ABSTRACT
As we began working on this book, an article was published on the front page of The Australian newspaper (Ferrari, 2014), entitled ‘Toughen up on teacher training, university heads warned’. The piece opened with an announcement that ‘Univers - ities will have to prove their teaching graduates improve student learning under tougher accreditation standards for education degrees envisaged by the new chair - man of the national teachers institute’. It then went on to identify this newly created institute’s research priorities as ‘assessing the capabilities of graduates, measuring the outcomes of initial teacher education, and how to roll out the most effective models of teacher education’. In a similar vein, the article noted that teacher education degrees would be evaluated against three criteria: ‘the impact of the teacher on the student, the magnitude of that impact, and how pervasive it was across students’.
