be hard to argue that what we now see in Australian classrooms is primarily the result of disciplined inquiry. What a body such as the Schools Council or the National Board will have to say will be largely a reflection of its collective experience; its shared values; its collective assessment how things could be improved in the context of political, social, cultural and economic realities - or its collective interpretation of them. Then it will tend to draw on the body of available research - to test, justify and strengthen its judgments.

The strength of a body such as the Schools Council lies in the obligation to report publicly, and to justify publicly its proposals and the basis on which they are put forward, including making explicit the values on which they are based.

Education policy is necessarily based on values. It may be that we would be well advised to go to far more trouble than we have in recent years to clarify what our values and goals and, through making them explicit, to attempt to communicate and build consensus around them. Perhaps education research and researchers suffer as much as teaching and teachers from the lack of a clearly-articulated policy framework.

In the absence of the capacity to make explicit the values that underpin policy there is the danger of creating cynicism about education and education research generally. Reports like the US report What Works: Research about Teaching and Learning have the potential to create that cynicism by drawing selectively on research findings to justify a particular educational ideology. It would be far more appropriate to state Government policies and to ask what research has revealed about teaching and learning in the context of those policy goals. After all, a government that wants to promote an individualistic and competitive society and to cut public spending is not going to be dissuaded from that course by independent research showing that co-operative learning in small groups is superior to competitive learning in larger groups, and will interpret research on class sizes in the context of its own policy imperatives.

Arguing that research will necessarily be interpreted in a political and social context is not to support policy being made 'on the run' on the basis of the prejudices of prominent politicians or advisers, or in complete defiance of established facts. On the contrary, one of the most urgent reasons to become more sophisticated about building up a body of well-argued, timely and useable knowledge to inform policy is to reverse a trend towards increasing reliance on public opinion polls as a definitive guide to education policy - a reliance which inevitably gives undue weight to the opinions of those whose interest in schooling is uninformed, out-of-date, incidental and indirect.

To conclude, I believe that it is worth asking ourselves in the education community some key questions along these lines:

What research activities over the next decade seem most promising in terms of their potential to inform improvements in teaching and learning and in the effectiveness of schooling generally?
How can those activities best be supported - in terms of identifying both research themes and funding structures?

Please cite as: Connors, L. (1990). The quality of education and the improvement of the teaching-learning processes: Impact of research on educational policy and practice. Queensland Researcher, 6(2), 4-31. http://www.iier.org.au/qjer/qr6/connors.html

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