The ED Thumbs-Up is a new series celebrating good ideas or outcomes in the tertiary education sector. It should be weekly and I’ll either cover something identified in the news over the last week, or respond to a direct approach (bribes welcome, but will be disclosed).

This week’s Thumbs-Up goes to Teach First New Zealand for their proposal for a six-week teacher training course. The length of the course sparked some headlines and the NZEI didn’t like it, which is always a promising sign for me (the PPTA has asked for proposals to do a literature review on the issues, and has set out some useful research questions). If it helps the unions solidify their opposition, high-profile US educational reformer Michelle Rhee participated in one of Teach America’s first intakes!

Back to the idea anyway. It’s based on a UK idea of the same name and they hope to:

• attract bright, well-rounded university graduates;
• require them to do 5 days of observation in a secondary school and another five days of prep before starting the course;
• give them an intensive summer residential course (the six weeks); and
• get them into classrooms, in secondary schools “facing challenging circumstances”; and
• provide “rigorous supervision, mentoring, and professional development” for the rest of the two years (no, it’s not a six week programme at all).

This idea turns around the current model of extensive provider-based education, with progressively increasing work placements, by having a very short provider-based section followed by on the job learning. Teach First has also arranged for the University of Auckland to be their partner, and run the educational side, so they should bring some rigour to the development and teaching process. They will have to work through the issues with the NZ Teachers’ Council, but they should be able to overcome them.

I generally like anything that challenges convention while still delivering results and this one certainly delivers on the challenging convention part, while it also throws in the “doing good” angle. Whether it works or not is another matter (it has run in the US for 20+ years), but I’d expect this idea to gain high profile support quickly. It has a commonsense logic to it and an emotional appeal.

If you want to find out a lot more, check out Teach First’s PowerPoint presentation. NZ Graduate School of Education offers a largely field-based programme for teachers that has almost as much classroom time as Teach First.