teaching and learning

Late in October I presented at the annual Ithaka Conference. The Ithaka Project has been going for about five years and involves nine or so schools in teacher reflection and collaboration. The presentation was a dialogue between Deane Blackner, Julie Landvogt and myself on a number of key questions relating to the central concern: What is good work? The dialogue bit goes missing in the bit below because you don’t get the interaction, which was fun, but as I promised I’d post it here ages ago, here it is.

1. What do we remember most about our education?

I don’t want to suggest that the ‘Dead Poets’ world stories of inspiration shouldn’t be allowed to be told, or that such stories don’t exist, just that they weren’t my stories and I’m not sure they are stories we can build school improvement around.

I remember school as an anarchic place which flowed with an energy and life entirely disconnected from the classroom. A place of friendships and alliances and betrayal and treachery. Of violence and grudges, like a Shakespeare play. Of unstoppable and incomprehensible shifting energy swarming in gangs or games like ‘British Bulldog’

I certainly don’t remember much about the teachers, except those who frightened or bullied us, like Mr Masies, a Science teacher with a thick German accent who we all thought, no said, was a Nazi. He would throw chalk or express his disgust and disbelief at our ignorance and lack of discipline. He would somehow move invisibly and silently around the room until you suddenly realised in terror that he was immediately behind you and you were about to pay for your whispered conversation with a clip over the ear or your head banged into the desk lid ahead of you. It didn’t occur to me until years later that perhaps Mr Macies was a victim of World War, not a bully in it.

It wasn’t until Year 11 that I felt a connection with a teacher, a Literature teacher who told me about Dylan Thomas and then several more times through those last couple of years, luckily.

That’s not to say the early days of primary school were entirely without pleasure. There was Let’s Learn Music and a book of folk songs with shiny pages and a voice out of the loud speaker at the front of the classroom (that was technology), SRA reading booklets that let you go as fast as you wanted so that I was on vermillion while most of the other boys were on tan. There was a Library and yeast buns with creamed butter if you were quick enough at recess.

2. What do the public think about teachers and schools

Apart from my sparky neighbour who delights me with his regular greeting, ‘You’ll be on holidays soon wont you?’, and the accompanying (half?) belief that teachers lurch gaily from term holiday to term holiday with the lightness of butterflies, there is the terrible ignorance that comes from the fact that ‘everyone’s been to school’ and therefore is expert with the intricate workings of it all.

It’s like the army of backyard lawyers versed in television melodrama or the growing number of viewers who, through the good work of programs like CSI now consider themselves expert in dissection, pathology and all manner of crime scene analysis. How could the New Zealand police be so ignorant, we all chirped in. They should have checked the car, and got an API on the suspect before he arrived in the USA …

I tend to think that the public have a different view of teachers to those of schools. To some, teachers are slightly left-wing, ruffled, out of the cut and thrust real world of the school of hard knocks, but basically well intentioned and even mostly effective. Like nurses and social workers, teachers are altruistic beings who are drawn into this kind of work because they like working with kids and doing community good. Otherwise, why would they work for such crumby wages? As David Campbell put in the AGE (28/9/2007), somewhat tongue in cheek, when he estimated that teachers are paid $3.27 per student per hour:

“Teaching is a vocation, and you can’t just break it down into hourly rates. It’s one of the caring professions. Teachers work for the love of the job, because of the intangible rewards they get from seeing children develop and succeed.”

Schools, on the other hand, by the nature of their structures mainly, often have something of the unyielding indifference of a bureaucracy for some parents. These schools exist as the collective impersonal ‘they’ as in ‘Why don’t THEY do something about it?’ or ‘I’m going up there and tell THEM what I think’. There might be differences between the local and the familiar (the primary school with its tan-bark playground, Christmas concert, miniature oval and the basketball court where we vote every couple of years) and the larger, more distant secondary system (with its specialisations, secret knowledge, possibilities of failure and exclusion as well as the forbidding bands of angst-ridden teenagers.

These impressions aren’t my own; nor are what I would hope them to be. They do point to a problem about the professional standing of teachers and their work. We talk about professional practice as if giving teachers professional recognition would sanctify our knowledge and practice against ignorant criticism. So that THEY would leave US alone, like they leave doctors and lawyers alone. And, in the next breath, we rail against controls and processes that might curtail our teacher liberty.

3. What is good work

I don’t want to talk about morality here, or principles, or virtue. I didn’t want to analyse what goodness might entail, or try to figure out where we might find it.

I was thinking more about what might constitute effective teaching, what kind of teaching practice might be more likely to lead to more effective student learning. That is good work.

I must admit that, here and elsewhere, I’m torn between competing impulses. On one hand I want to reject the ‘inspiring teacher / Mr Chips’ belief set that elevates the individual teacher and some unique capacity to inspire, motivate, inspire and enlighten above that of a set of common practices that are likely to lead to learning in a broad and systemic sense. I never liked that scene in Dead Poet Society, when the Robin Williams teacher-character, John Keating (wise-cracking, comedic, inspired, eccentric, standing on desks, loved) literally spins the shy and inarticulate student around and around until poetry spills from his mouth. It’s a miracle!

On the other hand, I’m also suspicious of Scmoker’s simplicity that we all know what good teaching is, we just don’t do it (for some reason). He describes a transforming teacher as ‘clear, organised and effective. But more to the point, he did nothing unusual – nothing any teacher couldn’t do, or hasn’t already learned.’ (Schmoker – p. 7) This is the opposite of John Keating; for Schmoker good teaching is self-evident and teachers don’t do it because no-one’s paying attention to classroom work.

