Method as an Opportunity for Collaborative Agency: An Australian Delphi Inquiry into Teacher Educators' Priorities in Assessment Education

Developing pre-service teacher assessment capability is a priority for the initial teacher education policy. Yet the collective expertise of teacher educators is difficult to access. This chapter addresses a persistent structural challenge—how to enable the expertise of teacher educators to inform policy—by exploring the Delphi approach. A Delphi research process enables individual experts to contribute to collective knowledge building. In the first phase, the development of Delphi statements occurred through a collaborative analysis of policy and research. This set the foundation for collective inquiry in the second and third stage through a process of consensus seeking. This chapter does not report on the survey outcomes, instead scoping the full range of assessment capacities developed in phase one from policy and research that teacher educators recognised as essential for pre-service teacher learning. This extensive list highlights the important role of teacher educators as agentic policy actors whose choices and priorities among a crowded field of possible assessment priorities impacts on the learning of pre-service teachers. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the challenges and the opportunities for teacher educators to collaborate in robust evidence creation efficiently and effectively using a Delphi process.