[LINK] Reboot ICT teacher training to halt the computing brain drain

[Glen Turner]

Tom Worthington wrote:

> "Teach for Australia" takes new graduates from relevant disciplines and 
> has them teaching in a school after a six week intensive course. That 
> approach could be adapted to take experienced professionals and turn 
> them into teachers: 
> http://www.teachforaustralia.org/content/graduate-program-overview

So what this programme is really saying is that you can take 
specially-selected recent graduates, put then through 6 weeks of training 
rather than the current 24 and with a lot of support they'll teach well. 
That seems reasonable.

But to me it doesn't look like a good basis for widespread teacher 
training. The aim there has to be to take below average inputs and produce 
excellent teachers.

It's my view that the way to do this in schools is to more tightly couple 
the practice and teaching of ICT through more use of "educate the 
educator" structures. One of the disappointments of the National 
Curriculum is that it made education of teachers "someone else's problem" 
whereas increasing knowledge and skill of teachers in ICT is core to what 
they are trying to achieve. For example, there is no funding for centres 
of teaching excellence in ICT -- such as was once done at the Parks 
Computer Centre here in SA. Because of this lack of attention to 
implementation I expect the ICT curriculum to fail.  We'll see, the budget 
is this evening -- if they are serious about successfully teaching ICT 
there will be cash to fund the necessary work.

-glen

-- 
Glen Turner <http://www.gdt.id.au/~gdt/>