However, if I had to describe good work I’d want to describe the kind of work that could be applied across the school, that could be shared and evaluated and celebrated. I was going to say, in good Scmoker style, that all of us here would recognise good teaching when we come across it, that we all would know who the ‘good’ teachers in our schools are. But would we? Or would we apply our own standards and virtues (punctuality, VCE results, behaviour, school spirit, discipline, content knowledge, academic qualifications, fun) to that judgement?

I’m not even sure that students always recognise good work. We’ve all probably experienced the scallywag teacher, loved by his pupils, who ducks out of every meeting he can, won’t work in a team, completes the bare minimum of professional development and scoffs at every proposed change with ‘we did that fifteen years ago, and it didn’t work then either’.

I heard Dr Lawrence Ingvarson talk earlier this year about performance based pay; ‘Don’t touch it with a barge pole’ was the take I took from that 45 minutes, but he also said something else that struck me: that if you ARE going to try to evaluate teacher performance then you’d be on much more solid ground trying to evaluate what teachers are DOING, rather than the RESULTS their students get, which are subject to too many other variables.

Which struck a chord in terms of what good work looks like; results aside, what are teachers who are doing good work doing?

I’d argue that teachers who are actively reflecting on their teaching, who focus on their ongoing learning as well as the ongoing learning of their students, who work with others in teams, who see their students as individuals, who are able to balance the big picture and the period 4 reality and who retain their hopefulness about the importance of what they’re doing, and who enjoy doing it, are doing good work.

4. What gets in the way?

Sometimes it seems to me that what gets in the way comes from over the school fence, and is often to do with agendas that compete with learning agendas, or agendas that are dressed up as being about school improvement but are really about politics or expediency. So things that get in the way might include:

Election year calls for ‘education revolutions’

Performance based-pay against all the evidence, yet supported by both parties. As the opening to the ANU Report (Conceptualising and Evaluating Teacher Quality) itself states:

 ‘In brief, however, an extensive body of work indicates that the single-level econometric models typically fitted to the available data employing general linear model (GLM) techniques under ordinary-least-squares estimation, are inappropriate on at least two counts. First, they fail to conceptualise, measure and evaluate teacher quality in terms of what teachers know (subject-matter knowledge) and can do (pedagogical competence). Second, such models rarely account for the measurement, distributional and structural properties of the data for response and explanatory variables – oversights that all too frequently yield misleading interpretations of findings for both policy and practice.’ (ACER)

Getting education and training mixed up

Comparisons with Korea and Finland (we never hear about Finland anywhere else)

A Victorian Institute of Teaching that, rather than representing teachers, is at best merely regulatory and at worst is a bureaucratic and administrative imposition on teachers.

A local politician wanting to mandate chess in schools; along with road safety, drug awareness, childhood obesity, mobile phone contracts, online safety,

A national curriculum that, besides a bare minimum set of benchmarks, is likely to connect to no student directly about who they are where they are. Listen to Paul Kelly in the Australian (26/9/2007) and you get a feel for the real agenda here: ‘a more rigorous agenda for schools’, ‘higher standards’, ‘a disciplined curriculum’ (meaning a curriculum divided into traditional disciplines) And in the face of evidence from other countries that it hasn’t worked, such as from US Professor Michael Apple who wrote of national curriculum in this way:

“What you get is a formula for disaster – alienated students who are in boring didactic instruction, teachers who feel as if they’ve lost control and have become alienated themselves, many of the most creative teachers then leaving the profession.’

Literacy and numeracy testing that seems to simplify things that shouldn’t be simplified and measure things that need not be compared including comparisons between schools based on the most narrow data.

Of course, for most teachers most days these things aren’t on the radar. From the teacher perspective it’s much more likely to be ‘constraints’ like accountability measures put in place by schools themselves that they are likely to point to or things like the number of meetings. Ironically, these are often put in place by people in positions like mine.

5 What is our day like? (white noise and all that) What might it look like?

Teacher work reflects the cyclical life of the school year with its vast, predictable surges of energy and effort countered with weeks where the place closes down and teachers retreat to recover their broken health. Years start with good intentions and the promise to work on new things this year and make a difference, and end with all your students going to some other teachers for their future needs. I sometimes catch office staff, who are not going on holidays, almost smiling at the frantic tying together of a thousand threads at the end of each term. Terms start with hopefulness and vigour and spruce assemblies and fade out finally into acrimonious editing encounters over the editing of pastoral reports or who didn’t complete their student update on time.

I was making a time to meet with a teacher for a meeting a few weeks ago and suggested we meet at 10.30. He looked at me suspiciously; ‘When did you stop talking about period 1 and period 2?’ As if I’d lost contact with the real somehow.

A lot of its to do with the terror of the NOW. Our days are deluged with the immediate; with the process of registering and recording who’s actually here, and following up who wasn’t, with meetings about allergies and Epipens, with tram duty and the moving around from place to place, with the pastoral. And the lessons themselves put twenty-five or so students into a block of time with one teacher and sometimes vague curriculum documentation.

Even in parts of the curriculum for which we have ownership we seem to want to put in place content heavy structures that give us meetings that conclude like this for example: ‘So, it’s eight lessons on ‘Cat’s Eye’, three on the oral, and two to revise for the exam, everyone send me one exam question on the text…’

6 What matters most?

The students matter most and always have, but the arguments remain about how to best address their needs.

For a long time I thought it was about carefully documented curriculum, clear expectations well written and distributed widely, and teachers writing curriculum together; but I’ve begun to think that no amount of documentation will make a difference unless teachers, in their own closed rooms, take action themselves.

Which explains why curriculum is inexorably connected with professional development and learning and why something like Ithaka is so central to the directions we must take and to the good work we see to do.