How can school leaders better support out-of-field mathematics teachers?
Professor Colleen Vale, a maths-education researcher from Monash University in Victoria, Australia, recently appeared on the Out-Of-Field Teaching Toolkit podcast. (Episode 1, Season 2).
You can listen to the interview or read this lightly edited transcript with highlights in bold and super-highlights in red.
Colleen Vale: I just want to make a shout-out to all of the teachers who are teaching out of field and say thank you, if you weren’t doing it, there’d be lots of students across the country who weren’t studying maths for one, two or three years in a row, or who weren’t studying and having the opportunity to do digital technologies, or who didn’t learn anything about geography. And we know geography is really important now in climate change, work and understanding our planets, too.
Host: So, today, I have Professor Colleen Valle, from Monash University. I’ll start by asking her about herself and where she’s from, and her claim to fame with regard to out-of-field teaching. So, Colleen, so, where are you based?
Collen Vale: I’m at Monash University in the Faculty of Education. I’m a professor of mathematics education there in the new school of curriculum and teaching and inclusion.
Host: Okay, sounds like you were a maths teacher in a past life.
Collen Vale: Yes, I was. I started my career as a math teacher at an all-girl, low socio-economic school. And at the time, we didn’t have any out-of-field math teachers at that school, which is a bit surprising, given it was a low socio-economic school. And also, at the time, they didn’t even have an option of doing your 12, because it had been one of those domestic colleges. So, this is very much the last century kind of thing, the opportunities lacking there.
So, that’s what got me interested in gender, and gender issues in the first place. But I became interested in our field teaching at Monash at Victoria University, and I got involved in a couple of projects there working with out-of-field teachers, and in particular, providing professional learning for those teachers. And that was something that had been was set up back in the 80s, and 90s, and late 80s. Then in the 90s, for teachers in a couple of different regions, firstly, in the Barwon region, and secondly, in the western region of Melbourne.
This [move] hadn’t come up from the top; this has come mostly from school leaders, who were concerned in the first instance, about the ageing, teaching population, especially those who’ve been teaching that upper secondary maths levels in their schools. And they thought, oh, my goodness, we’ve got these out-of-field teachers in our school who are teaching year seven, eight, or nine. And now we’re going to have to ask them to teach years 10, 11 and 12 and we can’t get any replacement teachers.
So, we did a program to provide professional learning for those teachers. And one of the things I learned then, was that it really helped the teachers to know how to teach years 7, 8 and 9 better, because they knew where they were. Their students were going into what were called Horizon knowledge, how they were going to end up using some of these concepts in more sophisticated ways in the upper levels of secondary schooling.
And to avoid creating misconceptions for students in the way that they were approaching the teaching. Then the Western Region school district approached me and asked me to provide professional learning for out-of-field teachers there. And it was a more structured program and focusing on teaching years seven, to nine.
At the time, there were a lot of new schools being built in the out in [Victoria’s] western region. There was an issue there about specialised teachers in any subject area. And the assumption that primary teachers are ready to teach year seven to nine content. So, we were focusing on, you know, as effectively, like teacher education program, really for that group of teachers. It sounds like the training and professional development was at the point of need for those teachers. That wasn’t recognized, were they then anointed as math teachers or those that couldn’t. And this is one of their major issues that arose, some, which we’ll talk about later, no doubt. But there’s only one state left in the country that actually registers teachers according to their specialisation. That means there’s no way of gathering data actually about how many specialist teachers we have for any of the discipline areas. And that’s certainly something that’s needed to really know exactly what’s going on within the state of teachers teaching other fields in whatever subjects.
And one of the things that we’re really calling on is to reinstate the recording of teacher specialisations in registration, not necessarily to be registered as a specialised teacher or something. But that that process should record the disciplines specialisations of secondary teachers.
Host: The way that you framed it, it sounds like in the past, those specialisations were registered, and it’s only New South Wales that sort of hangs on.
Colleen: Yeah, but that was quite a long time ago that though that registration was dropped … last century.
Host: Is there much political will or bi-partisan political will to change?
Colleen: No, neither. That’s one of the reasons we brought together all those people for the [Teaching Across Specialisations – Out-of-Field] summit. It was to raise all of these issues around the life of out-of-field teachers, but also the implications for students across the country. And I’ve been particularly interested in out-of-field math teachers, but it’s not just in mathematics, where we have our field teachers, the highest group is digital technologies. And the next highest group is probably languages and geography.
