Often, assumptions about teaching can lead to challenges in understanding what is meant by quality teaching and learning. Australian Professor Emeritus John Loughran from Monash University believes that there is a need to better understand teaching and teacher education in a post-COVID world. This article is based on his keynote address titled “Reimagining Teacher Education in a Post-COVID World” at the Redesigning Pedagogy International Conference 2022.

Assumptions of Teaching and Teacher Education

When we talk about teaching and teacher education, there seems to be many assumptions in terms of quality. It doesn’t matter where you look in the literature and forever, it is always said teaching is mostly just telling others what you know – a transmission of knowledge. That for teacher education, people learn primarily from more or less unguided experience. And that faculties of education offer little more than just half-baked theories that are unnecessary and perhaps may impede the learning of practical teaching requirements.

These are assumptions that seem to live around teaching and teacher education.

My argument now is that COVID-19 has given us an opportunity to push all those assumptions away in ways that haven’t happened before – to push the status quo.

I think now then it’s fair to say that there is a challenge for us to better understand teaching. And it’s important because these stereotypes and assumptions lead to public understandings that are not always clear on what quality is in teaching and learning. So, it becomes very important for us to now draw attention to what quality means in teaching and learning.

But responding to that requires a thoughtful approach. We need to think about teaching and teacher education as a way of developing better support for the transmission of knowledge, and to push back against what is often seen as the theory–practice gap.

The Theory and Practice Relationship

I like to think about the theory–practice gap in a different way. Instead of thinking of it as a gap, I like to think of it as a symbiotic relationship where practice informs theory, and theory informs practice. The two go together – they are inextricably linked and if we think of it that way, it stops being a gap and it starts being a dynamic relationship.

And these two things capture the essence of what quality is in teaching.

In a similar way, we also need to value theory, and that’s captured best, I think, when you see theory that creates frameworks that help us to better understand practice; that offers insights into the teaching and learning relationship; and that captures the sophistication of the specific “what happens in an individual classroom?” while also shedding light on the big picture understandings of teaching and learning.

So those things become important not just in thinking about teaching and classrooms, but particularly in shaping teacher education and what a programme with a systematic approach to teaching and learning about teaching, might entail.

Education in the Time of a Pandemic

COVID-19 has led to a new focus on teaching and learning. The great lockdown in Melbourne happened and I was there at that time. The lockdown captures nicely what the world of online teaching initially meant from students’ perspectives and the excuses it gave students for not doing what they were asked to do.

My daughter is a high school dance teacher and it was really interesting to be at her place sometimes, watching her teach dance online where you can see the number of students who did and did not participate. So, teachers then become the important element in what teaching and learning is during a pandemic.

In the world that COVID-19 has pushed us into, we need to see beyond this idea of transmission of knowledge. Telling and listening doesn’t equate quality in teaching and learning, and the pandemic really brought that to the fore. It also meant that theories in teacher education couldn’t simply be front loaded; and that school practicum experiences required much more than “stand and deliver” experiences.

I am not quite sure how it played out in Singapore, but in Australia, this became a really big deal because we could no longer get student teachers into school and so they were learning how to teach virtually through the online environment. This meant moving beyond the delivery of content was an immediate and very pressing issue for student teachers and for the teacher educators supporting them.

Parental Involvement Greater Than Ever

Probably the biggest breakthrough was that parents began to see education in new ways in that they couldn’t help becoming involved in supervising learning. You can look through many online blogs of parents who were confronted by what it meant to supervise their children, and their efforts to get new insights into teaching and learning. So, here’s one and I’ll read it out to you.

“Just the other morning, my daughter was doing school work – or so I thought – when I realized that I could hear the distinct voices of everyone’s favourite animated underwater rescue squad, The Octonauts, a very topical and a favourite cartoon show here in Australia.

When I asked what she was doing, she told me she was watching the episode and writing down facts. At the end of the show, my daughter proudly came and read to me a report of all that she’d learned about the Everglades (a swampy grassland) and showed me pictures she’d drawn of each of the animals that could be found there. This was not a school activity; it was certainly not set by me and it was definitely initiated by my daughter as an excuse to watch the television.

However, it made me realize the values that we regard highly – curiosity and enthusiasm for learning – were on fine display. And it struck me that my role as a parent in this education puzzle is to foster that curiosity and that I have an opportunity to support my children to experience more autonomy in their learning during this time.“

I think that’s a powerful piece of writing from a parent whose experience of education is probably 20 years different to what they are experiencing right now, supervising children at home in a virtual learning environment.

And I am now making this argument: What COVID-19 did was a game-changer in the way that the previous assumptions that I put up for you were challenged, and challenged in a productive and positive way.

So, quality in teaching and teacher education means that learning theory has to be translated into practice. It’s well and good to be making arguments about learning needing to be different. But it’s a different matter when you think about what it means to transfer understandings of learning into new pedagogical experiences both from the teacher’s and student’s perspectives.