The graduate teacher workforce: shaping teacher quality

This paper presents findings from an Australian large-scale longitudinal study designed to generate an evidentiary basis for policy decisions regarding teacher education and beginning teaching. The Studying the Effectiveness of Teacher Education (SETE) study investigated the career progression of graduate teachers from teacher education into teaching employment, tracking their perceptions over time on the relevance and effectiveness of their teacher education programs and their experience of beginning teaching. This paper examines notions of ‘preparedness’ and ‘effectiveness’ during the first years of teaching. We think of preparedness and effectiveness in terms of the graduate teachers’ attitudes and beliefs (Löfström & Poom-Valickis, 2013) about their own preparedness and effectiveness in relation to context (Alton-Lee, 2003) and personal qualities and variables (Beijaard, Verloop, & Vermunt, 2000). The findings support the established view that learning to teach is a continuum involving initial teacher education, induction into the profession and then ongoing professional learning and development (e.g. Conway, Murphy, Rath, & Hall, 2009; Putnam & Borko, 2000). But SETE data shows that this is not linear and that preparedness and effectiveness are not related in ways commonly reflected in the storylines of teacher education entrenched in the schooling and educational policy discourses in Australia. The longitudinal components of the quantitative and qualitative data highlight graduate teachers’ changing perspectives on the effectiveness of their teacher education in preparing them for the diverse contexts in which they begin teaching and their sense of effectiveness as beginning teachers. In respect to thinking about ‘being prepared’ and ‘being effective’, this study furthers the international debate on what matters in the field of teacher education and teacher education research.