Host: And religion.
Collen: Yes, it’s across the board, and it’s not going away. But we do need to collect data about the incidence of out-of-field teaching, and where it occurs. And that needs thing to inform policy that’s going support teachers and the school leaders. And certainly, there are some policies about trying to redirect qualified teachers to particular schools and locations – low socio-economic schools, remote, regional and rural schools.
And to some extent, they’re effective, but they’re not long-term solutions. It’s not going to be solved overnight. Some of the modelling that people have done has really shown that that’s not possible. We do have to find other ways.
Currently, the Victorian Government has had a few teachers in the maths and science program that out-of-field teachers can do. One of the things that’s been observed with that is that, yes, [the program] is getting lots of people to do it. But it’s not necessarily the people who are actually teaching out-of-field in the schools that are going and doing – it’s other teachers who are looking at their employment opportunities through this course. And that was something that came up early on in my work with those schools. Quite a few of them did not stay in the schools and went off to positions elsewhere.
So, they saw it’s like their incentive to do it was to retrain and to get more secure employment, maybe permanent employment. That’s one of the fears that I imagined – principals, have we let this person go off and do PD, or principal in a school more than 200k from Melbourne? Does that mean they’ll get a job in a private school in Melbourne now? That’s definitely is a danger.
Host: I’ve mentioned this in one of the other podcasts, there was a Sydney maths teacher who could not get work as a maths teacher – permanent work. So, she retrained as a librarian and was then able to get work. So, there are so many different forces going on. It just blew my mind that someone with that much-needed specialisation just wasn’t picked up. [She said] “I had to keep driving 45 minutes a day through crazy Sydney traffic. I just couldn’t do it [anymore
I wanted to introduce the out of field – teaching across specialisations summit, which is the national symposia. And all of the beautiful papers and the presenters got together and produce this report, which came out on the 30th of June 2022. Can you tell me a bit about that because you’re a signatory to that.
Colleen: We wanted to bring together a whole lot of different people. We were a group of researchers who have been working in different aspects of it for some time, or concerned about it. And we wanted to bring together researchers, people from the [Victorian] Department of Education, and teacher associations. We had people from registration boards as well. And people who were representatives of principals, associations, and so on.
So, we, we had a sort of broad range of people and organised the program around issues about incidences of out-of-field teaching, and we weren’t limited to mathematics, we were looking at, across the field, and issues for leader schools and leaders, and leadership issues for initial teacher education, issues for teacher registration and accreditation of pre-service teacher education programs. And finally, issues from out-of-field teachers themselves. We had quite a broad spectrum.
Through analysing the reports that were presented there, we came up with summaries of the key issues and have put forward a series of recommendations around the five themes that I just mentioned.
One of them, as, as I’ve already mentioned, was the need to have some to have ongoing data collection to really understand the problem, and for whom the problem exists for not just from the point of view of the teachers themselves, but for schools and which schools in what communities. There’s a whole different set of data there because often there’s an assumption that we should collect data about the teachers and how many of them there are, who are teaching, yes, exactly what the shortage is.
But the other side of the equation is the students, how many students are being taught by out-of-field teachers, and really understanding it from that point of view.
And that brings in front of mind for me, equity issues, and social justice issues because I know, my own experience, I was taught by out-of-field teachers two years in a row when I first started secondary school. And there. And when I think about some of the schools and where I’ve done studies, I can imagine that there would some be some students who have been taught by out-of-field teachers.
Host: What was your experience during those first two years? I mean, it’s interesting, you brought that up? That’s a fair while ago, but yeah, did it how did it impact you?
Collen: Well, when I finally got a year 10 teacher in a different school, who actually had some really excellent teaching approaches, I realized that I could do this work. Not that I didn’t think that before, because my initial reaction was, oh, gee, I’m not very good at this subject after all, because my recollection was that I did a lot of teaching of other students when in our classroom.
Host: Were you like a peer tutor?
Colleen: Yes. I was doing better than others, but I’m not so conscious of it in the very early, secondary years. And then once I’d had that positive experience with somebody, then that just encouraged me further. It doesn’t mean that by following teachers, the years after that weren’t necessarily much better, but my confidence was up, and I could roll with the very traditional teacher in the upper secondary school level.
Host: Do you think if you continued to have out of field teachers, or those who were a little bit shaky about the about the mathematical concepts and how to actually teach you the pedagogy would you still have?
