Private sector grabs Rhodes scholar in The Australian’s Higher Education section on Feb 7 takes the NSW Education Department to task for their insistence three years ago that a Rhodes Scholar would not be employed as a teacher until she had some teaching qualifications. The stumbling block was the completion of a one-year diploma of education.
It is an age old question. The person in question has stated “I firmly believe teachers are born, not made.” The private school who employed her allowed her to study the diploma in education part-time while teaching and offered to pay half of her HECS fees. So did they insist on the diploma too? Further in the article the diploma is described as “a complete waste of time”, on the grounds that it was too theoretical.
I find myself doing a bit of tongue-biting here - there are many responses that I could make, but the issue that I keep thinking about is the need for the teaching profession to have true professionalism. It is something that a previous Commonwealth Minister of Education, Dr. Brendan Nelson, talked about many times. It is the need for teachers not only to have academic background in the areas in which they teach, but also to have the highest teaching credentials.
Some of this principle can be glimpsed over at Teaching Australia, with work being done on professional standards for advanced teachers and principals.
Professional associations like the Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers, the Australian Science Teachers Association, The Australian Association for the Teaching of English in their endorsement of STELLA, and the Australian School Library Association (ASLA), are examples of attempts to define what competency or excellence in teaching looks like.
So, for me, not only does the article not even recognise why it was that NSW Department of Education acted as it did, but it also missed the opportunity to look at the bigger debate - the importance of the community being assured that those who teach not only do so because of a calling, but also have credible professional qualifications. I too believe that the best teachers are born to teach, in the same way that the best doctors are born for it, or the best lawyers.. etc. etc. But no-one is going to let me into the medical or legal profession without qualifications are they?
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