EDUC4820 The Professional Educator

This is a capstone topic designed to provide students with the opportunity to reflect on, synthesise and use knowledge developed across the earlier years of the degree. Students will be challenged to investigate significant contemporary educational issues and to use their educational and curriculum knowledge to explain and justify the positions they adopt in relation to these issues. This process will assist students to explore and make explicit their personal professional philosophy of education. In addition students will explore the nature of the profession they are preparing to enter. Students will critically analyse evidence of their learning and performance across course topics and professional experience as a process for gathering evidence to meet the graduate professional standards for teachers and document this in a personal professional portfolio.

This topic aims to:

• Assist students to bring their educational and curriculum knowledge to bear on the investigation of contemporary educational issues
• Engage students in applied processes that can be used to critically analyse selected contemporary educational issues
• Enable students to use these procedures to propose and justify policy positions and/or practices relevant to the selected issues
• Document evidence in a personal professional portfolio to meet the AITSL Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST): Graduate Level and or ACECQA Quality Standards

1. Articulate a personal professional philosophy of teaching and education by synthesising and critically evaluating relevant beliefs, knowledge and skills
2. Analyse and critique policy and practice related to selected educational problems and issues
3. Explain and justify their recommendations for action in relation to the selected educational problem or issues
4. Explain the roles of teachers as members of profession
5. Analyse key features of the process of entering the teaching profession and of the early years of teaching
6. Complete a professional portfolio that includes evidence of competency against the APST: Graduate level standard and or the ACECQA Quality Standards drawing on learning in the topic, previous coursework and professional experiences