Introduction

Since the 1980s, educational researchers have been inspired by the work of Lakoff and Johnson (1980) and have sought to understand the role that metaphors play in the formation and development of teacher professional identities. This research has particularly focused upon pre-service and early career teachers (Erickson & Pinnegar, 2017) as they develop their conception of what it means to be a teacher professional. This work often produces lists of metaphors for teaching which are then sometimes linked to the various theoretical ways in which teaching is understood, such as behaviourist, cognitive, constructivist or socio-historic understandings of the nature of teaching (Alger, 2009). While this work has been valuable in helping teachers and their teacher educators gain insights into how teachers come to understand their role and professional identity, a gap in the literature exists concerning how educational policy documents frame and construct teachers and teaching metaphorically.

This paper is structured in three parts. The first provides an overview of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) work on metaphors, particularly in how these provide conceptual schema structuring how we understand the world and behave in it. Lakoff and Johnson’s work has been extensively used in educational research, particularly concerning the metaphors held by pre-service and early career teachers. Some of the findings of this body of research is presented for context to explain how teacher metaphors link to professional identity. This includes research concerned with the transition in metaphors used as teachers develop from novice to expert and the similarities between teacher metaphors and those used by educational theorists.

The paper then analyses the metaphors used in the recent Australian government policy document, Strong Beginnings: Report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel 2023 (TEEP, 2023) whose aim is to strengthen Initial Teacher Education (ITE) to ensure graduate teachers, ‘are taught sufficient evidence-based practices to support them to meet the Graduate Teacher Standards’ (p. 9) of the Australian government. As the Department of Education website explains on its page providing information on the Quality Initial Teacher Education Review about the panel, ‘The Teacher Education Expert Panel was established by the Australian Government to improve initial teacher education (ITE) to boost graduation rates and ensure graduating teachers are better prepared for the classroom’ (DoE, 2023). The panel made 14 recommendations (TEEP, 2023, pp. 17–21) which we list later in this paper.

The Strong Beginnings report seeks to increase teacher retention in the belief that ‘One of the best ways to help beginning teachers be successful from day one is to improve ITE’ (p. 6). We argue that Strong Beginnings presents three major categories of metaphors: teachers as saviours, teachers as victims and teachers as compliant. We found that the metaphor that dominates the document is that of teachers as compliant. This is mostly achieved by stressing the need for teacher education to focus upon providing graduate teachers with mandated core content, asserted to be universally applicable in all teaching situations as evidence-based practices proven to be highly effective.

The paper then shifts to discussing how these three categories of metaphors for teacher professionalism stand outside those generally associated with ECT images of themselves, as discussed at the beginning of this paper, that is, metaphors that frequently stress teaching as contextual, student focused and nurturing, rather than based upon the application of universally applicable high impact strategies that take little or no regard of the situated nature of teaching and learning. This paper joins a body of research that views an analysis of teacher metaphors as productive in understanding the formation of teacher identities and the potential for these metaphors to conflict with those espoused in the Strong Beginnings report.

Metaphors to teach by

Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors We Live By understands metaphors as more than linguistic devices, rather they see metaphors as windows into how people and cultures understand and structure their world. This is because: ‘The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’ (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 5) in the context where, ‘human thought processes are largely metaphorical’ (p. 6). The concept that the metaphor seeks to illuminate is always more complex than the metaphor itself. The problem is that, ‘In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept … a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with the metaphor’ (p. 9). This means metaphors can work to stifle and constrain how we think of topics and our ability to think anew about them.

Metaphors help us understand the world because they are, in turn, structured into ‘entire domains of experience and not in terms of isolated concepts’ and these domains of experience are termed ‘experiential gestalt’ (p. 117). This gestalt structures our experience and can be understood as pre-structuring it: ‘Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities … In this sense, metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies’ (p. 156). What we perceive as, ‘truth is always given relative to a conceptual system and the metaphors that structure it’ (p. 197). These metaphorical conceptual systems are understood to structure our actions and these actions become ritualised, where ritual can be seen as a kind of lived metaphor and understood as ‘one kind of experiential gestalt’ (p. 234). In this sense, understanding the metaphors used by those engaged in any social activity helps to both illuminate how actors understand what it is that they are doing, but also why they behave in one way rather than in another.