Colleen: I don’t know the answer to that. My year 7 maths teacher was good at telling stories and that when the students asked him a question, he then spent half the lesson telling a story. But other students who’ve had that experience in smaller rural schools where there is only one math teacher for you, from years seven to nine in this particular school in one of our studies, and out-of-field and the specialised teacher was teaching years 10, 11 and 12. So, for three years, you were taught by the same person who was not a specialist teacher. Fortunately, the principal there did provide support for that person and found a mentor from within the region who came and helped plan and enable them to talk to that when he spoke to the senior maths teacher. The senior maths teacher was not at all helpful because they said, why? I haven’t had experience and experience of teaching seven to nine, so I don’t know what to do with seven to nine students.
Host: Wow, that’s not helpful, not supportive.
Colleen: Another issue is the nature of the school culture.
Getting back to these themes, one was about the data. The second was about school management and leadership and the issues from the school principals’ point of view what they needed to be aware of, and not just school principals, but the mathematics leaders in schools that are strong here of interest of mine at the moment. And we had some recommendations on initial teacher education, as well as teacher registration, one that I’ve already mentioned. And finally, the nature of professional learning, the wear and tear that needs to happen and be organised.
Certainly, there needs to be recognition in the teacher registration as additional qualifications. But that teacher professional learning happens on a number of different levels. And not just the formal qualifications kind of work. That’s really good. And I’m glad to see it’s starting to happen in Victoria. And it has already happened to some extent in Tasmania, and to some extent, in New South Wales. And in New South Wales, it was a means of getting a registration into another area.
Host: And again, as you’ve already mentioned, some of them are using that to improve their employment possibilities in places where they want to work.
Yes, it’s interesting in New South Wales as well, if you’ve worked in as an out-of-field teacher in an area for two to five years, you can then apply to have that as a specialisation, except if it’s English, or maths. So, they’re kind of like the protected areas.
Colleen: Yes, well, it’s, I suppose, a bit of a recognition of wanting to ensure that [schools] do have the specialist knowledge that they are the two key things in terms of schools’ performances practice, according to literacy and numeracy. NAPLAN data will fit in.
Host: So, I do want to go back to the report, and I’m really keen to sort of unpack the misconceptions or barriers that out-of-field teachers of maths have about how to do it. What do they keep getting wrong? What do they not know,
Colleen: So, I just want to say thanks, because we know that it’s taken you more time to have to think and plan your learning. And some of you haven’t got the support that you would like, either because it’s just not there in your school or because your school isn’t set up to be able to actually give you the support that you need.
It’s not just about you [as the out-of-field teacher] having misconceptions or anything like that. One of the things that tends to happen is that you’re going to be pretty confident in teaching your own subject area, and know what the good teaching practices and what works when you’re teaching whatever your special subject is.
When it comes to maths, you typically revert to what you remember maths teachers doing, which is ‘I do you do’, and very traditional instructional models. But at the same time, you’re aware that ‘I need to be doing these other things because that’s only really going to support proficiencies’ … the fluency, proficiency of recalling. Using rules and procedures, it’s not actually going to get you very far in developing students understanding or their problem solving or their reasoning. So that means you got to step out of that what you traditionally knew. And you know that that’s got to do something to do with what your other practices might be in your other classrooms. Like maybe you’re using group work in science, you’re going to be doing investigations and all those kinds of things. And you have really good relationships probably with students as well. And so, you want to bring that to your maths teaching, and think about how am I do this differently? Because I know this is the way that students like to work, and what are the opportunities and ways that I might be able to do that in the mathematics classroom. And from my work with research of out-of-field teachers in mathematics, people have brought their, under their science inquiry processes, to mathematics to be able to do investigations. But also, to represent particular ideas.
One I love that I saw was when a science teacher was teaching and began to teach equations in the eighth class, and solving equations, he brought a balanced scale to the classroom and put it up there. And that became his introduction. And what we know is so important in understanding algebraic thinking is the idea of equivalence. That’s really clearly demonstrated in the Balance Beam Scale.
Another teacher who was an English teacher, she was able to bring the strategies around vocabulary and language into the classroom. And the way that there could be a stronger emphasis on language in mathematics that we need. So, it’s like articulating all the operations rather than just going this is how you do it. But it’s more about mathematics being about algebra, symbolic representation, and that’s where we work, we write all those things on the board, and that’s on the page. But there are words that go with that. And there are visual representations that go with that.
