Draft conclusions and future projects?

I've had this list on draft for the past few week so I can gather my thoughts on where to next...

Study tours and exchange programs are a brilliant opportunity to open your eyes and see your own organisations strengths and weaknesses. This provides an opportunity to focus on positive steps to move forward.

As I reflect back on my own experiences I can see steps that could make a huge improvement in the Australian VET sector.
These steps follow 3 major themes:

• Develop community partnerships to promote and support education
• Develop workplace assessments to encourage work placements
• Promote the professional status of teaching as a career

In detail:

·         Promote a culture of social partnerships where communities and education providers work together for the benefit of their communities. It sounds simplistically easy and obviously we are already doing this but I think the point is we can do more.

o   We need to broaden our definition of communities and ensure we don't exclude people from their opportunity and responsibility to contribute to education. In particular in Australian culture we need to be careful we don't allow our "laid back" style to indicate that education is someone else’s problem, we are all involved and we are all responsible. 

o   Our definitions of community need to cover Business groups, town/regional governance and cultural groups.

o   Practical steps for me will include making more time to meet with Business chambers, shire councils, schools and where possible community and cultural groups

·         Continue to recruit and train great teachers BUT then we must trust them and show respect for their time and judgement.
Plus as a teacher, I and my colleagues must live up to the community trust placed in us.
We need to make sure that our systems and processes are no more complex or time consuming than absolutely necessary so teachers have the time to commit to quality work.

This has been a huge eye opener for me, particularly in Finland, teaching is a highly respected profession. The community respects their teachers and the work and decisions they undertake. Australian education seems to be struggling at times with the status of teaching as a profession where there is an ever increasing level of administration and a continual process of "audit" where teachers have to prove that they made the right decision. Surely we can do better than this! I know this is way beyond my "pay grade" but I intend raising the issue in a positive constructive light and I hope bit by bit we can improve. This is not meant as a criticism of audit and quality assurance processes, but simply that they need to be supportive, constructive, time efficient and focused on employment outcomes. We need to do more than tell teachers what they are doing wrong, we need to show them examples of best practice that they can learn from.

·       

·         Develop workplace assessments so students can choose to be assessed in the workplace.
This is a great opportunity to develop partnerships into the business sector

o   Develop a template for workplace assessments that defines the evidence that needs to be collected and who needs to verify it.

o   Prioritise the units that are more likely to be chosen for workplace assessment and then apply that template to create assessment tools
o   Work with employer to ensure that the projects students complete are relevant to the workplace and preparing students to be great employees in the future

·         Actively seek community projects where our students can work with their communities. I was very impressed with Otto's idea of students working at the local library helping community members with simple IT problems.

·         Trial Otto’s SCRUM pedagogy approach for student projects. I thought this was a beautifully simple approach to encouraging student project work. The scrum sheets ensures that members know who is doing what and the stage of the project.
This would also give us an excuse to collaborate with Otto and the team at Helsinki Business College.
This is a quick win towards a very constructive pedagogical approach.

·         Join international exchange programs for students and teachers. Perhaps they already exist but I have been a teacher in TAFE for 19-20 years and I don't know about them. So we either need to develop opportunities or promote the opportunities that do exist more effectively.
  Collaborate with TASTAFE who are running a great range of courses into a similar environment. We have a lot in common and would be ideal partners for future projects.

·         Cut ourselves some slack! We already have a great education system and the reason we worry about our standards is because we care. We have many great initiates we can contribute that I'm sure other countries would be happy to learn from. This creates an opportunity for international collaborations. I had lots of positive feedback and questions on some of our approaches:

o   Project based learning.

o   The ITPathway program which is a fully partnership between TAFE and Charles Sturt University

o   ELearning models and templates to make it easier for teachers to get online

o  Community consultation through Talking Tech Riverina

o   Support Workshops with peer support models