149Honestly, I am not sure any of it was valuable. I saw it only as a necessity. The verbal feed-
back I received was most valuable. I reflected on my lessons and practice as I went along
each day and had discussions with my supervising teachers, the TRTs [temporary relief
teachers] and the teacher educator.
This comment raises the problematic issue of preservice teachers’ professional
experience subject to chance rather than ‘subject to proper and systematic assess-
ment’ (Jonsson & Mattsson, 2011 , p. 185). In the case of this preservice teacher, she
reported a successful professional experience. However, her comment raises doubt
about the systematic assessment of her capabilities against the graduate level stan-
dards and the inequalities that may occur between supervising teachers when they
are reluctant to adopt required formative and assessment processes. As previously
mentioned, the reluctance by some supervising teachers to refer to the rubric was a
problem similarly described by Jonsson and Mattsson ( 2011 ) based on supervising
teachers’ lack of familiarity with the APST and preservice teacher competency not
being recognised in the rubric. Continuing the theme of resistance to the innovation,
a few supervising teachers noted that they preferred to evaluate preservice teachers’
achievement using the AITSL website to access the standards and view the
Illustrations of Practice as they were familiar with this resource. This may be help-
ful for final-year preservice teachers who are expected to meet the graduate level
standard. However, the rubric aims to support preservice teachers to distinguish the
increasing levels of complexity required leading up to this level.
A preservice teacher and a supervising teacher both commented that the interim
review based on the rubric was valuable for evaluating preservice teachers’ progress
and providing feedback, enabling preservice teachers to improve to meet the gradu-
ate standard before the end of the professional experience. Teacher educators in the
focus groups also pointed to the value of the interim report recognising this as an
opportunity to ensure that all parties were interpreting the standards in a similar
way. It was a time to discuss interpretations, gaps and plans for further learning in
very precise ways (‘nothing airy fairy’ was one remark).
The majority of teacher educators, school coordinators and supervising teachers
agreed that they used the rubric to guide conversations with preservice teachers
about generating evidence about their teaching capability (see Table 9.7). A third-
year preservice teacher wrote that she used the rubric ‘to identify the areas that
hadn’t been covered and discuss ways to gather this evidence’. A school coordinator
commented that conversations about what and how to collect evidence to demon-
strate achievement were integral to exploring with preservice teachers what each
focus area descriptor meant and could look like in the specific context.
A final-year preservice teacher suggested that the professional experience assess-
ment guide could be improved by including a section that requires us to obtain evi-
dence about each of the focus areas. He commented:
I found that I knew and my supervising teacher knew that I could fulfil all the requirements
but when it came to providing evidence I became stuck. A reminder that evidence needs to
be collected would be very valuable.9 Using a Developmental Assessment Rubric to Revitalise Stakeholder Conversations...