Some of our teachers coming from other fields, like our English teachers really know how to deal with words, and the different ways in which we can build students’ vocabulary. So those kinds of strategies are very useful in a maths classroom. And also, we want those strategies used because we have lots of non-English speaking background students in our classroom as well. So, think about those positives. One of the teachers that I mentioned before that he was teaching the year 7-8-9 young teacher in the school, he was a qualified PE teacher. And we know a lot of physical education teachers do get asked to teach maths out of field, and he was able to bring some of those contexts as physical education contexts into problem-solving tasks in the math in the math classroom.
Think about the positives. but also, be aware that it’s often when you try and stray away from their traditional teaching approach that you feel you may be uncomfortable because you then end up meaning you’re going to have to prompt students and post questions and respond to the questions that aren’t kind of in the textbook. And so that means it’s been preparing slightly differently for those kinds of lessons. I’ve got some particular strategies in which we can think about that.
But let’s read into your other question about misconceptions. A lot of teachers are not thinking like a science teacher where you have to do all of the exercises before the students. What are all the answers are, and you can do them? You’re spending a heck of a lot of time doing them. The out-of-field science teacher was trying to keep up with the science and having to read the textbook, ahead of all the students answer all the questions. And when she had a complaint from a parent from the school, the principal just complained, ‘can’t you keep ahead of the kids?’.
But it’s not about that. It’s about understanding the complexities of the concept. And as I talked about before, the learning trajectories, and if you’re in a class of year seven students in math, so you’re going to have students working at grade three level and up to grade nine level. You have to understand where this concept fits within the curriculum and the different approaches. Certainly, it’s about deepening their understanding and going beyond just procedures and rules. And to develop their conceptual understanding and know understanding the connections between concepts.
Probably a lot of them are scared of doing teaching algebra. That’s the sort of traditional procedural approach to algebra, rather than thinking about how do you, how do you develop an understanding of what the purpose of algebra is? Why it was there? Why, why and when and how do we use it? We use that money much more often than we actually think we do. And that because algebra is presented as performing these particular tricks. Like, become tricks, and that’s one of the problems. It’s about doing tricks rather than developing arguments, and reasoning about whatever the problem.
Host: here’s a great book I came across, ‘Nix the Tricks’ and it actually outlines the tricks [in teaching mathematics] that we think work, that we ask the out-of-field maths teachers to use, and then how you should actually teach it properly. So that was really handy.
But also like, I’ve been able to feel this as an out-of-field maths teacher, and I’ve done the working out of the problems, gone through all the examples. And I think, yep, I know this, I can teach this. But get me into the classroom. And when there are multiple behaviours, there’s heaps of things going on. It’s cognitive overload. And I can’t withdraw that information from my brain, because I can’t even think. That’s often an issue for teachers who are doing casual relief teaching the class.
I get that, because I can, I can spend reams of time perfecting my understanding of a particular area. But tomorrow, maybe teaching something else.
Colleen: Yes, it’s a real bind. But I guess it’s just life. Every day is different in teaching. A recent incident was a story where the school wanted to include more problem-solving in their math curriculum. And one of the teachers in their school was a qualified primary school teacher was teaching year eight, maths, so was in a P-to-nine school or a P-12 school, and she wasn’t really confident. I noticed that the class would be chaotic as soon as she tried to do something … such as a series of problem-solving lessons that they wanted to do. The school had a numeracy specialist who was asked to spend time with this teacher. So, what they ended up doing was co-planning the lesson and the problem-solving lessons that they were going to do. And initially, from the first lesson, the specialist taught the lesson and the out-of-field teacher observed. Then, the second lesson, they co-taught the lesson together, the two of them in the class together teaching the lesson. For the third lesson, their classroom teacher taught it by themselves, but the other teacher was there in the classroom, providing advice and support around actually equally contributing as a teacher, but there for her to be able to check in with them. That’s a very strong, middle leadership, professional learning practice that we know works across the system, and is one that I encourage school middle leaders to use with their out-of-field teachers, especially in for topics and concepts and practices like problem-solving, to use. And I know also from my research, the out-of-field teachers, they’re confident teachers, and that’s probably why they ask to teach these subjects. They actually want to do a better job. You know, they do want to improve. And one of the things that they typically ask is, we just kind of want to go and watch somebody else who’s good, do it, to be able to learn because they’ve never seen anybody teach us differently to what they experienced. They’ve gone through pre-service teacher education, and they’ve only worked in their subject areas, then check they’ve then started working in a school and gone. Oh, we need somebody to teach you maths when you do it. And they’re like, oh my goodness, I’m not going to have to teach this, and I say, yes, you will. Then they’re thinking, well, what am I going to do? What are the best teachers doing? And how can they do it? Let me go and see somebody, a really good teacher teaching a year eight maths class, and what that might look like. And that’s what they wanted to do. That’s what they’ve all said, we want to just go and see somebody else do, who’s doing a good job. And depending on what their own beliefs are about teaching, they tend to be more than they tend to go back to thinking versus traditional, whether other teaching is not so traditional.
