Assessors under assessment – Footnote to AQTF Standard 7
Australian Quality Training Framework (AQTF) Standard 7, Footnote 4
A person who holds the Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training from the Training Package for Assessment and Workplace Training (BSZ98) will be accepted for the purpose of this standard. A person who has demonstrated equivalent competencies to the Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training in the period up to 12 months following publication of the Training and Assessment Training Package will also be accepted for the purposes of this standard.
From the Teacher’s Perspective
The scenario…
You’ve been teaching for TAFE for many, many years and as far as you’re aware, been doing a good job of it. In the background you’re aware that part time teachers have been required to have a Certificate IV level qualification in order to teach and assess in TAFE (or any other RTO). However, this hasn’t been of concern to you because you’re full time; you have a tertiary qualification in teaching/education.
Then, one day along comes someone from the Institute Office – you know, that place where people do things you don’t understand and seem to be paid well despite their efforts not seeming to be directly related to anything you do or care about. Anyway, this person tells you that something’s changed and now you have to have this Certificate IV as well.
Say what?!?! Yep, you heard them correctly. They seriously expect you to jump through Certificate IV level hoops so they can tick off a box somewhere.
Your usual tactic of ignoring the emails doesn’t work. This person insists on ringing you then coming to see you, personally! It must be important to someone if they’re going to that much trouble. So you agree - as long as they come to see you; in your office; at your convenience.
A fortnight later…
OK, it seems the rules have changed. The standards used to keep all training providers in line have been updated. Of course they have a fancy acronym – AQTF. I have a feeling I’m not going to be allowed to forget that one. What I found out was that these standards keep all RTO’s under control. Sounds good to me but the trouble is we have to abide by them too. Can’t have rules for them and not for us I suppose.
The bottom line is that there’s a particular standard – No 7 I think – that says anyone delivering or assessing training has to be appropriately qualified. Du’oh! They get no argument from me. What I can’t figure out is why my university qualification isn’t enough. After all, it’s way above a Cert IV.
Anyway, this person says that I have to demonstrate that what I have is equivalent to the Cert IV that’s in the standard. Are they serious? I don’t have time for this!
After the next semester break…
Hmmm… This Cert IV thing just won’t go away. Now I’m being assigned an assessment coach. What the? Sounds like some sort of fitness program.
Not happy Jan!
Sometime in September…
My assessment coach really knows her stuff. I hate to admit that, but it’s true. She knew all about the stuff I did in my university course and had already figured out a whole heap of stuff that matched up with this Cert IV thing. What we did was go through the competencies and figured out what I had that matched and what I needed to find to plug the gaps. Of course there was no doubt that I’m competent. It was just a matter of being able to document it.
I told her right from the start that I wasn’t going to spend hours and hours doing up a portfolio or anything. She agreed. I couldn’t believe it. She pointed out that a lot of the stuff was already documented in our systems. Stuff like my years of experience, my TAA1 and TAA2, the professional development activities I’d gone to over the years, the stuff I’d been doing on the assessment validation panels for the faculty and so on. What she was interested in seeing were the session plans I had in my filing cabinet, the assessments I’d created and shared with the other sections… and lots more.
The best part is that she’s a qualified assessor for this new Cert IV and so she can see the evidence and record it without me having to send it off anywhere. I didn’t know that. I thought I’d have to do up some sort of portfolio like our RPL candidates do. But she said that she’d have to give it all back to me anyway so as long as she’s seen it and recorded it, we were OK. It makes sense. So we dug down into my filing cabinet and desk drawers and all over the place and found what we needed.
It was actually not a bad thing to do. In the end I was feeling pretty good about all the stuff I had. I was also a bit embarrassed about how messy my filing system is but that didn’t seem to faze my assessment coach. I think she’d seen worse.
Late October…
I got a certificate thingy today. Well, it’s not really a certificate – that’s something I learnt from my assessment coach. Certificates can only be issued for qualifications under the National Training Framework. This is just an internal document that says I’ve been assessed against the Cert IV competencies and have evidence of competence. On the back it lists the competencies and the evidence I had so it’s really clear. I thought about enrolling in this Cert IV and getting recognition. The head teacher says I can do that as long as it’s before the 23rd of November. I’ve got to pay for it though. Hmmm… I’ll think about that. At least I’ve done what I need to do to meet that standard so now the Institute is OK.
From the assessment coach’s perspective
The scenario…
AQTF audit coming in the new year. Yeah, I know we’re supposed to do things because they’re inherently good rather than just to meet audit requirements. However, not all our staff are that cooperative. In fact, I reckon quite a few of them don’t even know what hoops we have to jump through in order to stay registered as an RTO.
I’ve been allocated a bunch of full time staff and the task of ensuring each has demonstrated equivalent competencies to BSZ40198 – the old Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training. Don’t know how I got roped into this but… it’s got to be done.
A fortnight later…
Been in touch with my first candidate. He was polite but I could tell he wasn’t happy about this. I can understand that so I tried to find out what he’s most worried about in terms of the national system – not that I phrased it that way. It seems he’s got a bee in his bonnet about fly-by-night RTO’s that seem to give out certificates for $$. That was an ideal start point for explaining the importance of the AQTF standards and in particular, Standard 7. It worked. By the end of our conversation he’d decided that by making sure TAFE was squeaky clean we were within our rights to complain if we come across any shonky equivalents. All I need to do now is help him understand that what he did at university was a long time ago, and doesn’t necessarily line up with the competencies in BSZ40198.
After the next semester break…
Got back in touch with my candidates and let them know who their assessment coaches are. I just happen to be the coach for the first one I contacted last semester. Hmmm… Will be interesting working with him.
