Collaboratively designing a national, mandated teaching performance assessment in a multi-university consortium: Leadership, dispositions and tensions
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Keamy, Ron , Kriewaldt, Jeana , Brandenburg, Robyn , Walker, Rebecca , Crane, Nadine
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 46, no. 5 (2021), p. 39-53
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- Description: It is a requirement for pre-service students in Initial Teacher Education programs in Australia to successfully complete a teaching performance assessment (TPA) before they graduate. This follows similar requirements in other international contexts, particularly the United States, where standard-based assessment is also a focus. As members of the design team of a TPA, which was affirmed by a nationally appointed Expert Advisory Group in Australia, we examine the social processes contributing to the development of a high-stakes assessment task. Significant challenges emerged through the nature of the task and the responsibility developers had for ensuring validity and fairness, but also because the design team comprised of teacher educators from ten universities. Using collaborative self-study as a methodology we examine our reflexive narratives and find that collaborative leadership and key personal dispositions are at the heart of the design process. These enable us to identify, examine and navigate arising tensions. © 2021 Social Science Press. All rights reserved.
Finding passion and purpose in the teaching of reading in secondary school English through critical readings of practice : A huge kind of spider web
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Mason, Mary
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Language and Literacy Vol. 43, no. 3 (2020), p. 205-213
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- Description: We argue in this paper that the experience of reading is an intricate and dynamic weaving of connections much like the tentative construction of a spider's web. We also use the metaphor of the web to examine a professional learning experience for Australian secondary school English teachers who over the course of a year, and by working in Communities of Practice, find and renew passion and purpose in their teaching of reading. The professional learning project, beginning in 2015, is conducted in Victorian schools under the auspices of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English (VATE) and is funded for six years by the Victorian Department of Education and Training. In five years it has involved 36 schools. In this paper we focus on the experiences of teachers involved in the first three years of the project. The project begins by drawing attention, through an examination of literature, to disturbing levels of disengagement with reading at school and to a culture of pedagogy in English that has shifted over recent times toward transactional teaching and away from a focus on meaning-making. Drawing upon teacher interviews, the paper examines how teachers find passion and purpose in their teaching of reading through an initial focus on student experience revealed in drawings, which they find surprising and moving. In Communities of Practice and with the support of an external Critical Friend, the teachers explore a complex understanding of reading that has imaginative, dialogic, emotional, critical, metacognitive and embodied dimensions and design and trial reading activities with the aim of deepening students' reading experiences. Through a focus on what teachers say, the paper explores what is learned through this experience and examines some of the challenges associated with sustaining change in schools.
Thinking dispositions for teaching : enabling and supporting resilience in context
- Authors: McDonough, Sharon , McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2020
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Cultivating Teacher Resilience: International Approaches, Applications and Impact Chapter 5 p. 69-83
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- Description: Preparing pre-teachers for an increasingly challenging teaching profession is a complex work and requires teacher educators to engage in the careful design of both programmes and professional learning opportunities. This chapter explores how an explicit focus on thinking dispositions that enable effective teaching are developed in a Master of Teaching (Secondary) programme. This programme, delivered on-site at a secondary school, included carefully constructed teaching opportunities to support development of thinking dispositions. Ways of thinking and the impact they have on feelings, actions and beliefs will be examined along with how the implementation of our thinking dispositions framework supports the development of resilience in challenging teaching and learning contexts.
Learning and teaching activities and assessment approaches to build reading capabilities
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Mason, Mary , David, Lee
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Literacy learning Vol. 27, no. 3 (2019), p.
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- Description: Reading is cognitive, emotional and embodied experience. It is responsive, dynamic and fuelled by prior knowledge, dispositions, experience, skills, emotions and curiosity. In our minds we make connections, create images, test hypotheses, pause to reflect, puzzle and wonder, fill gaps, and engage in internalised and external dialogue in order to make meaning. Reading is highly personal and enhanced through social experiences and understandings of what good readers do. The following activities are experiential in nature and enable students to learn through social processes and experience. They support students to engage in reading as a meaning-making process. They foster active participation in important learning processes (connection-making, talking, feeling, seeing and thinking) so that reading skills and understandings are deepened. The activities activate students' physical selves, their personal and emotional responses, and enable them to visualise, imagine and step inside and away from texts. [Author abstract]
Reading in English classrooms : A developing culture of disenchantment
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Mason, Mary
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Changing English : Studies in Culture and Education Vol. 26, no. 2 (2019), p. 137-149
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- Description: Based on a three-year project conducted in Australian secondary schools, this paper captures a developing disenchantment with reading in and for subject English. As part of an extended professional learning experience for teachers, students and their English teachers were interviewed and students were asked to draw reading. Paying attention to the sensitivities both students and teachers express about classroom reading experiences and to the impact institutional culture has on what they do and feel, this paper identifies a developing culture of disenchantment that is veiled by recurring busy and technically oriented activity. We suggest that in a pervading culture of valuing what we measure, students regard reading at school as ‘work’, find it difficult to keep their minds on task and experience a loss of independence in thinking. Teachers, loath to take risks in a culture of compliance, also describe their disenchantment with current practices.
