A New Breed of TAFE Practitioner
THINKPIECE | Greg Madden TAFE NSW ICVET
The VET marketplace has shifted. Where previously it was about individuals wanting courses and qualifications, it’s no longer that simple. Not so long ago teachers were encouraged towards ‘flexible delivery’. For most of us, that meant doing things differently in the classroom. More recently, ‘flexible delivery’ has taken on a bold new face where the classroom takes a backseat to the workplace, where the focus is off teaching and onto learning, where the teacher is being morphed into a new breed – the workplace practitioner.
“Technology isn’t all that has changed over the past two decades. The people… have reinvented themselves”.
Ira Matathia
(Author “Next: Trends for the Future” 1998)
Customer Driven Practice
Over the past decade a new breed of TAFE Practitioner has emerged and is evolving. They stand alongside the classic classroom teacher but they are different. They ply a different trade, they have a different skills set.
Major Points Summarised
- TAFE practitioners are not being told to ‘lift-your-game’ but rather to ‘change-your-game’
- A very important facet of this role is fitting in with regular work patterns, and not interrupting the natural flow of work.
- The practitioner is dominantly diagnostic rather than prognostic.
- Initially, the work of the enterprise shapes learning rather than the learning shaping the work.
- There is a considerable amount of learning required by the practitioner.
- The stuff that’s most valued is by managers, is the informal ‘on-the-job training’ that people do, day-to-day, on the job with work colleagues. Rather than this being seen as bad news, it is really ‘product development information’ that should inform our product design. The TAFE practitioner needs to operate alongside, just like a work colleague.
- Workplace practitioners ‘tap into’ the informal learning that occurs in enterprises and render this more visible” (and therefore assessable).
In a rapidly changing workplace, there has been a swing from a supplier defined learning options towards customer driven formulations. Since at least the 1990’s, VET providers have recognized the need provide innovative customer-driven training solutions.
They have worked closely with business clients to develop customised training programs, specific to the needs of each particular business. Their aim has been to respond to market demand and develop courses – available at a time and location that suits a particular organisation. This customer responsive posture by TAFE has created something new – the workplace practitioner!
TAFE Practitioners responding experimentally
With the birth of initiatives such as TAFE Plus, campus based classroom teachers were encouraged to ‘get out into industry’. TAFE Plus was an enabling structure that resulted in a plethora of experimental initiatives. TAFE Teachers were asked to work in different ways, to undertake new roles and responsibilities additional to the traditional ‘teaching’ role, roles that “are also substantially different in terms of focus, purpose and practice”.1
Over the years, a ‘stable of willing TAFE teachers’ or part-time consultants, have been responding experimentally in diverse workplace environments. At the same time, university researchers have been engaged in mapping many of these workplace experiments, such that now, a significant body of data lays dormant in databases waiting for analysis and action.
The research shows that many TAFE teachers have re-invented themselves. It captures some of the inventiveness of our workplace based colleagues, as they have attempted to respond to the peculiar demands of a workplace environment. It begins to define the nature of the task and the characteristics of this ‘new breed of workplace practitioner’.
“… practitioners are asked to do things ‘differently’ in their everyday practices, they are being called on to become different practitioners; that is, to have different understandings of their role in education and training, to have different relationships with learners, to conceptualise their professional and vocational knowledge differently, to alter their relationship with their organisation, to change their understanding of who they are in the new education and training landscape. In short, to change their identity at work” 2
Traditional Classroom Approach |
Emerging Workplace Approach |
|---|---|
High ‘teacher:student’ ratio |
Low ‘practitioner:worker’ ratio |
Stand & Deliver – Tell |
Get Alongside - Listen |
Pre-designed materials |
Design As You Go (DAYGO) |
Teacher directed |
Project Based Teaching & Learning |
Assignment Based |
Portfolio Development |
Emphasis on pre-determined skills |
Practitioners who are reflective learners |
The Classroom with homework |
Creating spaces for learning |
Give them an assignment |
Take their suggestions for projects |
Scheduled |
Unfolding |
Targeted Outcomes |
Diagnostic |
Gap Filling |
Gap Analysis |
Trainer |
Learning Support |
Stand & Deliver |
Walkabout |
Targeted Result |
Analyse & Recommend |
Individual Commitment |
Management Commitment |
Well defined Pathway |
Emergent Pathways |
Fixed Rules |
Negotiable Rules |
Lecture mode |
Interactive |
This table represents the ends of a continuum. In general, the work of VET practitioners falls somewhere between the depicted approaches. The extremes are provided for comparison purposes . |
|
Pedagogical Shift
