ITE unfairly framed a failure in science of learning push: ed psych

So says Penny Van Bergen, professor in educational psychology and head of University of Wollongong's School of Education, who has called out a ‘quite antagonistic’ narrative that now surrounds the science of learning. 

"I do find the framing challenging sometimes, because the framing is very often that we’re going to ‘fix’ initial teacher education,” she tells EducationHQ.  

“And when I look at [the cognitive science content that we teach], from my perspective, that’s work I’ve been teaching for 15 years, and it’s work that I got taught in the early 2000s when I was going through educational psychology classes.”  

Van Bergen says while some have argued the coverage of cognitive science is ‘inconsistent’ across providers nationally, it does the industry “a disservice to pretend that it’s not happening”. 

“I think we actually don’t have very good data on that … I can tell you unequivocally that I can count multiple ed psych colleagues at universities who are doing this work, but I don’t have eyes on every university…” she adds. 

Initial teacher education (ITE) has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, with commentators and researchers declaring a constructivist ‘ideological bias’ amongst academics has left graduate teachers without a solid grounding in evidence-based teaching approaches that are aligned with the science of learning. 

Some more controversial analysis has gone so far as to claim that Australian universities are indoctrinating preservice teachers with ‘woke’ ideologies at the expense of teaching core literacy and numeracy skills. 

Others have advocated for a ‘sustained shake-up’ of the sector to ‘undo decades of neglect’, with Australia said to be a decade behind comparable countries in efforts to improve ITE and bring teachers’ practice up to speed. 

Just last week NSW Education Minister Prue Car fired a shot at universities, saying they needed to ‘lift their game’ when it comes to preparing teachers of the future.

“I just want to urge universities to pay attention to how important it is that university graduates are coming out prepared for the classrooms in NSW to teach explicitly – not just in terms of the curriculum, but also to explicitly teach behaviour in the classroom and the expectation of how our kids behave at school,” she told The Australian.

“…We will do everything we possibly can to address the teacher shortage, we will change the curriculum, we’ll build schools, but we still need teachers coming out as graduates well prepared to be in the classroom,” Car added. 

While Van Bergen welcomes the steely science of learning push, she has concerns about how the movement is playing out. 

For starters, the frequent antagonism directed at ITE is unhelpful, she suggests. 

“[It’s] antagonism towards universities who, ironically, are producing the research that goes into the science of learning. 

“And sometimes [the conversation descends into] almost culture wars about what matters in education. I don’t think either of those are helpful. 

“If we genuinely want evidence-based practice, which we do in education, then we just need to be looking at what works – and we need to adapt with the evidence. 

“And there’s a sense of intellectual humility that comes with saying, ‘Oh, I thought this was best practice, but actually, now I can see this (other) research and maybe adapting to this might be better again,’” she says. 

We need to make sure that the science of learning drive is “there for the right reasons”, Van Bergen asserts. 

“It’s not to bring other people down, actually, we want to bring people along with it.” 

There’s a ‘strange’ expectation that our graduate teachers ought to be entirely classroom ready once they start work, but it’s strong ITE-school partnerships, mentoring and professional learning programs that are critical in helping early career teachers succeed, Van Bergen says. 

Australia also has a peculiar fixation on ITE graduates being entirely ‘classroom ready’ the moment they start work in schools, the expert flags. 

And it’s an impossible expectation that is not so readily applied to those in other sectors, she says. 

“Engineers don’t step out ready, they kind of step out ready for graduate programs. 

“Sometimes the political rhetoric is such that if [preservice teachers] are not raring to go as soon as they step out, that means a failing.

“But actually, of course you’re going to be nervous, and, of course you’re going to have things still to learn…”

This is where high quality ITE-school partnerships, mentoring and professional learning programs step in, Van Bergen says. 

Last year the Government introduced mandatory core content areas for all ITE courses, one being ‘the brain and learning’. 

It will cover working memory limitations, cognitive load, spaced practice, and the importance of prior knowledge.

While Van Bergen says there’s not much that she disagrees with in here, the mandate does raise a few bigger questions considering it is ‘unprecedented’ in Australian higher education. 

“I’m curious to see what it means in terms of regulation more broadly,” she explains. 

There’s also a risk that the core content will result in limited or rote understandings of cognitive science in practice, she warns. 

Van Bergen draws on the ‘controversial’ example of explicit teaching. 

“There is very good evidence that you need explicit teaching for novice learners, who are developing a knowledge base, and that we want that knowledge base [because] it underpins other forms of thinking that are relevant across disciplines. 

“That’s great, but I think in the rush for selling this story about explicit teaching, we’re actually neglecting that that’s not everything that the science of learning says.

“It also says that when you develop expertise, sometimes it gets in the way because you’ve got your own internal expertise competing with the things that you’re being told, [so] you’re actually better off [leading the learning] yourself,” she explains. 

The core content also doesn’t touch on what ‘deep encoding’ is and what it looks like in different disciplines, Van Bergen suggests. 

“So, we’re talking about how you move information from working memory into long-term memory, and there are different ways of doing that that make a difference for how well you retain and can apply information later."

The mandatory content should also change over time to reflect emerging evidence, and it pays to remember that ITE courses can only cover so much, the expert notes. 

“If I think about everything I would like a preservice teacher to know about educational psychology, about how the mind works, about how cognition interacts with emotion, and relationships and motivation, it’s impossible to get it all done in the amount of time and space we have for it.” 

The Government has proposed a quality assurance board to periodically review core content mandated for initial teacher education. 

Van Bergen says one concern here is that people with ‘conflicts of interest’, namely experts in the cognitive sciences who work in universities, stand to be excluded from the review process. 

“I think that doesn’t quite marry up with the idea that nobody in the initial teacher education knows what they’re doing.

“[This proposal] means you’re also separating yourself from the researchers who do this work, and who have the best eyes on it. 

“If I’m to use an example, John Sweller spent his entire career in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales, he would be an excellent person to be informing some of this. 

“But if you’re shutting universities out of that story, they’re the ones producing the research…”