That’s a wrap! The first season of the Out-of-Field Teacher Toolkit Podcast concluded in December 2022.
It’s about and for K-12 educators who teach subjects for which they don’t have the necessary qualifications. This fortnightly show features insights, tips and solutions from teachers, researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and more from Australia and the world. You can listen to the podcast on Spotify or other top platforms. I’m the host – Margaret Paton – an education, business and technology writer based in Australia.
Here are some of the highlights.
- Finding flamboyance and boundary crossing as an out-of-field teacher Associate Professor Linda Hobbs – Linda is a key driver of the out-of-field-teaching across specialisations collective that runs annual symposia for Australia and international ones.
- Teachers should be flexible: Ben Grozier, ClassCover Founder/CEO – his business is a platform that matches schools with casual, relief and temporary teachers. It’s a different perspective on out-of-field teaching.
- What’s a teachers’ union have to say about OOFT? Australian Education Union president Correna Haythorpe spoke about the issues of teacher workload, and teacher shortages as feeding the out-of-field teaching crisis in Australia.
- Dr Emily Rochette spoke about the framework she uses to explore the out-of-field teaching phenomenon – positioning theory.
- Justin Pronin is an Australian high school teacher who relishes out-of-field teaching. He talked about embracing new subject areas, which became not only an area for his professional learning but personal development. A great attitude.
- Serious number crunching: Dr Paul Weldon from the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) His 2016 paper is still being quoted because it fills a hole in the paucity of data in the research area of out-of-field teaching.
- Liz Jackson: from teaching PE to upskilling teachers about entrepreneurialism. As we spoke, we realised that when educators teach entrepreneurialism, chances are they’re all doing so out of field, unless they’re commerce qualified.
- Seven Vinton: The out-of-field teacher who WROTE the textbooks for the subject he was teaching out of field – design and technology. This blows my mind.
- Do you teach maths out of field? Cassandra Portelli has plenty of tips for you. One of the practices I adopted from her in my out-of-field maths classes is to invite learners up to the board in small groups to do their working out on the whiteboard. The more whiteboards, the better. It encourages mathematical conversations; mistakes can be wiped off with no evidence to show, and students have plenty of ‘ah ha’ moments.
- Dr Susan Caldis: Teaching geography in and out of field. I loved when this Macquarie University researcher shared her anecdote about a geography-qualified beginning teacher who refused to teach out of field. She showed her principal evidence to support her case and was successful.
- Quantifying out-of-field teaching: Dr Jim Van Overschelde, Texas State University. Data collection about out-of-field teaching to die for. In that US state, data is collected about each student and their actual classes – whether taught by an in-field or out-of-field teacher and then look at the school-based end-of-year assessment. This data tracking follows students throughout their education and beyond. A gold mine of insights.
- Where out-of-field maths teachers are welcome to lurk – a community of practice where they get to rub shoulders and learn with in-field teachers. Southern Cross University and the Mathematics Association of NSW have set up this community of practice and a framework they’ve tested in a regional area of northern NSW during COVID. Rather than separating in-field from out-of-field maths teachers, they’re all part of the same community of practice. Expect to see this model embraced in other states.
Episode transcripts will appear on this website soon.
A hearty thank you goes to Rich Bowden, whose expertise I call on for the audio editing of these episodes.
Since I’ve started the pod, I completed a two-month stint as an out-of-field teacher. Part-time.
And, I’ve been accepted in a PhD program with an out-of-field flavour that I’m doing online, part-time via Deakin University, Victoria, Australia. So, I won’t have time for teaching for a while.
For my research, I’ll be doing a netnographic exploration into success stories of out-of-field teachers of STEM. If you’d like to know more, I shared my embryonic research proposal in one of the episodes of the first season, and occasionally, I’ll drop in some updates.
Season 2 will start on International Teachers’ Day on Tuesday, 24 January 2022, with a fresh episode issued each second Tuesday thereafter.
A key highlight for 2023 is the international OOF-TAS Symposium to be held mid-year – date to be advised. That’s the Out-of-Field Teaching Across Specialisations symposium – they’ve been going for years, and it’s a really active group that spans the globe. You can find out about their previous nine symposia on this website.
Please review my pod – I’d love to hear what you think. It also helps others find this podcast.
And, any feedback, comments, suggestions for topics and interviewees, please let me know. You can reach me via email on margaret.paton1@gmail.com.