Metaphors and teacher practice

Since the publication of Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) many educational researchers have analysed the metaphors teachers hold of their practice (particularly pre-service and early career teachers, see Erickson & Pinnegar, 2017) to help explore what this means in terms of their developing professional identity (Berliner, 1990; Buchanan, 2015; Goldstein, 2005; Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011; Vidovic & Domovic, 2019), effectiveness (Erickson & Pinnegar, 2017; McGrath, 2006), practice (Farrell, 2023; Mahlios et al., 2010; Munby, 1986; Perry & Cooper, 2001), professional development (Maxwell, 2015; McGrath, 2006), and whether their metaphors for teaching have developed as they progress from novice to expert (Bullough & Stokes, 1994).

Metaphors present a simpler, more concrete and easier to grasp image of the complex ideas they are seeking to illustrate (Kövecses, 2010). As such, ‘studying some complex phenomena (e.g., teaching) must start from the premise that there is no single metaphor that can best capture all of the complexities of the phenomenon under investigation’ (Saban, 2006, p. 311). Metaphors can be used as ‘powerful educative tools’ (Perry & Cooper, 2001, p. 4) to elucidate deep and complex aspects of professional identity and practice. Since the 1980s, educational researchers have considered the metaphors that teachers choose to describe their practice as an important means to gain an understanding of the tacit knowledge and epistemological assumptions underlying their conceptions of teaching. Metaphors illuminate the beliefs that teachers hold regarding their teaching practice (Dixon, 2016; Lakoff & Johnsen, 1980; Munby, 1986; Saban, 2006).

Gaining insight into how teachers envision their teaching identities is not simply a matter of ‘just asking them’. Buchanan (2015) has found that when asked directly to discuss their identity, teachers are likely to respond by discussing what they do, rather than who they are or who they would like to be as a teacher. This focus upon ‘the what’ over ‘the who’ (Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011) can lead teachers to a focus upon interventions associated with the job of teaching, rather than upon their identity as a teacher. This focus may effectively misrecognise the challenges teachers confront in becoming teachers, where ‘the what’ obscures ‘the who’ that brought them to the profession in the first place (Erickson & Pinnegar, 2017).

Metaphors signal a teacher’s deeply held (and perhaps even unconscious) beliefs and attitudes towards teaching (Dixon, 2016; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Munby, 1986; Saban, 2006). ‘They act as a lens, a screen, or a filter through which a subject is (re)viewed’ (Saban, 2006, p. 300). It is therefore imperative they are understood in the context of both teaching practice and how policy seeks to impact this practice.

Although previous research has provided a range of likely metaphor categories to be selected by teachers when they are discussing their teaching practice, these categories have often remained remarkably consistent across studies. Categories that repeat (see Alger, 2009; Mahlios et al., 2010; McGrath, 2006; Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011) include variations of Guiding, Nurturing, Moulding; Transmitting; Providing Tools and Community Development.

Although Bullough and Stokes (1994) stresses that teacher metaphors prove remarkably inflexible and resistant to change, others (Alger, 2009; Mahlios et al., 2004) assert that if teacher metaphors are to change this is most likely to occur across the early years of teaching experience, rather than during their initial teacher education. Beginning teachers engage in a process of role negotiation and identity formation reflected in their metaphors (Bullough & Stokes, 1994, p. 202). Research has found that personal metaphors have ‘sustained their work as teachers through shifting their focus from tests and test results, being attentive to the affective dimension of teaching and focussing on the individual student’ (Dixon, 2016, p. 337). Teacher metaphors ‘both enable and limit student opportunities to learn; their consideration necessitates that the ethical and moral implications of different conceptions of self as teacher, different relations with the Other, be confronted and criticized’ (Bullough & Stokes, 1994). As such, metaphors help teachers make sense of the complex contexts of their teaching lives, but these metaphors can also facilitate or hinder professional growth.