And if they’re open to something different, then they do want to see those teachers who are doing things differently, because they want to learn from them.
Host: Can I be a little bit of a devil’s advocate here? I’m thinking about school leaders who themselves have had to trot out of their offices and back in the classroom, and in most schools, very few schools where teachers will have a free periods like in high schools because of the current teacher shortage. So, that lovely model of guiding the teacher towards independent delivery of that lesson, are there any shortcuts that school leaders can embrace, to mentor to help out-of-field teachers, given the current crazy teacher shortage?
Colleen: Well, the current crazy teachers shortage is not out of the blue, considering the current COVID situation, teacher absences, shortage of qualified teachers in particular areas. It’s not just something that’s come out of the blue; it’s been there all along, and we haven’t collected the data to be able to absolutely know it. Probably, the COVID environment has just brought it to the fore a little bit more. I haven’t done any research, particularly, about online teaching, from the point of view of out-of-field teaching and what’s happened there. So that’s something that does need to be done and how that’s now impacting schools. That’s one of the issues for principals – half the time they don’t even know who are the teachers who were teaching out-of-field in their school. That’s because the timetabler is the one who puts people in spots, and they’re not even always aware of what the specialisations are, and who’s ended up being allocated to teaching out of field. That’s one of the recommendations that came through from summit is that principals need to know who they [out-of-field teachers] are, what they’re teaching. And they need to ensure they have access to working with a mentor. Now the mentor doesn’t necessarily have to be the school maths leader. It would be great if the school maths leaders had the time to do all the mentoring. What the teachers in our study identified is they wanted a critical friend. And sometimes that critical friend was the school maths leader. Sometimes it was another teacher in school. Sometimes it was a teacher in another school. And sometimes it was a regional consultant in those really tiny schools. So, it was somebody that they could share their ideas and experiences with. Because we all know in the classroom, we come out of the classroom and reflect about what happened.
And those conversations are even more important for people who are working in fields where they’re not sure about what’s happened. The other thing that we want principals put in place is collaborative planning structures, opportunities. One of the things that does tend to happen is if they’re not aware of the extent of out of field teaching in their school, then they set planning meetings up that are all at the same time after school. So, which planning meeting do you go to? Your subject or your in-field subject? If you never turn up to a planning meeting for your out of field subject because it clashes with your in-field area, that’s an issue.
[School leaders] should make sure that everybody who’s teaching mathematics out of field can get to the mathematics planning meetings of their team or of the whole group and. And, but not to limit them, not to exclude them from their own specialist areas. So be careful about the timetabling of planning meetings, so that our field teachers actually get the opportunity to plan with others. Unfortunately, a bit of the planning ends up being a divide and conquer kind of work. But you really do want to try and have opportunities where they can co plan because that’s when the in-school professional learning happens, not just for the elephant teachers, but for everybody. Yeah, we want to do things a bit differently if the battlefield teacher isn’t there at the planning meeting, when that’s discussed.
So that’s really important. And likewise, if at all possible, a bit of extra time, because there’s extra planning involved a bit of extra time for those people to do that. And keeping an eye on what is the professional learning that’s happening in the school, but the middle level, that maths leader is providing, and making sure that those adults and teachers are participants in their work. Their learning needs are taken into account in planning that professional learning.
Host: That sounds like so many different ways that out-of-field teachers can be supported. And some of that is self-directed, you know, just finding a body. Some of it would be, you know, the leadership ways of supporting it. And I love that idea of the planning meetings, just muscling into the out-of-field one, maybe one or maybe, you know, occasionally you go to your own specialisation planning meeting, and then you muscle into, you know, next week, the one for maths if you’re teaching maths. Yes, and making sure the planning schedules makes it possible for people to attend their out of field planning as well as infield. this is like the throwing in a curly.