The change has been pedagogically fundamental. The ‘stand & deliver’ mode of the classroom teacher has often been given short shrift out in the workplace. Business has seen the traditional classroom model as requiring adjustment to become less lecturing and more interactive. It’s been more than a simple change in emphasis, rather it’s involved a change in who they are and how they relate. Said one workplace manager:
“ What we are encouraging here is to be as distant from the classroom environment as possible and to have … interactive sessions, to get the people up and involved and we don’t want to be sitting there sort of lecturing them. You know we’re given session plans and training manuals but we don’t really … tend to read from them … I think for some of the trainers who have come from the classroom perspective that might hinder them a little bit because that’s not what they’re used to … TAFE practitioners are not being told to ‘lift-your-game’ but rather to ‘change-your-game’.” 3
The Enterprise shapes the learning
Coaxing ‘classroom based teachers’ out into the workplace is not as simple as it first seems. Exemplary workplace practitioners have a different paradigm and a different skills set. Teachers coming from a campus environment are suddenly on someone else’s patch, they are guests in a somewhat foreign context and as guests they must take a more flexible posture than they did back on campus. Says University of South Australia VET researchers, Harris, Simons and Moore – “A very important facet of this role was fitting in with regular work patterns, and not interrupting the natural flow of work”4
One implication of this was that they could not simply inject their own ways of training into an enterprise. One company member warned: ‘You can’t just come in and plug in a program … it’s in the workplace, so it’s workplace based.”5
“… providers are coming under increasing pressure to change the way they do business as a result of contemporary changes to work and work organisation, together with new ideas concerning knowledge, skill and learning”.
Clive Chappell & Geof Hawke
(‘Investigating Learning & Work” 2005)
“The theme of responsiveness was prevalent in the interviews, and was articulated in many different ways. One termed it being ‘in their hands virtually’, in that the services were ‘all negotiated, we certainly don’t go in there to impose on them, it’s a negotiated thing: what do you want to learn, when do you want to learn it, how do you want to learn it, yeah, how do you want it assessed, how many people have we got, when do you want it’.”6
This is very much a ‘listening rather than telling’ posture. When contact is initiated, the practitioner is diagnostic rather than prognostic. The VET practitioner walks about the workplace with the mindset of a researcher, seeking to better align ‘TAFE product’ with the needs of the organization and the individual.
One TAFE Manager said of his ‘workplace practitioner’: “Because of his close association (with the company), he had been able to identify gaps for the company and had been ‘instrumental in changing the training from what was a more traditional model’ The TAFE manager’s judgement was that ‘overtly or covertly, he’s absorbed the culture … and has been able to recognise opportunities of how you can do it in different ways [and] for this reason, he has become a key link for us.”7
For this new breed of TAFE practitioner, “ the work of the enterprise shapes learning—learning does not shape the work”8
Teaching and learning strategies must be able to meld in with the core business of the enterprise. One company member warned: ‘You can’t just come in and plug in a program … it’s in the workplace, so it’s workplace based’.9
Geoff Tye, Training Consultant, TAFE NSW -Western Sydney Institute explains the workplace practitioner needs to start working in different ways:
You’re not going to have the people there for nominal hours as suggested by the syllabus…. because the companies are saying ‘Hey I want my people on the job producing things!”. 10
Rather, this new breed of practitioner tweaks the traditional training product and adds-value:
“… they needed to be responsive to the practicalities of the workplace in their training and in their customising of materials, and to demonstrate ways of working that resonate with both the expectations of the companies’ personnel (managers and workers) and the exigencies of the companies’ work. To be able to do this required an understanding and an appreciation that they had a considerable amount of learning to do themselves”11.
The Learning Coach
But beyond this responsive listening and tweaking of traditional product, TAFE’s new breed of practitioners have developed a new model of teaching and learning engagement:
“They often worked with people on a one-to-one basis, as distinct from teaching in classroom-type situations to which they were more accustomed. This style could more aptly be labeled ‘a learning coach’, where the practitioner displayed ‘a real coaching way of teaching’ and was ‘passionate about developing people’…”12
Walking about the workplace, coming upon people, ‘actually being there while the student is doing it’ enables “needs-based, just-in-time and highly interactive training and learning strategies … that are highly valued approaches in enterprise-based environments”. In this context, workplace practitioners ‘tap into’ the informal learning that occurs in enterprises and render this more visible” (and therefore assessable).
