Ispiring teachers? It's more like unpaid(?) ALP advertising to promote current state elections.

What the heck is it doing here on these pages?

Tut-tut, naughty.

The comment

"A great teacher knows both the content of their subjects back to front, and how best to teach that content to their students"

is good and obvious. However, the modern school syllabi in almost all cases have downgraded content. Content and facts have almost dissapeared from some syllabi. For example, the new Qld Physics syllabus has a single completely unhelpful page on content. It does not say what will be taught even though it is a 30 odd page document.

You are right, we need to encourage great teachers, but we must do something about the crazy syllabi as well.

Well done Jenny,
"I may not agree with you all the time but I will defend your right of free speech."
My teacher never got the quote right,and I have suffered all my life.
Good teachers like good parents are so important.
Some children are naturally gifted and no matter what stands in their way they will always finsh up on top.
I like many writers have been lucky enough to be taught at primary school by a remarkable teacher.
She was awarded the C.B.E. by the Queen for services to teaching.
My brother became a judge and I a City Councvillor,my sister the salt of the earth the mpother of two children both successful people.
From little things grow big trees.
Well Done Jenny,state election or not,who cares.

Jenny,

I think that is the most simplistic piece of rubbish I have read for some time. Great teachers inspire students to great feats of scholarly brilliance? Many of the State Labor Government funded schools are so poor and so badly resourced, paying teachers $10K more would never compensate for the fundamental shortcomings in teaching aids and infrastructure. You could pay them $20K more and they will still fail to lift student standards. The money needs to go into the very basics, some school in the southern suburbs of Brisbane for example, are so poorly resourced teachers are subsidising student education with their own money. They are so poorly resourced that 12 year olds have reading ages of 7 year olds.

You and your Labor mates need to stop tinkering around the edges and have a real good look at your funding history and hang you heads in shame. The equalitarian Labor Party has presided over the formation of an intellectual up and under class in this country. You have no right to come to this forum with your advertising hype!

Jenny, there’s some truth to what Woody has said. But there is also some recognition in your piece that current state governments have no idea or interest in putting the teaching profession up there ^ where it belongs.

The most critical flaw in your proposal is that you have not examined curriculum in teacher education at all.

See Kevin Donnelly's tripe here on line opinion - about Leftist teaching for instance and you'll understand how the Howard government has created a crisis in education just for ideological reasons.

Labor needs to understand the education wars. You fail to address this at all in your piece.

Its a hodge podge of progressive and draconian methods and approaches to teaching and learning for pre-service teachers.

Labor needs to invest from the first year in teacher education, not try and fix them after they have graduated.

And guess what Jen; the best and brightest do not always make the best teachers too. (what a stupid myth) Many good teachers are born, the others simply work hard at it against the odds and many don't give stuff and just roll with the flow. Sadly many good one have just given up waiting for change

Jenny,

Interesting article. I am a registered high school teacher who, in principle, agrees with the concept of rewarding excellent teaching. Primarily for the reason that their seems a current generation of teachers reluctant to engage with their students in meaningful ways. For example, I often see great, modern, useful technologies being blocked at the staffroom door as teachers struggle to even check their email daily.

However, as previous posters have pointed out, there currently exists a massive gulf between the top and the bottom schools - even within the government sector. So it seems unreasonable to apply the same criteria to all teachers when assessing their excellence.

So how do you (Labor) propose to accurately judge an excellent teacher while taking into account the socioeconomic status of their school, their class sizes, their school's level of resourcing, the number of special needs students in their classes and the myriad other differences that make every school environment unique?

This is a pretty damn shallow article. The section that really got me was this:

"Labor will not have any truck with setting teacher against teacher"

and later on that same line: "Parents and children need governments to reward our best teachers"

Wait a minute... let's actually analyse this instead of getting all gushy.

Reward our best teachers... but I'm assuming this means just the best? or the would have said something along the lines of bumping up all teachers pay, regardless of competence.

So... how are you going to reward good teachers without pitting them against the less impressive teachers?
I can only conclude that this article has been written without actually seriously considering the issue.

Don't get me wrong - I'll take labor over liberals any day, and I definitely don't support a merit based system for teachers.

(though I'd go along with an increase in pay to increase applican numbers, but a hike in requirements to weed out less impressive teachers)

Though this article irks me. There's not much to argue with because it's so simple. Makes me feel like the labor party assumes voters are idiots and are treating them like children... I just wish they'd wake up so it would be easier to vote for them. Sometimes they just make it so damn difficult.

Grizzle... hmmph. That post was probably a little too harsh, but I stand by it until someone can demonstrate a merit based system that will take into account the sad fact that not all students are equal either.

And seriously labor... get some hardcore policies out there. Even if they're flawed, at least demonstrate you're actually considering how to tackle these issues instead of considering how to look like you're tackling them.

TurnRightThenLeft the phrase "turn teacher against teacher" refers to the situation in Victoria in the mid 1990s when principals identified low performing, inexperienced or troublesome teachers for dismissal in return for bonus payments before having the same process used on them.

From my perspective in Victoria I see many permanent teachers aged over 50, few permanent teachers in their 20s and 30s. Younger teachers who have attained permanent positions had to prove themselves through years of contract employment, usually being hired from term 1 to term 4. Often contract teachers are the professionally dressed people found in the Centrelink queues.

