Association supports debate on teaching excellence

Trustee Association supports debate on teaching excellence

The New Zealand School Trustees Association says if all of our students are going to succeed at school we must have robust debate on teacher excellence and what that might mean.

Lorraine Kerr, NZSTA President says the recent study by Professor John Hattie from Auckland University is a timely catalyst for discussions on what needs to change for students to achieve.

“This is just too important to be ignored,” she says.

“In recent years, the education sector seems to have moved away from educational debate about student achievement and how to obtain excellence, to a situation of allowing industrial agenda to dominate outcomes.”

She says while this has certainly meant lower class sizes, more staffing, higher wages for teachers and less class contact time, there is a dearth of evidence to suggest that that these changes have made any significant impact on student achievement.

In fact, Lorraine Kerr says, each of these has been done in isolation without any assessment of whether it is making any difference to the quality of teaching practice.

“NZSTA would certainly support a shift away from this approach to one which is more focussed on teaching excellence and student achievement and other aspects that may be needed to ensure that all students can achieve to a high standard.

“We need to move away from the old thinking around smaller classes, more staffing, more release time and general salary increases as being the panacea for improvement,” says Lorraine Kerr.

She says there needs to be a collective will to address the continuing issues of teaching quality and teaching excellence and its impact on high achievement for all students, including rewarding teaching excellence through not just pay but other initiatives.

“This is more important than ever given an increasingly tight economic situation, where there is a need to ensure that the education dollar is invested in those areas that will potentially give us the biggest improvements in achievement levels.”

Lorraine Kerr says that boards of trustees also have an important role in lifting student achievement, particularly through establishing a high expectation of success for all, and by establishing a “no excuses” climate within the school.

“Boards of trustees should be concerned at any student failing to achieve to a high level, and be prepared to support a culture of high expectations with appropriate resourcing to help their teachers to achieve teaching excellence. The Government needs to play its part here, by ensuring that boards have sufficient resourcing to enable that to happen.”

Lorraine Kerr says another priority for NZSTA is Initial Teacher Education, and the need to establish nationally consistent high entry and exit standards into teacher training.

Research carried out by McKinsey & Company between May 2006 and March 2007 (How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top, September 2007, McKinsey and Company) shows the critical importance of attracting the right people to become teachers, she says.

“We cannot reasonably expect our schools to deliver high outcomes for all students if we do not provide them with a pool of high quality graduates to recruit from.

“As the McKinsey research says, ‘the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers’.”

ENDS

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