Know your Standards

There have been a number of recent member enquiries about collecting and annotating evidence for accreditation at Proficient. This applies to those teachers currently accredited at Provisional or Conditional as they undertake their accreditation journey as early career teachers. It does not apply to those teachers maintaining their accreditation nor to those pre 2004 who will be deemed Proficient on January 1 2018.

Essentially, you need to do a few things to ensure you are moving successfully towards accreditation at Proficient:

Register with NESA: know your timeline – be clear about when your documentation is due to be uploaded to NESA.

Pay your annual fee.

Demonstrate that your teaching practice meets the Standard Descriptors in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers by gathering and annotating evidence of your teaching practice.

Build professional relationships with your colleagues and consult with them about your teaching practice.

Let’s look a little more closely at Point 3:

Demonstrate that your teaching practice meets the Standard Descriptors in the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers by gathering and annotating evidence of your teaching practice.

You need to start by becoming familiar with the Standards and the descriptors that are in each one. You might see that much of your consistent day to day teaching practice matches the descriptors, so you then need to think about how you can demonstrate your proficiency by collecting and annotating evidence that aligns to the proficient descriptors (they end in 2, eg 1.1.2 or 3.4.2)

So, what does evidence look like and how much do you need?

The evidence needs to be drawn from your everyday teaching practice; you might work in collaboration with your supervisor or mentor to choose the best examples and you will then annotate them by indicating how they meet the descriptors to demonstrate your ongoing proficient teacher practice. At a minimum, your annotations should identify the descriptors being accounted for; demonstrate how the evidence shows achievement of the standard descriptors and indicate the impact on student learning.

While you do need to show that your teaching practice meets all 37 descriptors under the seven standards, you shouldn’t have to produce 37 pieces of evidence (one for each descriptor).

NESA website information

When collecting your evidence, keep in mind that:

you don’t need documentary evidence against all the Standard Descriptors at Proficient Teacher

you need to select appropriate evidence against at least one of the Standard Descriptors for each of the seven Standards, and

one item of evidence can be used to demonstrate more than one Standard Descriptor.

(Source: NESA website, May 2017: http://educationstandards.nsw.edu.au/wps/portal/nesa/teacher-accreditation/proficient-teacher/evidence)

An ongoing process

Gathering the evidence, annotating it and talking with your mentor and supervisor is an ongoing process and is not about meeting a checklist or ‘ticking the boxes’. The idea behind teacher accreditation is that as a profession, we develop a culture that is evidence based, built on collaboration and reflective practices to allow teachers to improve their practices as they grow in experience, expertise and confidence in the classroom.

The IEU has a dedicated accreditation team that may be able to assist you with accreditation as you work towards Proficiency. You can email questions or comments to accreditation@ieu.asn.au.

We also offer assistance through dedicated sessions for working towards Proficiency, with the next day being held on 6 July at the Ultimo office. Email us for further details about this day accreditation@ieu.asn.au

Karen Forbes
Professional Officer