The teachers we already have

Why improving initial teacher training should lead to greater investment in professional learning.

Recently, a former student, now an economics teacher in England, got in touch for some advice about teaching economics. It’s great when someone you taught turns up years later as a colleague, even if it does remind you how old you’re getting.

Hearing from him got me thinking about my own teacher training back in 2005 and the NQT year that followed. I reminisced a little…. It was a fun time, I had great support from my Head of Department and cracking mentor, and experienced some excellent training around behaviour management. I started out in a tough school and it was a real baptism of fire. I do also remember some bonkers practices and plenty of twilight CPD sessions on topics, many of which have since been debunked.

Aside from some great memories of my early career, I remember a lot of pointless admin. We had 3 page lesson plans to write for every lesson; I actually remember being excited given we’d had to do 9 page plans during my training placements. There were the frustrations of a corrupted floppy disc that had held your lesson resources on a day you were subjected to another judgemental observation. I also have a bizarre memory of a Deputy Head questioning my choice of using a backpack, suggesting they were for students and teachers should be using a briefcase or pull-along trolley! I now have a briefcase, so he’d be happy!

What I do not remember, though is receiving anything close to a proper explanation of how learning happens that I see trainees now getting. Back in 2005, no one at my university or in my training schools knew to tell me about the limits of working memory or how prior knowledge changes what a student can think about or learn. My course didn’t offer anything about performance vs learning, retrieval practice, the novice-expert distinction or the worked-example effect. What it did focus heavily on was maximum engagement, differentiating lessons for almost everyone and being a ‘guide on the side’, getting out of the students’ way so they could take charge of their own learning.

Looking back, I cringe at some of the lessons I taught that I thought were decent. Plenty of marketplace activities where kids became ‘experts’ in a slice of the content then proceeded to ‘teach’ their peers as they learnt from them, and delivering lessons where everyone had a role in a business scenario to demonstrate a concept like cashflow forecasting. There were some fun lessons that definitely weren’t too bad but the main learning was often secondary to the ‘activity’…like having my Year 13s drink successive cups of fizzy pop to illustrate diminishing marginal utility or adding more students to a tennis-ball production line to show the law of variable proportions as they got in each other's way, lowering total output as more joined.

The problem was that I spent far more time setting up activities or designing them in the first place. I’d rarely have any control, or awareness, over what students were thinking about and less time was dedicated to how I would explain the underlying ideas and what I would do afterwards to make sure the economics, rather than the fun activity, was remembered.

It took getting on Twitter, some great blogs and a decent conference to get me to start questioning what I thought I knew about teaching. By then, I’d already spent way too long doing things less effectively in the classroom. Back then, observations were focused on demonstrating progress within a lesson…we were judged on student performance, which we know now to be a poor proxy for learning.

I was pretty angry that I had gotten so far into my career without knowing about much of this stuff. I remember feeling cheated that many of these ideas I’d been learning about were shown to be fundamental to teaching effectively and yet had somehow never crossed my path.

At the time, my team and I set about reforming our Business and Economics curriculum by stripping out ‘pointless’ activities, sequencing knowledge more carefully and changing how we explained, modelled, questioned and built practice into lessons. It took time and plenty of iterations, but student outcomes began improving almost straight away, and most interestingly, so did engagement and student perceptions of our lessons…even though the ‘fun’ activities had been binned.

My former student has entered the world of teaching at a very different point from where I started out.

Teacher training in England

Early Career Teachers (ECT) now have an induction period of 2 years and they are well supported with the Initial Teacher Training and Early Career Framework. It sets out what every trainee and ECT is entitled to in the way of the core body of knowledge, skills and the behaviours that define great teaching.

Of course, teaching will always be more complex than what goes into a framework, but what is different now is that new teachers have way better guidance and a sound idea of what good teaching looks like. I'd have loved to have something close to that back when I was learning.

Australia is doing the same

Moving to Queensland had me swotting up on the Australian system. In 2023, the Australian Government’s Strong Beginnings report recommended mandatory core content for Initial Teacher Education, with Ministers agreeing that the new content should be embedded in all ITE programmes by the end of 2025. Decent funding was also provided to help universities adapt and bring about the change.

The report covers all the core knowledge teachers need including the differences between novices and experts, working and long-term memory, prior knowledge, schemas, mastery and common neuromyths. It ensures new teachers know about explicit teaching, modelling, worked examples, scaffolding, formative assessment, spacing, retrieval practice and lesson sequencing.

How much of this will survive once they start teaching?

Penny Van Bergen writes that teaching the content is only part of the job. Teachers also need enough research literacy to judge how strong the evidence is, how well findings apply across different ages and contexts, and what can get lost when research is translated into classroom practice.

Sometimes, good ideas will get misunderstood or changed so much that they become ‘no longer effective, or even counter-productive’. Dylan Wiliam calls them ‘lethal mutations’, a term he and Kate Jones use in this article, which is well worth a read. Retrieval practice is used as an example…It starts as a perfectly sensible idea about strengthening memory and somehow ends up as 5 questions at the start of every lesson because ‘we do retrieval here’. The underlying reason is long gone. Teachers need to know why they are doing something, what the research says and whether it makes sense with those students, in that subject, at that point in the lesson sequence. Otherwise we end up blindly doing something because somebody told us it was good practice.

The problem with waiting

Improving what new teachers learn is crucial and has to happen but most teachers in schools aren’t new. The latest AITSL workforce data estimates that around 22% of Australia’s teachers are in their first 5 years, so most of the profession is already well beyond their early career stage.