“ … the significance of informal learning on the job from everyday work colleagues was strongly emphasized. The stuff that’s most valued …is on-the-job training that people do, day-to-day…”13 on the job with work colleagues.
Embedded in the Business
This last comment may sound like bad news for any external provider but is it really? What they value is “learning on the job from everyday work colleagues”. But what if the TAFE practitioner is effectively, a work colleague.Rather than being seen as bad news, this is really ‘product development information’ that should inform our product design. In this brave new world of TAFE practitioners in the workplace, Harris, Simons and Moore have contended that the workplace practitioner tends to become ‘an everyday work colleague’. They say:
“As a consequence of close working arrangements with the enterprises, and increasingly spending more time there than in their institutes, the TAFE practitioners became closely affiliated with their linking companies.
They often came, therefore, to be identified and even named almost as one of the company staff. For example, one TAFE practitioner could claim: ‘I feel like I’m actually part of the site, that I’m not external … Yes, I kind of feel like one of them, so that’s really good’, while two different TAFE managers said, ‘As far as the clients are concerned, you’re now part of their furniture’ and, ‘He could probably just about step into the warehouse manager’s role, I suggest, he’s been there that often and because of the way he works with them … basically he could be one of their people, it’s as simple as that’.
I think [the workplace practitioner] has become like a part of our company and a person that people know and also trust and, when he does his training, people are not scared to put up their hand and say, okay, I don’t know now … we see him as a part of our business.14
The new breed of workplace practitioner becomes somewhat embedded in the organization. They are almost ‘pastoral’ in their role, moving about the workplace, touching base with their charges, prompting and nudging the learning process along. Because relevance is so highly regarded by managers and workers, it’s essential that the practitioner digs deeper into the substance of the organizations life.
One practitioner for example:“equipped himself by working in the company for three months ‘so that he could get a really good idea of exactly how does it all work’ and, as a result, ‘he was able to grasp what I wanted so quickly’ and ‘really understood what we wanted. And, you know, that’s fantastic. I don’t think that I’ve seen that type of dedication to getting something right anywhere else, so that was … impressive”15
In another instance, “the TAFE practitioner became a learner with company employees as a new warehouse management system was being introduced into the enterprise, and was then able to serve as the knowledgeable resource person with firsthand experience for others in the company or new staff”.
One TAFE manager articulated this embeddedness as ‘being visible. He contended - … if you’re going to start working in closely with industry, you’ve got to be able to keep going around and around and around, coming back and revisit, revisit, revisit, make new ground, come back, you know, offer things, do things come back and visit again. It’s no good just [being] … out there for two or three months and then disappearing. This meant going to meetings, participating in luncheons and visiting companies, ‘so those people in those establishments can see that we’re there to support them and we’re visible, you know, we get to know their business while visiting so we have other ways of doing things as well’’16
Project-Based Delivery
The central plank of this ‘embedded practitioner approach’ is a kind of ‘getting-alongside pedagogy’ rather than ‘stand & deliver’ It’s an pedagogy that lends itself more readily to new concepts such as recognition, informal learning and holistic professional judgment. But beyond those more passive approaches, this pedagogy has invented alternative ways to pro-actively interpret and deliver Training Packages.
Geoff Tye, a Senior Training Consultant based at Mt.Druitt with TAFE NSW - Western Sydney Institute, explains his team’s Training Package delivery as being ‘projects based’:
“The TrainingPackage acknowledges that most of the work will be done in a team based situation because that’s what a workplace is and so we will develop projects with a student and with a company to help resolve company issues, to solve problems, or it might be some ideas that the bosses have been throwing around for a while. We’ll sort of put it in a framework that helps the company but it also helps us get evidence.”17
This project-based modus operandi takes the ‘getting-alongside pedagogy’ to a new level. It’s definitely not a case of the passive observational assessor. One can imagine that these projects could have a significant impact on the company’s development. The training package translated into an ‘on-the-job team project’ becomes somewhat of a performance management tool. The workplace practitioner who shadows the project, becomes somewhat of ‘a consultant’. At the same time as there’s enhanced performance, the use of a project based pedagogy, provides a very credible context for valid assessment.
Geoff explains: “So that’s where we have to really rely on recognising their current skills or their prior learning and developing projects in line with management needs… we can get their workers attacking projects and then, from those projects, we will extract evidence to satisfy our assessment needs”.
“We can’t just use last year’s assignment, we’ve got to develop with them, activities that suit everybody’s needs”.
References