2 41preparation. These factors include employment type (full time, part time, casual),
diversity of school context and induction support received (Mayer et al., 2014 ).
Higher education institutions, in partnership with systems, employers, schools and
regulatory authorities, are collectively responsible for continuous improvement and
raising public confidence in the teaching profession, not just teacher education
providers.
In this volume, we have presented innovative approaches for finding productive
solutions and ways forward in third or hybrid spaces within the professional experi-
ence component of initial teacher education. These are approaches that could also
be extended to differently imagined partnerships between systems, schools, univer-
sities and regulatory authorities. It is important to note that a number of recommen-
dations from the TEMAG report ( 2015 ) also focus on supporting beginning teachers
and workforce planning challenges. Like all successful partnerships, these recom-
mendations take time to establish and evolve. This invariably creates a mismatch
between the time needed for the deep engagement necessary for successful and
sustainable outcomes and the limited timeframes imposed by governments for evi-
dencing reform. We argue that innovative and insightful practice helps fill this gap.
Government policy is right to focus on strengthening the ways in which higher
education institutions approach the development of effective and well-prepared
graduate teachers. However, it is important that accountability and regulatory mech-
anisms lead to improvements, and not have the counter-effect of reducing the qual-
ity of some programs by constraining providers from developing the types of
innovative approaches that feature in this volume.
Teaching is one of the single largest professions in Australia. In a climate of
reform that is also focused on the effectiveness of teachers’ practice, there is a grow-
ing expectation that teachers will enable better learning outcomes for all students.
This has implications for the range of skills needed by teachers, especially when
dealing with twenty-first century skills (Asia Society, 2014 ), and necessitates a bet-
ter understanding of developments and trends that will both shape the teacher work-
force of the future as well and allow teachers the best possible opportunities to be
effective practitioners (Weldon, 2015 ).
As we write, the new requirement for a final-year teacher performance assess-
ment is being developed for implementation across all Australian teacher education
programs from 2018. This requirement stipulates that prior to graduation, preser-
vice teachers must present evidence of their impact on student learning after the
completion of a cycle of planning, teaching, assessing and reflecting. Australia is
poised to follow in the path of some states in the United States of America who use
the edTPA, which, in turn, has built on the Performance Assessment for California
Teachers (PACT) model (Reagan, Schram, McCurdy, Chang, & Evans, 2016 ). In
the edTPA, the performance assessment task assesses planning, instruction and
assessment domains of teaching using a structured portfolio approach.
The means by which preservice teachers are required to account for their prac-
tices using a performance assessment can powerfully shape their understandings of
what matters (Allard, Mayer, & Moss, 2014 ; Soslau, Kotch-Jester, & Jorlin, 11
December 2015 ). Teacher performance assessments may have positive formative
14 Educating Future Teachers: Insights, Conclusions and Challenges