Supporting Pre-Service and Early Career Teachers in Australia: Design for a Learning Network

Nick KellyThe University of Southern Queensland

• Why?

• Design for a learning network

• And then…

• “Altruistic communities”• Motivation• League tables of…?• PageRank

Image credit: Dewy Spider Web by User:Fir0002 Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

(Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002)

Behaviour change (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002)Theory of reasoned action (Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980)

Pre-service and early career teachers

• Transition• Challenges• Attrition

• Role of support

“The factors with the strongest effect were having a mentor teacher from one’s subject area and having common planning or collaboration time with other teachers in one’s subject area” (Ingersoll, 2012)

What is support?

• Mentor• Orientation program• Reduced face-to-face• Follow up from TEP• Structured observation/reflection

24% primary no support14% secondary no support

(McKenzie et al 2007)

19% unprompted negative comment(Kelly et al, 2014)

“Limited support. A mentor teacher was assigned to me but her workload was such that there was little time to effectively help. Sink or swim!”(Kelly et al, 2014)

Who is unsupported?

• Remote teachers

– 27% unsupported (17% for non-remote)

• Insecure employment

– 25% unsupported (15% for supported)

• Dissatisfied

– Approx 30% unsupported (18% for satisfied)

(SiAS data, 2007; n=1862)

What happens to a cohort

after higher education?

(institutions/organisations)

The Learning Place

PLANE

Scootle Community

Facebook

(user initiative)

Total

Resource sharing

Resource requesting

Practice sharing

Practice requesting

Social

Commercial

Other

Analysing Facebook

Email 44 71%

Facebook 29 47%

In Person 22 35%

Telephone 14 23%

Other 3 5%

Twitter 0 0%

How did you stay in touch with university community?(Kelly et al, 2014; n=62)

Design principles (95% agreement):

• Ask questions of experienced teachers

• Easily searchable and moderated FAQ from all 1st year teachers in the country

(N=118, Kelly et al 2014)

Stack Overflow(Mamykina et al, 2011)

• Enhanced Q&A• 5 million users• 11 minutes

(after Carvalho and Goodyear, 2014)

• Set design

• Social design

• Epistemic design

• Empirical foundation– (Survey, bigger survey, analysis)

• Design-based– (Development, focus group, engagement)

• Theory based critique

Set Design

• Context– Physical, cultural, historical

• Threshold for involvement

• Device

• Aesthetic

• When?

• Motivations

Social design

• Who?

• Interaction

– Affordance

– Default

• Differentiation

• Closed

Design for co-creation of knowledge

• Emergent

• Implied by:– Media

– Seeding

– First peoples

• Motivation

• Role of theory

• Relational agency (Edwards, 2005)

• Resource sharing

• Reflection on practice (Griffiths, 2000)

• Reflection on practice (Dewey, Schön)

“…making preconceptions explicit through a study of autobiographical accounts can enable pre-service teachers to begin the transformation of personal experience into personal and professional knowledge” (Griffiths 2000, p547)

Challenges

1. Trust- Joint reflection (Wopereis et al, 2010)

2. Clarity- How to ask (Mamykina et al, 2011)

3. Stability- Responsibility, interiorizing (Gelfuso & Denis, 2014)

…with massification(Clara et al, 2014)

Towards…

• Teachers in research

• Connection (hub)

• Analysis

• Design principles

An invitation

2014 S2 – Pilot (USQ + Griffith)

2015 S1 – Expanded pilot (+QUT,+CQU,+UQ,+?)

2015 S2 – Nationwide