Teachers hold metaphors in ‘clusters’ (Mahlios et al., 2010), and therefore hold a variety of metaphors they feel best describe their experience, metaphors that might even appear self-contradictory. However, these contradictions can be productive, rather than symptomatic of loose thinking. The contradictions between these metaphors can potentially help to illuminate the complexity of the context faced within the profession, where complexity is more than chaos, and can inspire change, rather than confusion.

From novice to expert teacher

Research into the metaphors held by early career teachers stresses that these become increasingly student-centred over time. For example, Farrell (2023) found, ‘the two teachers in their 2nd and 3rd years wanted to control their learning environment, while the two teachers in their 4th and 5th years were more focused on their students’ learning’ (p. 20). Other researchers considering the differences in kind of teacher metaphors when comparing novice to expert teachers, where ‘experienced teachers identified the valued work of teaching as principally addressing the social, emotional or life needs of students over or beyond the academic areas’ (Dixon, 2016, p. 328).

In some cases, researchers see the path to developing teacher professionalism in bringing teacher metaphors to the fore, so that the underlying cognitive beliefs the teachers hold can be better explored. In this process, it is understood that ‘the metaphors held by teachers both enable and limit student opportunities to learn; their consideration necessitates that the ethical and moral implications of different conceptions of self as teacher, different relations with the Other, be confronted and criticized.’ (Bullough & Stokes, 1994, p. 202).

Such an understanding of teachers and their progress from novice to expert sees this progression as deeply situated, influenced by how teaching and learning is experienced by the early career teacher, all of which needs to be subjectively assimilated into their professional identity with the aid of pedagogical theory acting to help interpret practice. Research shows that developing teacher expertise is often accompanied by a shift away from a focus on the processes of teaching towards understanding the deeply relational nature of learning between teacher and students, and students and their fellow students (Berliner, 1990; Biesta, 2013).

The strength of the repetition of metaphors and categories of metaphors for teaching by teachers across so much of the research is a strong argument for how deeply many of these conceptual schema are held in the self-conception of teachers. But as Maxwell (2015) makes clear, educational theories also provide repeating metaphors:

…one could easily organise a history of Western educational ideas around recurrent metaphors of teaching. Considering the classical humanist view of the ‘teacher as gardener’ (Rabelais, 1553–1564/1991), the Rousseauian notion of ‘teacher as liberator’ (Rousseau, 1762/1979) and more recent projects to conceptualise the teacher as ‘applied scientist’ (Piaget, 1969), ‘parent’ (Neill, 1960) and even ‘therapist’ (Rogers, 1969), it would seem that there are few schools of educational thought that cannot be instructively encapsulated in a metaphor (p. 88).

What is perhaps remarkable is not how frequently teachers and educational theorists work within frames of teaching and learning metaphors that prove to be so similar, but rather how different these are to those used by policy makers.

The saviour, victim and compliant teachers of strong beginnings

The Teacher Expert Panel’s report Strong Beginnings (2023) provides a variety of implied metaphors for teachers that serve multiple discursive purposes across the text. In particular, it constructs three main categories of metaphors: teachers as change agents; teachers as victims; and teachers as compliant professionals. These categories were identified using inductive coding across multiple readings of this text. After an initial reading, four metaphors were identified, the three already mentioned and teacher as disciplinarian. However, although it is clear the authors of the report saw the imposition of discipline by teachers as a core component of effective teaching, this was not otherwise discussed in the report. A copy of the report was highlighted in various colours to identify text referring to these three core metaphors for teachers. These highlighted text was then analysed to understand the language embodied used to construct these teacher metaphors.

Teacher as saviour

The report begins with a discussion presenting teachers as saviours that is barely used in the report again. The teacher as saviour metaphor is a common trope in popular culture, particularly films (Dolmage, 2017; Henry, 2020). The saviour metaphor is also used as a marketing device for recruitment organisations specialising in providing education systems with underqualified and inexperienced university graduates who are encouraged to see their short-term sojourns into the profession as a means to boost their long-term employability outside of education, such as, the Teach For organisation (Cann, 2013). The teacher as saviour metaphor virtually only appears on the first page of the Executive Summary of the report and can be divided into three major kinds:

Teacher as Pathfinder: ‘When we are young, we can explore and master new talents and skills, discover new passions, test our potential and build our independence. These are all things we start to learn at school with our teachers’ (emphasis added. p. 6).

