What are we paying for in teacher training?
Survey headline results
From October 20 to November 4, 2024, I ran a Google Forms survey about teacher training. I promoted this survey via my own social media accounts on Substack, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. The survey collected no names, email addresses, dates of birth or any other key identifying data. Instead, it asked participants about their experiences training. Overall, there were 1045 responses of which 378 were from those who stated they trained in Australia and 143 were from those who stated they trained in Australia from 2014 onwards. I wanted to see how the Australian experience compared with the experience worldwide on a number of issues. I was also interested to find out whether the situation had changed in recent years.
I anticipate this being the first of a few posts on the topic and I only intend to present initial highlights here. I probably have enough responses from England to analyse those separately. There are also some questions specific to primary education that I will not report on in this post.
This is not meant to be a piece of peer-reviewed research, just a survey of my various groups of followers and their networks. I have not tried to compute margins of error or any other such statistics because the data is probably not rigorous enough to justify such an analysis.
Learning styles
I asked respondents whether they recalled learning styles being discussed during the university component of their course. 69% of all those surveyed recalled learning styles being discussed and 72% of those who stated they were trained in Australia recalled learning styles being discussed. Of those who stated they were trained in Australia in the last ten years, 83% recalled learning styles being discussed.
Is this a concern or a good thing? Learning styles are a classic neuromyth. Although people will express a preference to learn via one particular mode or another, a review of the educational psychology literature does not support the idea of tailoring teaching to specific learning styles. So, it could be a good thing if all these teacher training courses were discussing learning styles as an example of a myth about teaching.
Unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case. Respondents who stated learning styles were discussed were then asked in what terms the idea was presented on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being strongly negative and 5 being strongly positive. For all respondents, the average was 3.9, for those who stated they were trained in Australia, it was 4.0, and for those who who stated they were trained in Australia in the last ten years, the average was 3.6. So, learning styles have been presented positively, although perhaps less positively in the most recent Australian cohort. This positive framing is an ongoing concern.
Explicit teaching / direct instruction
The same question was asked about explicit teaching / direct instruction. Only 44% of all respondents recalled these teaching methods being discussed. This is worrying, given the evidence we have for the effectiveness of explicit teaching approaches.
For those who stated they trained in Australia, this figure was 43%, and for those trained over the last ten years it was 58%. That seems like progress, if rather incremental. Overall, these methods seem to have been presented neutrally, with the scale hovering around the midpoint of three (3.1, 3.0 and 3.0 respectively). One respondent who stated they trained in Australia in the last ten years commented that:
“I think sometimes they say that they’re teaching something like Explicit instruction, but sometimes it is just tick a box. Some are very against explicit instruction and make it known in their views.”
This may be a factor in the mixed results.
Inquiry learning
In contrast to explicit teaching, inquiry learning seems to have been universally popular. 76% of all respondents, 84% of those who stated they trained in Australia and a whopping 94% of those who trained in Australia in the last ten years recalled it being discussed. It was also presented overwhelmingly positively (4.3, 4.5 and 4.5 respectively).
This is a major concern because the evidence simply does not support inquiry learning, especially for novices learning new concepts.
Piaget’s Stage Theory
Idiosyncratically, I asked a question on Piaget’s stage theory because I remembered it from my own training and I recall being surprised when I read that it was not really supported by the evidence. As Dan Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, states:
“Unfortunately, Piaget’s theory is not right. He is credited with brilliant insights and many of his observations hold true—for example, kindergartners do have some egocentrism and 9-year-olds do have some trouble with highly abstract concepts. Nonetheless, recent research indicates that development does not proceed in stages after all.”
Piaget’s stage theory suggests that children pass through a series of discrete stages of development. As such, it echoes much earlier progressivist ideas from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Herbert Spencer. However, Piaget’s more recent work makes it seem more scientific and perhaps this is why we still frequently hear the complaint that teaching young children certain things would be ‘developmentally inappropriate.’
How did respondents answer on the survey? It seems Piaget’s theory is still current in teacher education:
This raises an interesting question about why a relatively obscure theory is such a cornerstone of teacher education across the world. I suspect the answer is that it aligns so well with progressivist ideology.
Cognitive Load Theory
I did not expect cognitive load theory to feature highly in teacher education, but I did wonder if there had been an uptick in Australia in the last ten years.
This does seem to be the case. Overall, 17% of all teachers and 17% of Australian teachers remember it being discussed. However, 34% of more recent Australian trainees reported it being discussed. When presented, all groups judged it as being presented somewhat favorably (3.5, 3.3, 3.5).
You probably expect me to suggest this is not good enough, and it’s not. Whatever your issues with cognitive load theory, it has a far more sound empirical basis than Piaget’s stage theory, yet teacher education seems to have that precisely the wrong way around.
Classroom management
Perhaps the most significant, if unsurprising, finding is about classroom management. I asked, “To what extent did your university experience prepare you to manage challenging classrooms?” Respondents answered on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 5 (extremely well). The average for all respondents was 2.0, for Australian respondents it was 1.8 and for Australian respondents who trained over the last ten years, it was 1.7.
Why might this be the case? I suspect it is due to teacher trainers subscribing to Romantic and impractical views of young people. If you believe that all behaviour is communication and poor behaviour is the communication of an unmet need, you won’t teach trainees about rules, routines and consequences, or strategies such as the use of proximity.
What does this mean?
If my data is representative, it suggests students are receiving a poor deal from teacher training. Australian student debt is now at such a level that the government recently decided to cut it by a flat 20%. What is it that Australian trainee teachers are paying for? Moreover, the move in 2017 to make all graduates study a two-year Masters of education instead of a one-year diploma exacerbated this situation by increasing the debt burden of these courses while also doubling the amount of time trainees spend without drawing a salary. As one Australian respondent noted:
“[I] [c]ompleted a Masters (the Diploma had just been discontinued) and had the distinct sense the course was artificially inflated to fill 2 years.”
This is a scandal. If teacher training courses do not add value, if they teach concepts that have long been superseded, and if they largely ignore concepts with a greater evidence base, while being so hidebound to ideology that they leave trainees ill equipped for basic classroom management, they are not worth the cost.
Instead, we should be recruiting graduates of conventional degrees and training them on the job. Such courses are unlikely to be much better than the ones currently on offer in universities — there was considerable agreement by Australian respondents that their teaching placements exposed them to flawed ideas — but they would cost students and taxpayers less and would be less of a barrier to entering the profession.
More to come.
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I honestly think the bigger sins of ITE are of omission rather than commission.
Yes they talk some nonsense, but the real problem is that they practice what they preach - they refuse to explicitly tell you much at all. It was all reflection journals and discussions where they ask what *we* think we should do. And exactly zero "this is how to handle this scenario" or "here's the best way to teach something like this".
Not once did you come out a lesson firmly knowing something that you didn't know going in.
I wouldn't assume that by getting schools to do the teaching rather than universities it will be any better (unless we have 'teaching schools'). I see no evidence that debunked teaching philosophies are less prevalent in schools than in university education departments. I work in teacher training I have noticed that experienced teachers doing additional degrees (e.g. M. Ed.) are more likely to believe in myths like learning styles - and they've usually been in schools for over a decade. Same with student teachers' experiences on placement. They learn all kinds of nonsense from practising teachers. Although as the author points out, this is such a skewed dataset at the outset (self-selected from a potentially quite ideologically homogenous group) I'm not sure much can be inferred from it that most fans of this blog don't already believe.