But if someone like me, a primary trained teacher, wanted to do a fast-track way of becoming a maths teacher and a high school. What do you do? And if you don’t live in Victoria, what are your options?
Colleen: Well, your options there’s a couple of other I know, in Tasmania and New South Wales. I’m not sure about the current programs, they’re certainly being developed in Queensland at the moment, our professional learning programs for our field teachers, so and some of those have just been just about anybody can apply to do them. And others have been developed for particular people. I think the Tasmanian one really has been focused on those particular schools. There are other opportunities in terms of postgraduate programs, but they don’t typically tend to be, let’s do the pre service teacher kind of education program that is there. So, it’d be a matter of go along and do this course. But you’re going focus on the maths part of your experience when you’re doing all of your assignments. I’ve actually got a student who, just in my class last night, or I’ve had for the last couple of weeks, they’re doing a graduate certificate in education research, and they want to research out-of-field teaching, and they’re an out-of-field maths teacher themselves.
They’re developing a project that they can do. So, that’s certainly taking the initiative all the way and doing it yourself. But it’s about saying, well, I want to do something about this. And they want to be able to teach differentiated mathematics in a differentiated way better than he’s been doing. So, you know, he’s recognised the problem and an issue for his own teaching and will probably do, I imagine, some practitioner research around that. However, when he finishes that he has a graduate certificate, but he doesn’t actually it’s not recognised as a maths qualification, though.
Yeah, so that’s one of the issues that was raised at the Out-of-Field-Teaching-Across-Specialisations summit – how do we get some acknowledgement for these, especially ones that are particularly focused on professional learning in particular areas? And within teachers’ registration? And how do we also prepare teachers better through our in-service pre service teacher education for teaching out of field. Now I do know that some students in their final teaching round in their in the school and a school, and they will be asked to teach out a field on their teaching rounds. And that’s because they want to get an idea of if we employ this person, Can I also ask him to teach out of field once I employ them?
Host: Very savvy.
Colleen: That’s a good, that’s a positive experience that will support them and need to think about other ways that we might actually be more supportive. Because we know it’s beginning teachers who get asked to do all of them for teaching. Like, for example, my brother-in-law, he taught maths, maths out-of-field for 30 years.
Host: Wow. One of the other podcast interviews is with Seven Vinton from Victoria, who is an out-of-field digital and technologies teacher who actually co-wrote the textbooks for year seven to 10. So, if that doesn’t give you external acknowledgement that you know what you’re teaching, I don’t know what does. But still, some people still question him, which I think is really, really amazing, despite that experience.
Colleen: So just to change the subject and go back to principles and maths leaders. If we want to actually develop their understanding and skills, then when need to ask the teacher for other teachers who’ve taught, for example, year eight out of field, in their first year of teaching, then the following year, don’t give them your nine, year seven – give them the right again. That happens quite a lot – they don’t get an opportunity to teach the same subject at the same year level. That means that they just want to get out of it. And as soon as they can get out of it, often they will. Sometimes getting out of it means leaving teaching altogether. We just need to be aware that unless we can provide this ongoing support mechanism for out-of-field teachers and give them an opportunity to further develop their practices by repeating things in the following year.
Yes, there’s lots that who walk out of the profession altogether.
Host: Yep. Exactly, exactly. Or, as in my case, I worked seven years on and off as basically as a CRT, mostly in high schools, even though primary trained, and couldn’t get a school to supervise me to full registration, so I was always provisional, not full. So, I quit, because I’ve run out of time. So now I’ve reaccredited. And I’ve got two years to try and get from provisional to proficient, and it’s a pay drop. It’s about a third of what I’m getting as a writer. I can’t do it full time because I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills, just giving it a shot. Yeah, I can see why people leave because and they would be leaving now. Because you wouldn’t be able to get work in your specialty to be able to get the evidence and do the assessment. You’re just filling holes. Yeah. I’m wondering what happens with all of that. But if we don’t have the stats, we don’t have the data. So, Colleen, as you’ve mentioned, one of your specialties in the research area is about educational leadership. And in your bio, there’s this lovely line about reimagining educational leadership. You’ve talked a little bit about how this pans out for out-of-field teaching, what else needs to happen. What do you think the policymakers aren’t talking about?