Teacher as Nation Builder: ‘And as a nation, our competitiveness, economic strength and prosperity will depend on our people’s ability to imagine and create, to discover and design new futures, and to seize new opportunities. The foundation for all this starts with teachers in our schools’ (emphasis added. p. 6).

Teaches as an Agent of Force: ‘Schools are at the forefront of managing the impacts of constant changes shaping our society, such as mobile technology, social media, artificial intelligence and vaping’ (emphasis added. p. 6).

As such, teachers are presented as having an expansive role helping young people to map, design, shape and build their future, while overcoming the social evils associated with everything from AI to the tobacco lobby.

While this narrative draws heavily from tropes in popular culture of saviour teachers, there are also distinct differences. Saviour Teachers in popular culture are often a renegade, or at least a non-conformist. They only succeed as teachers when they throw out the curriculum (To Sir With Love), or tear pages from textbooks (Dead Poet’s Society). In such films it is the conformist teachers who are mostly seen as the problem, since these can often be too easily manipulated by their students for their own good (Unman, Wittering and Zigo). However, as will be discussed at length later, the chief message of the Strong Beginnings report is the opposite of this, that change comes via teacher conformism.

Teacher as victim

Throughout the document, early career teachers in particular are presented as victims of a system that fails to provide them with the otherwise readily available tools necessary to do their job. This results in ‘Nearly four in 10 ITE students leave their course within six years of commencing their degree and around one in five beginning teachers leaves within the first three years of entering the teaching profession’ (p. 6). It is therefore necessary to increase, ‘the ability of, and incentive for, higher education providers to further invest in ITE to increase the number of ITE students and improve the quality of their ITE programs’ (p. 7). This is then supported by a spurious use of fantasy statistics:

A one percentage point uplift in ITE retention rates would result in nearly three hundred more teaching graduates a year, while a 10 percentage point uplift would result in nearly three thousand additional graduates. Similarly, a one percentage point reduction in early career attrition would result in over one hundred more beginning teachers a year, while a 10 percentage point reduction would result in over one thousand additional beginning teachers. p. 7

Teachers are victims due to being underprepared by the ITE courses ‘in several key areas, particularly reading, cultural responsiveness, supporting diverse learners, classroom management, and family/carer engagement’ and in not being ‘taught sufficient evidence-based practices to support them to meet the Graduate Teacher Standards’ (p. 9).

One of the key metaphors driving this trope is that of the Teacher as Chooser. This speaks to the asserted disadvantage faced by potential students of ITE courses by the withholding of vital information upon which they might otherwise make an informed choice between university providers. This would be solved, the authors assert, by the provision of data, where ‘Publicly reporting on these indicators would increase transparency, ensure consistency and help prospective ITE students choose programs best suited to their needs’ (p. 42). Here the metaphor is of transparency allowing freedom (equated solely as choice) and this ‘would drive ongoing improvements if it were used by students in choosing their higher education provider’ (p. 49).

This view that the lack of information inhibits choice is highlighted as a major problem for those seeking entry a mid-career transition to teaching, since, ‘Most universities do not seem to detail available incentives on their websites, and flexible study options are often unadvertised despite being the most commonly available feature to support mid-career entrants’ (p. 83).

Other issues associated where teachers feel victimised that lead to documented reasons for them leaving the profession (Brandenburg et al., 2024) are not mentioned at all, including School Leadership, Workload, Workplace Environment, Student Behaviour, Administrative Load and Lack of Personal Satisfaction (No page numbers, see Table 1 of Brandenburg et al. 2024). Issues such as the increasing administrative burden placed on teachers by a system that fundamentally does not trust them (Galant & Riley, 2017) are also passed over in silence, despite the administrative burden experienced by mentor teachers and ITE providers in managing placements is repeatedly mentioned. In no instances was it found that the major reason teachers were leaving the profession was do to the failings of training they had received in the ITE courses. Rather, Brandenburg et al. (2024) found that teachers leaving schools were often moving to other jobs related to education where they could continue to use their skills.

