The Department of Education and Training Victoria has partnered with the Faculty of Education in the design and delivery of a Graduate Certificate in Education (Learning Difficulties) (GCE). The fully online GCE was co-designed and developed for its first delivery in Semester 2, 2022.
Melbourne Metrics’ role is to partner with the Learning Intervention team at the Faculty, who are leading the project, to develop a capability framework in a multi-stage, iterative co-design process involving subject matter experts and stakeholder engagement. The framework seeks to describe what a teacher of students with learning difficulties looks like as their practice progresses from novice to expert. It aims to align with the course purpose and outcomes and learning and assessment design. This will provide the basis for an assessment that will allow course participants to demonstrate evidence of their capabilities and provide reporting to support teachers to understand, plan for, address, reflect upon, and celebrate their professional growth. The framework will allow for multiple assessment types, including self-assessment and school-based assessment by a school leader, to provide a comprehensive evidence base to determine participant achievement.
The impact
Research has shown that often graduate teachers are not ‘work ready’ when they graduate from higher education. To address this, the capability framework shifts assessment and reporting from a one-dimensional focus on what graduates know to a focus also on what they do in practice. Moreover, the development of the capability framework with the Learning Intervention teaching team has provided a means of reflection regarding course content and how it contributes to graduates developing specialist practices in the education of students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities across the span of their career. In this way, the framework has provided a means to address how teachers translate knowledge into practice, a link that is key to effective practice. The Victorian Department of Education and Training has committed to funding four cohorts of teachers to undertake the GCE-ld.