Piloting Teacher Education Practicum Partnerships: Teaching Alliances for Professional Practice (TAPP)

Universities and teacher professional learning in the new policy context of teacher accreditation

“…For example, recently the NSW Department of Education (DoE) advertised two tender applications for professional learning providers to co-design state-wide contextually relevant school leadership professional learning courses that are owned and funded by the Department but include postgraduate credentialing (e.g., participants who complete the course receive credit that can be used in future postgraduate studies) and accredited professional learning (participants can claim professional learning for teacher accreditation). This is an interesting partnership arrangement that has the potential to mitigate some of the complexities of traditional partnerships such as university academics perceived as outsiders (Grundy et al, 2001), lack of funding (Mockler, 2013) and one-sided benefits (Kertesz & Downing, 2016). While there is sparse research in the field of co-design and teacher professional learning, one report associated with the NSW DoE co-design partnership suggests that the co-design was beneficial because it utilised four key principles: 1) an agreed moral purpose and agenda of improving student learning outcomes as drivers for decision-making; 2) ongoing generative dialogue where diverse expertise and opinions were shared and considered; 3) context immersion where the design and delivering of the program was aligned to the school policy landscape; and, 4) purposeful slowing down of decision-making to ensure design making by the project team was collaborative through deliberate consideration of multiple perspectives (Lipscombe, Bennett, Kidson, Gardiner, & McIntyre, 2019b).…”

“…Benefits of school-university partnerships include increased sense of community (Bentley-Williams, Grima-Farrell, Long, & Laws, 2017;Forgasz, 2016); greater opportunities to try new ideas (Hudson, Hudson, & Adie, 2015); deeper reflections on teaching and learning (Ward & Hart, 2013); and, opportunities for teachers to develop their capacity as leaders (McQuirter, Dortmans, Rath, Meeussen, & Boin, 2015). Important to note is the significance of mutual benefit for both schools and universities (Bernay, Stringer, Milne, & Jhagroo, 2020;Kertesz & Downing, 2016;Lipscombe, Tindall-Ford, & Kirk, 2019a;Walkington, 2007) where both institutions work towards collaborative improvements.…”