Student success rests on the daily ingenuity of our teachers, but ‘improving professional standards’ may refer to improving centrally codified conceptions of what it is to be a good teacher; or it may refer to improving the quality of the thousands of actions and decisions that teachers make on a daily basis. The two are not entirely unconnected, but the latter is a far more important and interesting issue. While codified standards can help, they are neither necessary nor sufficient to improve teaching and learning; at worst, they are a reductive distraction.So the challenge is how can we improve student learning by helping teachers teach better? and it’s an old problem. With so much information at our fingertips today, the answer may seem obvious; mine the research to find best practices, and implement them. This approach seems to be behind many government initiatives, but it just doesn’t work. ‘Best practices’, unlike codified standards, are largely context-dependent and the answer lies not in finding a single ‘best practice,’ but in empowering our own teachers.
The Problem with ‘Best Practice’
For example, what’s ‘best practice’ in teaching mathematics? Many educators are familiar with numerous US studies showing the efficacy of cooperative learning in terms of raising attainment. But in the UK, the same practices had no effect, and the reason is that the effectiveness of a practice cannot be judged in isolation; one practice rests on a whole system. So the manner in which the curriculum is structured and sequenced, or the manner of assessment, for example, will be confounding variables that makes straight causation difficult to determine in principle and simple transfer impossible in practice. For these reasons, researchers at the Johns Hopkins School of Education argue teaching methods proven to be effective in one culture and system cannot be assumed to be effective in another – salutary words for anyone seeking the holy grail of teaching. And that’s for relatively-easily measured academic attainment; the problem is still more complex when we turn to measures of character, disposition, or community engagement.
The Solution: Delegate Control
So what might we do to improve standards, if there is no single solution? The answer is to delegate control from the centre to schools, and within schools, to delegate control to the people who best understand the context; classroom teachers. A thousand diversified flowers must bloom to replace the monoculture of teacher improvement.
For schools in national systems, the issue of control from the centre will not go away. Solutions are constrained, but a striking example is the Ontario system which showed dramatic gains by cultivating school-led innovation and improvement. One school leader writes “We did almost no mandating of specific strategies – we got professionals to develop their own plans. We didn’t micromanage schools or districts in this process. We empowered them.” Nor is this a recent western truth – an erstwhile Singapore Education Minister wrote that the “days of large fixes are over” and that improvements will come from “responding to a school’s unique needs” via “top-down support for bottom-up initiatives” (which really means moving to an organic approach which transcends top-down and bottom-up thinking). Coming from a country that regularly tops the OECD global education rankings, this is powerful stuff.
For all schools though, it is well within the grasp of ambitious leadership teams to give scaffolded freedom for teachers to interpret, address and adapt to their contexts. That means moving from deficit to capacity building models of professional development. Any model which systemically builds individual or small group planning, action and reflection into school processes can work. There’s no improvement ladder, but a rock-face, with many possible routes upwards; schools can explore and construct tailored, contextual, better systems. This principle of de-centralisation is old wisdom we need to recover. As William Blake said in his Proverbs of Hell one law for the lion and the ox is oppression and it’s equally true for the staffroom.
A Word on Appraisal
It’s also vital that we divorce this planned professional growth from traditional appraisal; note that this is on a pragmatic, not an ideological basis. Educators know that occasional high-stakes appraisal linked to remuneration or contract renewal does not support professional growth, and very often undermines it. By creating oppositional and entrenched attitudes, traditional appraisals risk damaging the very environment they seek to create, and act against learning gains (businesses are recognising this too). I am not naïve here; we need methods to deal with poorly-performing teachers. But to link performance management to professional growth is profoundly counter-productive.
How things will pan out across the global profession is completely dependent on decision makers’ paradigms. To use the ideas of systems theory, those who see teaching and learning as either simple or complicated will continue to try to control from the centre; the danger is less that they will fail, and more that their efforts to succeed will damage educational systems: which is to say, demotivate teachers who will then serve their students less well. Those of us who see teaching and learning as a complex process, infinitely sensitive to context and not amenable to certainty, are gradually assembling the evidence we need to convince parents and voters. The most compelling stories come from student experiences and testimony in schools which support teacher autonomy in improving professional standards.
Further Reading
- Slavin R., Sheard M., Hanley P.Cooperative learning in mathematics: Lessons from England (available here)
- Mourshed, M., Chijioke, C., and Barber, M. (2010), How The World’s Most Improved School Systems Keep Getting Better, McKinsey & Co
- Shanmugarathnam T. (2005) Speech at MOE Work Plan Seminar 2005, Ngee Ann Polytechnic Convention Centre, quoted in Gopinathan S. (2015) Education. Institute of Policy Studies; Straits Times Press Holdings, Singapore
- Snyder, S. (2013), The Simple, the Complicated, and the Complex: Educational Reform Through the Lens of Complexity Theory, OECD Education Working Papers, No. 96, OECD Publishing.http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k3txnpt1lnr-en
