Plan for elite teacher squads to travel Queensland helping out schools

TRAVELLING squads of highly-skilled teachers would be deployed across Queensland schools to mentor staff and boost confidence under a bold new proposal to improve student results.

TRAVELLING squads of elite teachers who are experts in their subject areas would be deployed across Queensland schools to mentor staff and boost teacher confidence, under a new proposal to improve student results.

The Grattan Institute has released a report, which recommends Australia follow the lead of Shanghai and Singapore and form elite teams of specialist teachers and use them across state schooling networks.

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The proposal from the think-tank would see specialist units of teachers work directly for the Department of Education or other bodies such as Catholic Education Queensland, who would send them on secondments to schools that needed to boost their maths, science or literacy results.

“In high-performing systems, such as Shanghai and Singapore, an elite cohort of specialist teachers sets the ­direction for effective practice and spreads the message via cross-school networks,” the ­report says.

“Master Teachers should work across schools, leading subject-specific cross-school networks that provide practical guidance in classrooms.”

David Gonski. Pictuer: AAP/Mick Tsikas

The report also echoes the Gonski 2.0 report into improving the standard of schooling in Australia, by warning that classroom teachers often spend too much time on “low-impact” activities and duplicating work, such as creating teaching resources, when similar, better-quality resources may already exist.

Like the Gonski review – which proposed employing casual administrative staff to cover lunch duty and sports supervision – the Grattan Institute recommends relieving teaching of much of the daily administrative work they do, so they can focus on their core role of teaching.

It also says that teachers need more support to deal with classroom discipline issues, with Australian schools scoring significantly worse than other OECD nations when it comes to classroom management practices.

“As many as 40 per cent of students in Australia are unproductive in a given year,” the report says, “Teachers find this very stressful and are calling out for more support.”

The institute recommends universities sharpen their focus on behavioural management as a part of general teaching degrees, so teachers are better able to deal with challenging situations when they’re in front of a class.