By Lucy Carroll
Just over a decade ago, Cassandra Pride decided to upend her life and retrain as a high school English teacher.
She graduated with a bachelor of teaching from a NSW university and spent two years working in independent schools before taking a position at one of Sydney’s top public selective schools.
“After I started teaching in high schools, I knew there were fundamental writing and grammar skills I needed to teach students, even the senior students,” she said. “There was nothing in my degree to prepare me for that. I had to learn on the job.”
Cassandra Pride is now director of research and professional practice at St Catherine’s School.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
Pride spent her first years teaching dedicated to “lots of extra reading, working out how to improve” and then returned to university, this time to La Trobe, where she completed a masters of education in language and literacy.
She credits that degree with giving her “detailed, specific knowledge of how to teach reading and writing, how people learn, how to engage students, how to maximise learning in the classroom and the science of learning”.
It has been almost two years since a sweeping review of initial teacher education, led by Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott, recommended 14 reforms to radically alter teacher training courses.
Backed by the nation’s education ministers, 37 Australian universities have until the end of this year to modify some 280 courses to embed “core content” in all teaching degrees, including evidence-based and explicit reading and maths instruction and knowledge of how the brain learns and retains information.
The Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership has released core content that must be included in courses, stating that “self-directed approaches as a starting point for novices is ineffective and should be avoided”.
A quality assurance oversight board will assess the quality of the degrees, while the updated courses will be re-accredited with state teacher regulatory authorities, a federal education department spokesperson said.
La Trobe’s masters of primary and masters of secondary teaching are the first courses to be re-accredited under the reforms.
Dean of La Trobe’s education school Joanna Barbousas rewrote the university’s teaching courses in 2020, stripping out “theoretical positions, philosophical and sociology subjects that weren’t aligned with evidence-based teaching methods”.
Sydney University vice-chancellor Mark Scott led an expert panel established to review initial teacher education courses.Credit: Louie Douvis
“We listened to what principals said they needed, which was that often teaching graduates had to be retrained once they arrived in the classroom,” she says.
Barbousas said the changes meant ditching debunked theories of “learning styles” – the myth that students benefit from receiving information in their preferred format.
“We replaced that with the science of learning, how to teach explicitly and creating practical routines to be able to manage a classroom. They were big reforms, not tweaks,” she said
Universities received $15,000 grants to make the changes, with core content also mandating explicit phonics teaching, routines for classrooms, behaviour management and responsive teaching.
Tony Loughland, head of the school of education at UNSW, said the reforms were a “game-changer” and the most ambitious changes to initial teacher education in decades.
But the changes have come under fierce criticism for a perceived overreach from the government into what’s being taught at universities and the inferred assumption that content is not already part of the curriculum.
Western Sydney University education dean Michele Simons, a review panel member and president of the Australian Council of Deans of Education, said the biggest concern was the time-frame to implement changes.
“While attention is being paid to implementing these reforms, the work of teachers is being significantly impacted by technology and the growing challenges to the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people,” she said.
Kelly Freebody, head of Sydney University’s school of education, said it was in the process of including the mandated core content on cognitive processes. “It’s good to be reminded of areas we should focus on, but it would be remiss of us to turn away from teaching sociological and historical aspects of education which are the core parts of learning to be a teacher,” she said.
The NSW Education Standards Authority says all universities are on track to submit evidence of content changes by mid-year.
When the initial review was released in 2023, Scott said it had come after “deep-seated concerns – given complexities graduates are facing – that we are [not] doing everything we can to get student teachers ready for the classroom”.
The initial teacher education review in 2023 recommended 14 reforms to overhaul teaching courses.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos
After completing her masters, Pride spearheaded a whole school literacy program at Sydney Boys High, and is now director of research and professional practice at St Catherine’s School.
“I drilled down into explicit teaching of sentence structure, identifying figures of speech, and developing sophistication of expression,” she said.
“If I had come out of my initial teaching course with the knowledge I gained from my masters, then there would have been no lost time, no lost years.”
“High school teachers are set up to with the expectation they don’t need to teach reading or writing and that students come in ready to go. That couldn’t be further from the truth,” she says.
Pride explains that her initial interest in teaching was sparked years ago after she became concerned about the way her own children were taught in their primary school years. “They weren’t being pushed, and the teacher was just kind of sitting in the room while they did discovery projects.
“Seeing those deficits really motivated me to get into education myself.”
With Alex Crowe