Sometime in September…
I’m so pleased we got the assessment coaches together and talked about the equivalence project before we met with our candidates. It was really helpful to have a shared understanding of what evidence we could get from the corporate systems and what type of things we might be able to dig out of the teachers themselves. I actually made up a checklist aligned to each of the competencies so when I met with my first candidate we just went down the list. Any item he had, we pulled out of his files, made a note of it then put it back for safe-keeping.
I think he was amazed at some of the stuff he had and I confess I was impressed. This guy has done some really interesting things and very valuable for his students. It was a real eye-opener for me. The challenge of course was helping him figure out what constituted quality evidence. Just telling me a story of what he’d done wasn’t enough. We had to do some digging around both in our conversation and in his office to find artefacts to back up his claims. It was all there though. Just took a bit of time.
One of the outcomes is that I’ve made a mental note to myself to clean up my office when I get back. Can’t believe the mess some of our teachers work in and I suspect my office looks much the same.
Late October…
Phew! I’ve sent statements of equivalence to all my candidates – a very satisfying thing to do. I can’t believe how successful the process was. I’ve even heard from one of the head teachers that there’ve been a few inquiries from full time staff about enrolling in BSZ40198. Never thought THAT would happen!
From the coordinator’s perspective
There were three key pressures leading to this project. One was the introduction of TAA40104 (Certificate IV Training and Assessment) in November 2004. Another was the publication of the revised AQTF Standards for RTOs in July 2005. The third was our AQTF audit scheduled for early 2006.
The project aim was to ensure our Institute met AQTF standard 7 – the one that refers to the qualifications of staff. As is often the case with seemingly simple requests, there were many complicating issues to wade through before a solution could be found.
The key was found in the footnote to the standard. It was one of the very few surprises in the revised AQTF standards when they were published in July 2005. In short, it meant we didn’t have to enrol all our staff in BSZ40198. Instead, we could document equivalent competence – basically, a recognition process. We were good at that!
However, recognition for nearly 100 staff members geographically dispersed up and down the mid-north coast was a logistical nightmare. It couldn’t be delegated to local head teachers because some of them were among the candidates. Besides, the assessors themselves had to meet specific qualification requirements.
Michael Fullan (1991, Ch 3) very clearly expresses one of our main stumbling blocks. He points out that “new experiences are always initially reacted to in the context of some ‘familiar, reliable construction of reality’ in which people must be able to attach personal meaning to the experiences regardless of how meaningful they might be to others.” In other words, the reasons why my colleagues and I thought it important to meet AQTF standard 7 were not necessarily going to be meaningful to the teachers. No matter how many times we tried to explain it to them, if we did so using our own logic it would continue to be resisted. As George Bernard Shaw once observed, problems emerge when ' reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity'. (cited in Fullan, 1991, p 96)
So it was essential to the success of this project that we could help the teachers involved figure out “what’s in it for them”. However, we didn’t have the luxury of time. This project had to be done before the 23rd of November. We needed a quick, simple strategy.
The answer came in the form of an article by John O Burdett: 'Forty things every manager should know about coaching'. (Journal of Management Development, Vol 17 No 2 1998.)
Burdett proposed a simple framework for how to approach a coaching conversation. He called it the S - T - R - E - T - C - H discussion.
Here’s how Burdett describes his framework and how it worked for us.
Set the context. Engage the staff member in dialogue regarding the current situation. Ask questions so that you have a shared understanding of the current situation. Define the problem or opportunity. Where the staff member is unaware of the difficulty, outline your perception.
Transfer the problem/opportunity to the staff member. Give evidence of the opportunity/problem. Be specific. Don’t dwell on the negative. However, don’t be afraid to make a recommendation. Ask questions to gain the staff member’s point of view. Ask questions, encourage staff members to provide answers (don’t give the answers).
Revisit what the desired level of performance looks like. Be future oriented. Have the staff member paint a work picture of a future based scenario where he/she is acting out the new behaviour, process or issue. Ask questions to complete the details in the picture. Help the staff member experience at an emotional level how he/she would feel if they were operating at that level of performance.
Establish what’s in it for the staff member. Encourage the staff member to recognise the benefits for them if they are successful. With some staff members it is also important for them to recognise the consequences if they are not successful.
Take time to agree on specifically what will change. Focus on a manageable element of behaviour, part of the process or issue. Build on the staff member’s strengths.
Catch them doing it right. Provide specific praise and ongoing feedback.
Have time set aside to celebrate success. This should be done in an appropriate way valued by the staff member. It could be for example public praise for the achievements of the staff member at a staff morning tea.
We allocated assessment coaches to each staff member without BSZ40198. The initial phase of their role was to explain why we needed to document equivalent competence. The challenge was to do this in a way that was meaningful for each candidate.
Rather than tell the candidates what was needed, the assessment coaches asked them what they had. They used a checklist of possible evidence to help this process but ultimately it was up to the individual candidate’s to identify the evidence they had.
This particular step in Burdette’s process was less useful to us. However, the checklist of possible evidence served as the “picture” of desired performance. It gave them both a start and end point. A start point from which they could identify their own evidence and an end point in that it showed what a complete set of evidence might look like.
This wasn’t as difficult as first thought. It relied on the ability of the assessment coaches to tune into the issues of concern to their candidates. Once that was achieved, it was merely a matter of keeping the candidate’s perspective in mind in all conversations.
In the case of this project, rather than seeking change, we were seeking cooperation. The underlying principle was the same.
The assessment coaches were very adept at doing this. Their praise was genuine as they discovered the wonderful things our staff do but haven’t necessarily documented or brought to anyone’s attention.
This was done at the time of the conversations between the assessment coaches and their candidates, and also in the form of the statement of equivalence that each candidate received.
See also
Australian Quality Training Framework | A-Z Resources