Even teachers entering schools in 2027 may have completed much of their training before the new requirements were introduced. Postgraduate routes can take 18 months or 2 years, while students starting a 4 year undergraduate degree in 2026 may not graduate until 2029. If we rely on ITE reform to do all the work, we'll be waiting a long time before most teachers have been through the new training.

And then there’s what happens when new teachers arrive in schools. They’ll join departments, get mentors, watch other people teach and very quickly learn “how things are done round here”. A graduate will arrive knowing about cognitive load, explicit teaching and retrieval practice, but are then surrounded every day by entrenched habits and beliefs about teaching, they may inherit curriculum and lesson plans already in place. Those established routines could easily become more influential than what they learnt at uni.

So we can’t just expect new teachers to rock up with their new learning into schools and hope the existing teachers pick it all up through osmosis. Which makes investing in the teachers already in schools even more important given they are the people who’ll be supporting and influencing the newbies.

Dylan Wiliam made a similar argument back in 2013 when he called it the 'love the one you're with' strategy, claiming that improving teaching across a system required investing in the teachers already working in schools.

The 78% already teaching

There are things you pick up through years of teaching that no training framework can really give you. It’s that intuition; you know where kids are going to get stuck before you've even started teaching a topic, when an explanation has lost half the class and when you're flogging a dead horse and need to try a different explanation. Experienced teachers develop all sorts of instincts and habits that are difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t spent years in a classroom.

I remember the relief when I started reading more about explicit instruction. All those lessons where I’d run out of time to plan something all-bells-and-whistles and ended up explaining the economics, drawing diagrams, asking questions and getting students to practise were probably some of my better ones! Yet I’d feel slightly guilty about lessons like that. I’d been trained to think a good lesson needed loads going on… activities, movement, choice and students discovering things for themselves. It took me far too long to shake that off.

There is, however, an important distinction between being an experienced teacher and being an expert one. Paul Kirschner, Carl Hendrick and Jim Heal explore this in the opening chapter of How Teaching Happens, drawing on David Berliner’s research. Berliner argued that experience alone won’t necessarily make someone an expert, and that the conditions teachers work in have a powerful influence on how their expertise develops.

Rob Coe describes teacher expertise as a balance of knowledge, skills and judgement. I particularly like the emphasis on judgement. It's what you need when a lesson starts going differently from the one you'd planned.

We can get beyond those ‘it works for me’ chats and talk about why we are making particular choices, what we think they are doing and whether they are actually working.

Developing the teachers we already have

The Centre for Independent Studies looked at this in its report Implementing the Science of Learning: Teacher Experiences. One of the biggest examples it describes is Catholic Education Canberra and Goulburn’s Catalyst programme, which covered more than 1,700 teachers across 56 schools. The reported cost of retraining was around $3,000 to $4,000 per teacher, not cheap.

NSW Education has also developed material around how learning happens, covering all the important ‘how we learn’ stuff, alongside its wider work on explicit teaching.

The Australian Government has also funded microcredentials via Adelaide University available for practising teachers. These include courses on Classroom Management, Explicit Teaching and Phonics, available to teachers and other school-based educators as free online CPD. But whether a teacher is aware of or gets access to any of it still depends on where they teach, which system they are in, what their school prioritises and whether someone in their school has the knowledge to share the information with them.

Queensland is a good example of the difference between doing professional development and developing professionally. The Queensland College of Teachers requires fully registered teachers who teach at least 20 days in a calendar year to complete 20 hours of CPD. That could be 20 hours carefully planned around developing particular areas of expertise, with opportunities to practise, receive feedback and improve. Or it could be 20 unrelated hours accumulated throughout the year. Both satisfy the requirement, but you’d likely expect very different results.

What professional learning can do

Rob Coe and Stuart Kime recently argued that we need a revolution in professional learning. They argue that schools need to give teachers proper time to develop their expertise and make a serious attempt to find out whether any of it is changing what happens in classrooms.

Coe and Kime describe professional learning through goals, understanding, skills and habits. That’s useful as it stops us imagining that explaining an idea to teachers is enough. Hearing about something once in a Thursday afternoon session is not going to do much. Teachers need to understand it, see someone doing it, have a go themselves and get some feedback, adapt it and then probably get it wrong a few times before it becomes part of how they teach.

Take mini-whiteboards. They can be brilliant, but you don’t want them to become something teachers feel they need to use because they’ve appeared in a professional learning session. You want teachers thinking, ‘How can I tell whether everyone has understood this before I move on?’ Sometimes mini-whiteboards will be the obvious answer…and sometimes they won’t. I’d much rather teachers were discussing those decisions than counting how often a particular technique appears across lessons.

I like the simplicity of Coe and Kime’s argument because schools are traditionally good at measuring professional learning by what happened: the session ran, people attended, slides went out and teachers said they enjoyed it. But none of that tells you whether anyone understands something better six weeks later or whether things changed in classrooms.

What we should be checking is whether any of it has made a difference. Did anything change in classrooms, are teachers still doing it long after the session and did students get anything better as a result? It’s hard to know if a January professional learning session nudged GCSE, NAPLAN or ATAR results months later, but we can do better than counting who turned up and asking whether they liked it.

My former student reached because he thought my experience meant I had something useful to tell him, and I hope what I shared helped.

But reading through the framework he’s been trained with made me realise there are probably plenty of things he’s already been taught that took me years to find out about.

I find that exciting, actually. Someone I taught is now entering the same profession with access to knowledge I wish I’d had when I started. I wonder how different my early career might have been if I’d had it.

I think about this in much the same way I think about my own teaching. I want my students to benefit from the knowledge and thinking of people who have spent years developing an understanding of the subject. I’d rather give them access to that knowledge than expect them to spend years discovering it for themselves.

We should want the same for teachers, regardless of whether they’re in their 1st year or their 30th.