Flip, Feedback And Fly: Using Loop To Enhance The Professional Experience Of Initial Teacher Education

The Australian Professional Teaching Standards require pre-service teachers to complete a minimum number of days of professional experience in order to graduate. Problems can arise, however, when the evaluation of their professional experience against the Standards shifts from the providers of teacher education programmes to school-based supervising teachers. The Lesson Observation On-line Platform (LOOP) begins to address these problems by utilising a secure, shared digital platform to facilitate evidence-based evaluation of the performance of pre-service teachers. In this research, we evaluated the potential of LOOP to assess pre-service teachers against the Standards as well as to enhance the professional development of both pre-service teachers and their supervising teachers. The responses from two pre-service teachers and their supervising teachers demonstrate that the methodological matters can be easily overcome. Nevertheless our findings indicate that there are several practical issues that need to be overcome if LOOP were to be fully successful.