Clinical Praxis Exams: Linking Academic Study with Professional Practice Knowledge

Conceptualising the impact of initial teacher education

“…For example, if a teacher becomes a mentor teacher and has a teacher candidate working with them for several weeks they may interrogate their own practice more through explaining their decisions to the teacher candidate, or may notice more about student learning through having the teacher candidate ask questions or work with individual students. Partnering closely with an initial teacher education provider may be a significant move for a school, bringing new levels of discussion about practice and deeper scrutiny of student learning (McLean Davies et al 2017;Kameniar et al 2017;Simpson 2016). Teacher educators may also be curriculum experts who are called on to consult on state or national policies.…”

Legitimising disciplinary literacy: rewriting the rules of the literacy game and enhancing secondary teachers’ professional habitus

“…Called the 'Clinical Praxis Exam' (CPE), following the clinical approach to teacher education adopted by the University of Melbourne (McLean Davies et al, 2013;Rickards et al, 2020), this assessment requires pre-service teachers to present a data-informed, evidence-based account of their differentiated support for one student, or a group of students, in the context of their disciplinary classroom practice. This innovation has been recognised, more broadly, as an example of best practice in teacher education assessment (Renshaw et al, 2013;Louden, 2015) and has had specific affordances for preservice teachers' conceptualisations of disciplinary literacy, as pre-service teachers see literacy as foundational rather than additional to learning in their discipline (Kameniar et al, 2017). Further, as this assessment task is undertaken in practice, it also impacts the knowledge of mentor teachers supporting pre-service teachers in the discipline and starts or expands important shared conversations about literacy, and other core educational understandings, in disciplinary practice (McLean Davies et al, 2017).…”

The Australian Context: National, State and School-Level Efforts to Improve Schools in Australia

“…As part of this, the then Faculty of Education stopped its undergraduate initial teacher education program and shifted entirely to become a graduate school, with a two-year Master of Teaching program. The design of the program drew heavily from the Stanford Teacher Education Programme (STEP) from Stanford University in California and from the University of Virginia and Bank Street Teachers' College, New York (Kameniar et al, 2017) which adopt an evidence-based clinical approach. The Master of Teaching was the first of its kind in Australia and a paradigm shift in initial teacher education, promising to deliver not only high-quality initial teacher education but also equipping teacher graduates with knowledge in areas such as wellbeing, curriculum or leadership through a carefully constructed Masters level elective offering.…”

“…'The CPE is an oral assessment task that involves a cyclical process of analysis and reflection, integrating theory, evidence, practice and evaluation' (Kameniar et al, 2017, p. 58). Research (Kameniar et al, 2017) into the impact of the CPE suggest that students considered it to be the most valuable learning in their studies. Students felt that the task helped them bridge the gap between theory and practice and assisted them in developing greater understanding of 'the complex intellectual, diagnostic, planning, intervention, and evaluative aspects of teaching practice' (Kameniar et al, 2017, p. 62).…”