UTS Digital Generation – Danny Mavromatis

It’s probably time for a little rant on my part. I worry about the prospects facing us as teachers in our first year of full-time teaching. It seems to me that the current system of assimilating graduate teachers is inherently flawed and in need of reform. Let me explain why.

We come out of our university training all fired up with a burning desire to avoid direct instruction teaching (yuck!) and put the theories of student-centred learning such as constructivism and discovery based pedagogies into practice. But what are we typically faced with? We will be teaching an average of five classes each day. Every Maths teacher I have spoken to has told me that we will be leaning heavily on textbooks. When you have to prepare lesson plans for five lessons per day together with all the administration matters, preparing assessments and marking, is it reasonable to expect a teacher to produce a great student-centred lesson for every class? Bear in mind that such lessons require a great deal more planning than following a textbook.

On top of all this we are being encouraged to incorporate technology into our lessons to make them more appealing to the ‘digital generation’. We all agree that this would be a good thing, but who will have the time to do the legwork required? The sad truth is that most beginning teachers will resort to teacher-centred instruction with perhaps a smattering of other approaches as time and opportunity permit. What is even sadder is that, in this all-important first year, a pattern will have been established and it will be difficult to break out of it. For many the die will have been cast even when pressures ease in subsequent years (assuming the teacher survives their first year).

A related problem is the reinvention of the wheel that seems to occur throughout the education system. In teaching practice, schools are islands that are cut off from each other. Even within a school each teacher is usually left to their own devices in preparing course work. In my experience I observed very little sharing of lesson resources. This simply has to change in future if we don’t want teachers to end up teaching out of textbooks.

A rethink is sorely needed in the way that new teachers are thrown into the workforce. Obviously mentoring and support will vary from school to school. However, I believe a more consistent approach is necessary. One suggestion I have heard, and with which I agree, is that new teachers should be allocated only a half-workload in their first year. This would certainly enable them to be more courageous and creative with their lesson planning than has to be the case at present.

There is one ray of light in all this gloom that I only just discovered today during the “Portfolio” lecture. Apparently the NSW DET Centre for Learning Innovation (CLI) has been in the process of developing multi-media teaching resources for some time now. Why weren’t we made aware of this in our course earlier in the year? I, for one, could have incorporated some of the content in my lessons during first practicum when I was teaching using an Interactive Whiteboard. My feeling is that such initiatives will be invaluable to teachers in the near future to ease their workload and improve student outcomes as they draw upon such rich resources to formulate lessons.