Thinking dispositions as a resource for resilience in the gritty reality of learning to teach
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , McDonough, Sharon
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Educational Researcher Vol. 46, no. 4 (2019), p. 589-605
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- Description: While there is agreement that dispositions and resilience enable teachers to negotiate the complexities of teaching, how we support pre-service teachers (PSTs) to activate and understand the nature of dispositions and resilience is less clear. This narrative inquiry, conducted at a regional university in Australia, examines ways thinking dispositions act as personal resources to enable PSTs to develop resilience and negotiate the reality of teaching. In this paper, we examine a teaching and learning experience in an initial teacher education program where PSTs engage with complexities associated with planning, teaching and assessment. Drawing from semi-structured interviews, we construct and examine PSTs’ narratives and identify the foundational influence of people-centred thinking. We also identify the central role of reflective and strategic thinking in enabling resilience. Finally, we argue that school/university partnership initiatives in teacher education provide opportunities to focus on dispositions associated with resilience.
Why 'that' question? Reimagining classroom reading activities from the basis of what we understand about engaged reading
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Mason, Mary , Lee, David
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Literacy learning Vol. 27, no. 3 (2019), p. i-vi
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- Description: The authors offer a series of strategies around re-engagement of students in reading, framed by the findings from a 6-year project. Listening carefully to what younger readers themselves say about reading, they interrogate ways that a number of school practices work against the pleasure of immersing readers in books. [Author abstract]
Freedom and constraint in teacher education : Reflections on experiences over time
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 43, no. 3 (2018), p. 154-167
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- Description: Teacher education programs in Australia increasingly comply with new and narrowing accountabilities so that they can be approved by diverse regulatory authorities and accredited. This is an auto-biographical narrative study which draws upon the memories of a teacher educator who contrasts her experience of learning to teach in the early 1980s with her recent experience as a Program Leader working with colleagues to design a new Master of Teaching program. She interviews Professor Bernie Neville who was responsible for the design and implementation of the teacher education program she completed in 1983. He reflects on the principles guiding his practice at a time when greater freedoms were possible. She contrasts this with an interview her colleagues conducted with her during the program accreditation phase and highlights tensions in the current process of program design related to an increasing performance-orientation, greater levels of compliance, and managing an over-crowded curriculum.
Selection and rejection in teacher education: qualities of character crucial in selecting and developing teacher education students
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Fish, Tim
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education Vol. 46, no. 2 (2018), p. 120-132
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- Description: The focus of recent Australian political and media reports on the selection of candidates for initial teacher education programs has focused on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) score as one of the key indicators of worth. This narrative study conducted in an Australian regional university focuses on the life stories of twelve pre-service teachers (PSTs) who received lower ATAR scores and who may well have been rejected by other universities. The PSTs’ narratives highlight that low achievement levels in the final years of schooling did not prevent them from being able to succeed in teacher education programs. We argue that high stakes tests as gatekeeping devices are simplistic measures that fail to recognise important qualities of character crucial to effective teaching. We suggest that qualities of character such as these are hard to quantify but are central to both selecting entrants to, and developing PSTs during, their teacher education programs.
Mentoring for pre-service teachers and the use of inquiry-oriented feedback
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Davis, Robert
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education Vol. 6, no. 1 (2017), p. 50-63
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- Description: Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of feedback offered by school mentors in three primary and secondary rural schools during pre-service teachers’ (PSTs’) professional placements. In the context of discussions about the need for more integrated theory/practice connections for PSTs which are “mutually reinforced by all programme components” (Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, 2014, p. ix), it aims to examine whether certain contextual features of school environments have an impact on the nature of feedback offered to PSTs. Design/methodology/approach: Through a phenomenological analysis of semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the relationship between certain contextual features of school environments and their impact on the effectiveness of mentor feedback practices. Findings: It is suggested that teacher mentors are more likely to offer inquiry-oriented feedback informed by well-developed personal theories and values if they teach in schools where feedback processes are promoted as a central part of teachers’ ongoing professional learning. Professional learning experiences, which include classroom observations, peer feedback and a focus on using feedback to enhance students’ learning, extend and deepen teachers’ understandings and beliefs about feedback as well as their repertoire of strategies. Consequently, they are more informed and better able to work with PSTs using inquiry-oriented approaches. Originality/value: Through an examination of teacher narratives, this paper presents two frameworks for considering the nature of feedback offered to PSTs by their teacher mentors: inquiry-oriented and instructional-oriented feedback. It argues that teacher mentors are better equipped to use inquiry-oriented feedback approaches and build growth-fostering relationships if they are engaged in ongoing professional learning experiences in their schools based on classroom observations and non-judgemental peer feedback. © 2017, © Emerald Publishing Limited.