Table 1 Some indicative teacher metaphors from previous research
Full size table

Teachers as compliant

The report contains the following 14 recommendations. We have highlighted those we believe are designed to foster compliant teachers.

Recommendation 1:

Establish the core content and mandate it in national accreditation.

Recommendation 2:

Embed the core content in initial teacher education programs.

Recommendation 3:

Strengthen the national quality and consistency of initial teacher education programs.

Recommendation 4:

Establish nationally consistent, transparent indicators.

Recommendation 5:

Streamline reporting requirements in the Accreditation Standards and Procedures.

Recommendation 6:

Establish a Transition Fund to support embedding of core content.

Recommendation 7:

Establish an Excellence Fund to improve the quality of initial teacher education programs.

Recommendation 8:

Establish system-wide coordination of practical experience delivery.

Recommendation 9:

Develop national guidelines for high-quality practical experience.

Recommendation 10:

Increase systemic investment in practical experience.

Recommendation 11:

Ensure professional recognition for mentor teachers.

Recommendation 12:

Develop and expand mid-career pathway programs.

Recommendation 13:

Promote mid-career pathways.

Recommendation 14:

Build the evidence base for mid-career programs.

That is, at least eight of the 14 recommendations are concerned with the teaching and reporting of mandated content by ITE providers, ultimately in an attempt to ensure early career teachers comply to standards and teach in ways consistent with endorsed methods. Recommendation 8 could also be included in this total, as it is premised upon agreements that ‘would set expectations for practical experience placements, put in place delivery models to ensure quality and make sure beginning teachers have the opportunity to apply and practise core content while on placement’ (p. 73).).

The report makes it clear that one of its chief concerns is to ensure that if ‘ITE students learn and can apply the teaching practices that work best, beginning teachers will be better prepared for the classroom and more likely to stay in teaching’ (p. 7).

The metaphor of the compliant teacher is constructed using words associated with Rationality, Transparency and Provability. Some of the terms associated with these and the number of times each is used within the report are provided in the following table (Table 2).

Table 2 Compliancy metaphors words and frequencies in strong beginnings report
Full size table

In some cases, we have added all variations of words (e.g., expected/expectation, consistent/consistency), although we have not grouped synonyms, their repeated use makes much the same point (number of uses of each in brackets), such as for Rational words such as: systemic (5), Robust (2), Rigor/ous (10), or for Provability: Moderation (9), Benchmark (8) or Mandate (9).

While the direct requirements of compliance in the report are directed towards ITE providers, the ultimate goal of these requirements is to forge teachers with universally applicable skills all teachers must share if they are to be effective.

Evidence-based practices are those practices supported by research evidence as to their effectiveness. This means there is broad consensus from rigorously conducted evaluations that they work in many cases across various contexts for different subgroups of students (p. 27).

The reason asserted for mandating such content is that ITE courses are not teaching ‘sufficient evidence-based practices to support them to meet the Graduate Teacher Standards’ (p. 9). The recommended changes to ITE are designed to produce three interrelated compliant teachers: the Rational Teacher, the Transparent Teacher, and the Proven Teacher.

The rational teacher

The rational teacher is an output of a rational system of teacher education. ‘Strengthening accreditation will mean there is greater consistency in ITE programs and will put in place a systematic approach to assessing and improving the quality, consistency and outcomes of ITE programs’ (p. 7). At no point in the report is the controversial nature of the conclusions of what makes a rational teacher mentioned, even if this could be deduced from the apparent reluctance of ITE providers to implement willingly what the report is proposing to mandate. In fact, the report states that ‘The Panel’s Discussion Paper provided extensive analysis of the available research on core content areas. Submissions from stakeholders indicated broad support for the core content’ (p. 28).