Additionally the teacher registration process makes stringent demands of teachers applying for registration and the process is unable to be completed by teachers who don't have permanent employment.

Yes, Victoria has a looming crisis in teacher numbers but its easier for a Victorian graduate who hasn't got a permanent position to work in UK or NZ to get the experience and circumvent the registration process. The registration process is an insurmountable hurdle for the large numbers of graduate teachers who have only got casual relief teaching. There are 1200+ provisionally registered teachers in Melbourne metro. Personal observation in north east victoria indicates that school principals prefer to hire graduates of city campuses rather than their local regional campus.

Christie Hurley said she wouldn't get out of bed for less than $10,000 per day and most posters on this forum wouldn't study to become a teacher given the current situation of

1. HECS debt of $100,000
2. pay rates of $47,000 in Victoria
3. up to 15 years of contract employment
4. some children are wild uncontrollable monsters
5. in the near future all teachers will have to undergo a rigorous reaccreditation process every 3 years, possibly through further training, in own time, at own expense
6. develop own teaching materials and keep it up to date
7. comply with all mandatory reporting regimes in place
8. provide meaningful feedback to parents about lazy little Johnie's progess without being sued, destroying Johnie's ego and within the new reporting framework

I have to stipulate that HECS debts to enter teaching are nowhere near $100K. In fact, many Faculties of Education around Australia are suffering financially because faculties offering core services such as nursing and teaching are not allowed to increase student HECS contributions by 25% (like other faculties such as medicine... which QLD has just discovered is a core public service?) But then again, tertiary education has been suffering under the neoliberal policy of "let's keep removing until things fall over - then we'll know where the limit is".

Yes, Jenny Macklin's piece is somewhat simplistic - like most other political discussions on the topic of education (including Kevin Donnelly's) but, you know, I have to say that I prefer her respectful approach to teachers over Julie Bishop's roasting of latent "Maoist" ideologues (although I think perhaps she was aiming for academics like myself?) At the end of the day, Labor is failing to stand up for something that the nation can believe in: fundamentally, that freedom and agency is something that has to be developed and that education is the medium which provides the highest chance of that happening. Without a decent public education system, we are consigning the most vulnerable in our society to their fate (and their subsequent generations - just look at the Gini coefficient and social mobility stats for the US!) Unfortunately, Federal Labor cannot ignore what some of their State counterparts have allowed to happen in the name of progress, marketisation and "keeping up with the Libs".

There is mounting evidence that shows neoliberal policies in public service provision exact much collateral damage. Have the courage to stand for something else, Labor - the reason no one's voting is because there seems little alternative.

I agree with the need to lift the status and pay of the teaching profession. What should be considered, however, is how do you judge the best teachers? It's already been mentioned above that so many variables, such as different schools, socio-economic situation of students etc, etc, make objective comparisons difficult.

So, what is required is a way of measuring teacher excellence that is less dependent of simple objectifiable outcomes, such as TEE/HSC scores. More attention to the input of the "consumers" of the service provided by teachers is one method. In other words, ask the kids and their parents who the best teachers are, ask the teachers' colleagues and school administrations and councils and parents organisations. Also, the level of prefessional development, post graduate qualifications and other standards-based approaches should be used.

I'm confident that an "index of competence" can be constructed from these diverse measures that could support any application by a teacher to be considered as an "excellent teacher".

What an amazing load of dribble. A pile on the rhetoric of weasel words, this is just an outpouring straight from the emotional faucet, plucking at the heart strings and avoiding the benefits of objective performance measurement (the sort of objective performance measurement which students will face when they leave school and start life in the working world).

Regarding the Prime Ministers expressions of the activities of some in the teaching unions,

Kevin Donnelly (http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3787) rightly points out in his article of the corrupting influence which Pat Byrne and the AEU would inflict on the impressionable minds of children.

“The AEU told classroom teachers to tell students that the US-led war was illegal, that allied troops should be immediately withdrawn and to "support students who take an anti-war stance".

Kevin also points out

Victorian Ex premier, when education minister, “Joan Kirner once argued that the work of schools had to be radically redefined. Instead of education being impartial, she said, it had to become "part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system".

My personal view is teachers should not do the political bidding of their union leaders, in short, teachers are not, as was promoted by Kirner and the secretary of AEU, there to indoctrinate children into the right way of thinking as a “socialist”.

Excellent teachers do not simply regurgitate a syllabus, the real process of teaching is to develop skill, enthusiasm and energy in students so the student is able to go and find out for themselves how to find out for themselves.

I notice you are big on throwing dollars around, that is just hackneyed political pork barreling.

Travellingnorth “I'm confident that an "index of competence" can be constructed from these diverse measures that could support any application by a teacher to be considered as an "excellent teacher".”

I agree with you, so we find out who are the excellent and who are, well, less than excellent and who are blithering incompetents.

How do we get rid of the “less than excellent and incompetents”?

Compared with other professions, the entrance bar into universities seems low. Should be at least one standard deviation over the mean of the matricvulating population (c. 85th percentile). Given that situation and other positive personal qualities, higher salaries would seem to be in order.

For teaching couples, there are better teaching opportunities offshore. Much of the first salary needs to go to cover higher living costs, the second salary can be saved.