Reading as an imaginative act
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , Mason, Mary
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: English in Australia Vol. 52, no. 2 (2017), p. 9-19
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- Description: The teaching of reading provokes heated discussion, particularly when the reputations of governments and institutions rest on what students do and achieve. This paper focuses on the first two years of a three year project where the researchers worked in communities of practice with secondary school English teachers in state, Catholic and independent schools in Victoria, Australia with a focus on examining and improving the teaching of reading. A starting point for practitioner inquiries was giving close attention to what students say about their reading experiences. Based on the students’ insight and a return to key theorists, we suggest that the process of reading in English is largely an imaginative act. Like the students, we argue for curriculum that is less ‘fenced in’ by limited notions of quality and more open to genuine learning. © 2017, AATE - Australian Association Teaching English. All rights reserved.
Activating teaching dispositions in carefully constructed contexts : Examining the impact of classroom intensives
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda , McDonough, Sharon , Wines, Chris , O’Loughlan, Courtney
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Teacher Education : Innovation, Intervention and Impact Chapter 12 p. 193-209
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- Description: The current policy stance in Australia which seeks to produce ‘classroom ready’ teachers requires that pre-service teachers (PSTs) be assessed against national professional standards that articulate minimum skills and knowledge required of beginning teachers. There is no mention within these standards of affective qualities (e.g. humour, passion, inspiration) or thinking dispositions (e.g. curiosity, reflection, creativity) that enable good teaching and professional learning and which capture the complexity that is inherent within good teaching. This study focuses on the research of a team of teacher educators in a regional Australian university who believe that a focus on dispositions is central to effective teacher education. They have embedded a ‘Dispositions for Teaching Framework’ within a Master of Teaching (Secondary) program to allow PSTs’ various thinking dispositions to be activated within carefully constructed professional learning contexts. The context in this study was a Classroom Intensive experience at a P-12 School in regional Victoria where PSTs participated in structured classroom observations over a two day period. The key research questions were: Did the Classroom Intensive experience activate the dispositions in the PSTs? Were some dispositions activated more than others? How could evidence be collected of these dispositions in action? A variety of research methods enabled a complex data-set to be collected. It was identified that the Classroom Intensive experience provided a rich professional learning context which activated all five of the thinking dispositions in the framework, and that these dispositions are not discrete but interconnect and rely upon each other. © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016.
Layered stories as opportunities to show and engage in learning
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Pedagogies for the future p. 73-84
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Self and community: The impact of ISATT on the professional learning: Teaching and research of members in the Asia-Pacific Region
- Authors: Berry, Amanda , McGraw, Amanda , Ying, Issa Danjun
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: From teacher thinking to teachers and teaching: The evolution of a research community p. 669-701
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Creating an Australian Curriculum for English
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2012
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: English in Australia Vol. 47, no. 2 (2012), p. 103-104
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Shoving our way into young people's lives
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Teacher Development Vol. 15, no. 1 (2011), p. 105-116
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- Description: This paper uses Sizer and Sizer's concept of 'shoving' to examine the school experiences of a group of young people who left mainstream school early and some time later enrolled in an alternative educational setting designed to reengage early school leavers in formal learning. 'Shoving' is a way to explain why so many young people feel alienated in the school setting and consequently disengage from formal learning. It is used here to describe the rude, confrontational, disrespectful behaviour that many young people experience at school from peers, teachers and rigid school systems. For the young people involved in this study, the dominant school culture is perceived as 'aggressive', unfair and condescending; as a forceful political and relational dynamic where interactions are typically battles for control. Like any rich metaphor, 'shoving' is multi-dimensional and ambiguous. It also has a crucial dimension; a sense of being proactive and deeply moral. If educators intend to combat issues related to disengagement and early school leaving, they must position themselves to shove on behalf of young people. © 2011 Teacher Development.
Toward professional learning experiences for teachers that are meaning-full : A narrative study
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Thesis , Doctorate
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- Description: This doctoral portfolio is a set of interconnected research studies that examine the nature of significant professional learning experiences for teachers, postgraduate university students, and teacher educators.
- Description: Professional Doctorate
Working with early school leavers to improve the way we teach: A partnership initiative that's making a difference
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2008
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Paper presented at 2008 Australian Teacher Education Association National Conference, Novotel Twin Waters, Sunshine Coast, Queensland : 8th-11th July 2008
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New teachers, new teaching
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Jousting for the new generation: Challenges to contemporary schooling Chapter p. 93-95
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- Description: 2003005690
On the brink
- Authors: McGraw, Amanda
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Jousting for the new generation: Challenges to contemporary schooling Chapter p. 118-122
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- Description: 2003005696