Colleen: In terms of the middle leadership role that the school mathematics leaders that there is enough recognition of the huge amount of time that some of them take up in mentoring, they’re saying, I’m spending all this time mentoring, mentoring, and mentoring. So, I think we need to have a better approach with our school mathematics leaders. They need time to do the job of what they’re expected to do. And that may, in some instances, involve working with a number of out-of-field teachers in the school, and that they need to develop the skills that’s involved in effectively in supporting those teachers, understanding what are their particular learning needs, not assuming that all other teachers have the same [knowledge/skills], celebrating their successes, that’s really important, and building the confidence and enthusiasm for the subject.
We want them to feel comfortable and enthusiastic about teaching whatever the subject is out-of-field, but maths in particular, because we know that students read the attitudes and confidence levels and perspectives that the teachers have on the subject that they’re teaching. That influences their own attitudes and dispositions towards that subject. We want to be providing a very positive and supportive in environment for those few teachers. That means developing some particular skills. The mentoring needs to go beyond just observing and giving feedback on lessons, there’s quite a number of other strategies that they need to put in place. But that means the school leadership team needs to provide the time and resources for that mathematics leader to support those teachers in their school. And that’s the same with the other discipline areas as well.
Host: Yes, definitely. So, I might wrap up a little bit here. If you had an unlimited budget, and time to research, a particular aspect of out-of-field teaching of maths, what would it be? And why?
Colleen: What have we learned from our COVID experiences of teaching online -has that made the situation more difficult or less difficult, I would like to know much more about school mathematics leaders and their role, work, knowledge, approaches, to providing a culture of support to celebrating success, as well as to providing the professional learning for their colleagues. That means just setting up those environments that enable a couple of teachers to work together. It doesn’t have to come all come down to the work of one leader, but it’s about setting up those environments. So, I’d probably like to continue my research in that area. But also thinking about changes that we know, at the moment to sort of maybe come along to make maths more traditional or less traditional as a result of COVID. And how, how teachers feel in that situation.
Host: You’ve mentioned success a couple of times. How do you define success in our-of-field maths teaching, and you decide which, from which perspective, is it from the out-of-field teacher’s perspective or head maths teacher?
Colleen: Yes. Being able to celebrate, hey, that was a good lesson today. I really enjoyed teaching today. And I noticed the kids did this. And the students did that. And I’m wondering, well, I could have done better, but it’s just all of that up, providing opportunities for them to celebrate their achievements. And those achievements will no doubt go along with students.
Host: So, it’s not just, my students’ NAPLAN scores are pretty good.
Colleen: It’s actually about all the things as teachers that we know we love to do, which is just yak about our students and celebrate the successes of the lessons that we have delivered. So, success isn’t just the teachers’ own reflection on how the class went. But, it’s also the student learning outcomes, and the school’s learning outcomes, how sort of fits into that whole piece, but also the students’ dispositions. In mathematics, that’s what we’ve got to be improving. We want to improve their willingness to do mathematics and can keep studying mathematics. They don’t have to love it and be passionate about it. They might think, I’m not going be a math professor, but I know I need maths. And so, I’m comfortable. So, we want to be able to celebrate those things as well. And that can happen if our collaborative practices in the school allow teachers to be able to report on what’s happening in their classroom, not from just their point of view, what are the problems you’ve got, but what’s been the success? And how did that series of lessons go that we all plan together. And I just wish there was more sharing of that information, so we get little pieces of the jigsaw puzzle.
We can all learn from that knowing that teaching is context specific, but might work in our classroom to celebrate the successes in your particular context for you.
Host: So, I know that we’ve kind of gone backwards and forwards, but it’s been lovely to hear a more holistic perspective about our field teaching of maths. Is there any advice you’d like to offer novice out-of-field teaching researchers?
Colleen: Well, I’d go to the Summit Report and have a read of the issues that come up for you from the different perspectives there – from policy perspectives, data perspectives, teacher leaders, perspectives, teachers, perspectives, and professional learning. All of those things, you get a bit of an overview of summary of what the research findings are. And that’s one good place to start. And you can have a look at all of the different list of people who are researchers who put that all together. And then you can go searching their particular expertise and contribution to the field.
Host: I love that all those presentations are online, they’re accessible year-round, including the ones from years and years ago. There’s just amazing information out there. Great. Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Links:
Professor Colleen Vale, Monash University, Victoria, Australia
Teaching Across Specialisations – Out-of-Field Teaching summit
Nix the Tricks