The primary focus of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) is to inspire, empower and educate. There are seven key professional teaching standards that are being upheld in the Australian teaching sector. Different qualities are portrayed for these standards which identify as Professional Knowledge, Professional Practice & Professional Engagement. Each of these standards applies to an aspect of the learning environment which take places every day in school and monitors the achievement process of accreditation for Australian employed teachers.
The standards can also be further broken up in areas such as Graduate, Proficient, Highly Accomplished and Lead sections. I’m going to focus on the titles of the Proficient and Highly Accomplished Teacher particularly exploring Standard 2: Know the content and how to teach it. When observing how each teacher displays knowledge in certain content areas is an important value throughout this standard, particularly as the teacher is always improving their personal practice over time. The main idea that I observed when looking at sub-strands of standard 2 is that Highly Accomplished teachers have the role of supporting their colleagues particularly when increasing student learning; for example encouraging staff to team teach and collaborate together as a stage as a way to understand what content is being used during units of work.
However the Proficient teacher still has the advantage to assist their students in so many ways in a professional manner. This can be particularly noticed when you start to think about one of the areas in Standard 2 that focuses on the relevance of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) programs in the classroom. This relevance is also able to be displayed by the Teacher Librarian (TL) as they have the added benefit of improving individual student achievement as well as developing understanding not only with ICT programs but also in literacy research tasks. Focus area 2.6 highlights that the role of the Highly Accomplished TL is to model ICT knowledge and skills which will benefit their colleagues within the school as well as improve their teaching practice. I think that role is an extremely important task to undertake so that a wide variety of activities can be implemented not only in the school library but also in the other classrooms across the school.
Reference:
Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (2017). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. Retrieved from https://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/default-source/teach-documents/australian-professional-standards-for-teachers.pdf
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