One of the quoted submissions asserted as providing this broad support is that of the Australian Council of Deans of Education. However, their submission spends extensive time expressing its reservations at the lack of evidence supporting the inclusion of cognitive science into the mandated curriculum of ITE courses. They quote at length Perry et al. (2021), bizarrely, a reference also used in the report itself as a Key Reference for the inclusion of its The Brain and Learning as core content (p. 96), despite this summary of the evidence making it clear that while there is a case for the inclusion of some findings from cognitive science, there are ‘serious gaps and limitations in the applied evidence-base, the uncertainties about the applicability of specific principles across subjects and age ranges, and the challenges of implementation in practice…there are large disconnects between the evidence-base for basic cognitive science and applied cognitive science…applied research surfaces many theoretical and practical problems not encountered in controlled lab or pseudo-lab conditions…(and) The evidence-base is largely at the level of principles rather than tests of specific classroom strategies’ (ACDE, 2023, p. 2, summarising the findings of Perry et al., 2021). This could hardly be construed as a ringing endorsement. It is also ironic given that one of the major concerns the report says is seeking to address is that ITE courses are often viewed by graduate teachers as having been ‘too theoretical and focused on teaching philosophies’ (p. 23). As such, this rational approach to ITE is not only supported by very thin evidence, but criticisms in the literature are presented as supporting evidence.

The transparent teacher

The transparency discussed in the report has less to do with teachers and more with the ITE courses they might attend. Nevertheless, the reason for this transparency is to provide those considering becoming a teacher with data they can use in their choice of provider. The word Choice is used 11 times in the report, and Choose a further 8, and virtually every time it is used in the context to ‘encourage higher education providers to improve the quality of programs, and inform prospective initial teacher education (ITE) students’ choice of programs best suited to their needs’ (p. 18).

This transparency is intended to lead to greater consistency between providers. So, while part of the justification for transparency is to provide potential students with a free and informed choice between providers, the intended long-term outcome of the effect of this choice is to ensure that all ITE providers move towards more homogeneous course delivery and standards. That is, competition is being used to produce a standardisation in outcomes, rather than in providing a growing diversity of approaches. This is consistent with the metaphor of the Rational Teacher discussed above, since there is understood to be only one means of being a rational teacher.

Thus, transparency and the resulting consistency of ITE instruction is an intended feature of the new system. Not only is the Core Content a mandated feature of all ITE courses, but there will also be mandated reporting processes to enable comparisons between providers and financial rewards for providers to implement these changes and for those ITE providers who excel in delivering the preferred model.

The point is to produce graduates who fit the mould of the effective teacher as defined by the Core Content of ITE courses. These graduate teachers will in turn be transparent, since they can only graduate once they have assimilated what it means to be classroom ready. Here, transparency allows all aspects of the teachers work to be visible to outside observers, something which, as Byong-Chul Han explains in The Transparency Society (2015), undermines trust since it negates the need for trust. As he says, ‘The society of transparency is not a society of trust, but one of control.’ (n.p.)

The proven teacher

This lack of trust necessitating the transparent teacher is manifest in the need for these teachers to provide evidence of their ability to meet the pre-determined requirements and standards of a teacher, including being accountable for their impacts within the classroom and being able to demonstrate these in clearly quantifiable outcomes. An effective teacher is understood to be the product of a quality ITE course. The obsession with the word quality in the report is of particular interest, not least since quality appears to have become an empty signifier. That is, quality is entirely subsumed within systems of quantity. Only teaching and learning that can be measured and demonstrated to have produced quantifiable results is considered effective, with the report repeatedly stressing this in relation to ITE courses, for instance, ‘there are insufficient mechanisms to ensure all Teacher Regulatory Authorities are consistently assessing ITE programs against the Accreditation Standards and Procedures in the same way. There is also no systematic approach or program of research designed to inform improvements to the quality of ITE programs’ (p. 10).

Notions based on quality, rather than quantity, such as the somewhat clichéd quote from Henry Adams, ‘A teacher affects eternity, he (sic) can never tell where his influence stops’ would clearly not be an acceptable measure of educational success. This narrowing of the curriculum of ITE courses is the reports intended outcome. There are occasions in the report where ITE courses appear to be given licence to construct their courses to best meet the needs of their students. ‘The core content does not set out the full curriculum for ITE providers’ (p. 28). However, since nothing beyond the Core Content is to be assessed, how well or poorly ITE providers achieve according to the mandated measures and requirements will obviously hold more weight than those left unstipulated. As such, the non-core curriculum will be discounted accordingly.

The requirement for ITE courses to constantly prove they are abiding by the mandated core content is reflected in how teachers are also increasingly mandated to abide by administrative measures and new public management processes that have been shown to be a major cause of teacher attrition (Galant & Riley, 2017). This is also a manifestation of the growing lack of trust in teachers shown in the demand for them to become increasingly transparent.

These metaphors for what makes an effective teacher remain highly teacher centred, and yet research has shown that as teachers move from novice to expert their vision of what it means to be an effective teacher is also likely to shift towards student centred understandings and practices (Berliner, 1992; Bullough & Stokes, 1994; Dixon, 2016; Farrell, 2023). The prescriptive nature of the report's recommendation, so strongly focused upon standardised teaching practices, may stand in the way of this shift away from the teachers themselves and towards the learning needs of their students. This focus on the asserted ineffectiveness of both early career teachers and their ITE courses is at odds with research (Gore et al., 2024; Author) and with the reasons ECT themselves give for why the leave the profession (Brandenburg et al., 2024; Galant & Riley, 2017).

Conclusion

When early career teachers are asked to share a metaphor for their professional practice and identity, they are most likely to choose one that expresses their desire to nurture the intellectual growth of their students—a gardener or mother nature (Alger, 2009; Patchen & Crawford, 2011; Usher & Hershkovitz, 2023)—to provide their students with pathways to knowledge—a guide or map maker (Alger, 2009; McGrath, 2006; Shaw & Mahlios, 2008; Vidovic & Domovic, 2019)—to transmit knowledge to their students—light a candle or be an animal trainer (Maxwell, 2015; Shaw & Mahlios, 2008)—maintain student interest through performing—Actor or Rock Star (Alger, 2009; Patchen & Crawford, 2011)—or giving students the power to transform their lives—a tool provider (Shaw & Mahlios, 2008; Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011). While it is easy to link these metaphors to various pedagogical theories, overwhelmingly these metaphors show that teachers choose metaphors that reinforce their understanding of the profession as one of care, dedication, responsibility, professionalism and a love of learning.

These metaphors are significantly different to those found in the Strong Beginnings report. In this, the teacher has three major characteristics, that of the saviour, the victim and most particularly the compliant teacher. Long-term, none of these metaphors would seem likely to hold teachers within the profession, the stated aim of this report. Rather, research shows that the excessive feelings of needing to comply and a lack of support from within the system are more likely to push teachers from the profession (Brandenburg et al., 2024). The report begins from the premise that teaching is most effective when it is applied according to ready-made formulae and strategies. It presents these as generally accepted as effective, often by overstating the evidence supporting them from the research literature.

The Strong Beginnings report promotes metaphors of teachers and teaching that display a deficit understanding of their skills and the ITE courses that train them. This understanding is at odds with the best available research evidence on the effectiveness of these courses (Gore et al., 2024; Author). It promotes conceptual schema that provide a narrow focus for professional practice, virtually limited to beginning teachers following a standardised checklist of teaching strategies, regardless of the context of their teaching situation. This ignores research that shows the efficacy of developing teacher communities of practice as shown in the research literature (see, for example, Zeivots et al., 2024) or the professional standards for Australian teachers mandated by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL, 2017) which require professional engagement in professional learning (Standard 6) particularly so as to ‘engage with colleagues and improve practice’.

The report has a different purpose to that of teacher education or indeed early career teachers seeking to establish their professional identity and professional practice, and so some differences between the metaphors each would use is perhaps inevitable. To construct compliance as a desirable feature likely to hold early career teachers in the profession during an attrition crisis seems at odds with how teachers themselves view their identities as shown in the metaphors they choose for themselves.

The clash of metaphors discussed in this paper between those likely to be held by early career teachers and those espoused by the policy writers of the Strong Beginnings report highlight more than differences in linguistic flourishes. Rather these differences display underlying cognitive conceptual schema that are likely to be in conflict when seeking to understand what it means to be an effective teacher.