Moral panic at the academy

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The Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) has published a blog post by Alison Bedford and Emily Ross highlighting a review that is currently taking place of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. The Standards are poor. They are not based on evidence from cognitive science or high-quality education research. For example, they do not mention explicit teaching, cognitive load theory, the worked example effect, retrieval practice, spaced practice, or methods of checking for understanding.

They are also suffused with the language of differentiation and treating all children differently, with differentiation being an explicit standard in its own right. Differentiation is a vague term that can mean many practices and even opposing practices. For example, giving a student a writing frame and allowing them to record audio instead of writing are both examples of differentiation. The writing frame addresses a need while the audio recording accommodates it. There is little research evidence to support differentiation and yet it sits in the Standards while evidence-informed approaches do not. This shows the Standards are based more on ideology and romantic ideas of how the author/s would like the world to be than being based on how the world actually is.

The pernicious effect of having differentiation in the Standards is that a teacher using whole-class, explicit teaching may be seen by some as failing to differentiate. And so the evidence-blind practice defeats the evidence-informed one. Some will retort that teachers have a legal duty to apply reasonable adjustments for students with a disability. This is true. Some of these adjustments are not evidence-informed and come from boilerplate educational psychologist reports, but teachers apply them anyway. This is not the same as differentiation as it is commonly understood. That is intended to apply to all young people and not only those with a disability.

One irony is that these boilerplate educational psychologist reports frequently recommend structure, routines, explicit teaching and breaking things down into smaller chunks—evidence-informed practices the Standards don’t mention.

I am therefore grateful to Bedford and Ross for informing me that a review is underway. You can contribute to that review by following the link below and answering the survey. Feel free to include any or all the points I raise above.

Contribute to the review

Bedford and Ross include a call to action of their own in their post and this comes from a quite different perspective to mine.

They range around issues that don’t seem directly relevant to teaching standards but are, nonetheless, preoccupations of academics and people who train teachers. Australia has four federal bodies involved in regulating education, with the Standards being the responsibility of one of them. Bedford and Ross are concerned about moves to merge these bodies into a single Teaching and Learning Commission.

Bedford and Ross are also worried about the core content that politicians were forced to impose on teacher training courses due to the fact that trainers were so reluctant to teach about evidence-informed practices. The extent to which this content has done any good is questionable. No inspector attends lectures to see whether lecturers are teaching this content and how they are teaching it. Instead, accreditation is largely a paper-based exercise. I therefore expect that many lecturers make some pretty disparaging remarks about this content, given it conflicts so deeply with their ideologies of teaching and education.

What most exercises Bedford and Ross is the issue of lesson planning. They are dismissive of PowerPoint—a common enough stance—but the issue is greater than just the medium. It is a question of trust—a moral question.

“We close by inviting you, whether you are an academic, teacher, or parent, to reflect on those teachers who most influenced your own education. Were they the ones that followed a pre-determined script and rigid lesson plan. Or was it an educator responsive to the young people in their care? Who adapted their approach by using a range of techniques to engage everyone in the room. Who challenged you not only to remember facts, but to think critically for yourself?

…the moves afoot in the proposed [Teaching and Learning Commission], the introduction of Core Content, and the review of the [teaching] Standards all indicate that our federal politicians do not believe in teachers’ ability to make these expert decisions, and they instead can only be trusted to deliver generic resources in a singular way, despite research showing that lesson planning and resourcing (that is, expert “curriculum making”) is one of the most valued aspects of the profession.”

The disparaging remarks about remembering facts, and the false choice we are offered between factual knowledge and critical thinking, are fairly typical and betray a fundamental misunderstanding of cognitive science. That is to be expected.

Nevertheless, I agree that teachers value planning. Often, they enjoy it. I enjoy it. Given the choice, I suspect many teachers would gladly spend a year writing lesson plans for the state education department if they could keep the same salary. The problem is that a teacher writing plans for their own teaching on a daily basis is inefficient, time-consuming and stressful.

On Wednesday, I am teaching a Year 7 lesson introducing geophysics, the formation of the Earth and Moon and discussing what has happened to the Earth’s surface and atmosphere over the last 4.5 billion years. I have been provided with a set of slides that has the objectives, resources and questions that I will be using. I have read through and prepared for the lesson. If I had written this from scratch, it would have taken me well over an hour. Instead, perhaps ironically, I can spend more time thinking about individual students and the interactions I want to have with them.

Yes, teachers would all wish to drop pointless meetings, generic reporting, laborious behaviour documentation, laborious additional needs documentation and a whole host of other activities before they dropped lesson planning, but a common approach to lesson planning still has the capacity to make the job far more manageable.

I can imagine the objection: But a plan for one class cannot possibly meet the needs of a different one. This is damaging nonsense. Students are more similar than they are different, despite the ideological attachment of many in education to hyper-individualism. And the extent to which they are different is something I can plan for in the space created by not needing to source a diagram of a cross-section of the Earth or write a lot of questions.

We collaboratively plan at my school, but throughout our recruitment process, we make it clear this is our approach and if a teacher is not comfortable with it, ours is not the school for them. Partly, we do this because of the strong rhetoric around planning seen on social media and in blogs and articles. In practice, virtually all the teachers we interview are extremely happy with the idea of shared planning. Most say they do something similar already, if not as systematically. They are, of course, a self-selecting group.

Where it becomes a problem is in hosting trainee teachers. Universities seem to be struggling right now to find placement schools and we have been approached by several, pleading with us to take candidates. When we explain they won’t be planning whole lessons for themselves and then teaching them, it is a deal breaker. This is because the Standards require evidence of planning. So, that’s another fail.

When teachers visit our school, we show them exactly what our approach looks like, but we are crystal clear that we are not telling them what to do. They can take away as much or as little as they wish from the visit, even if that is simply that they don’t want to be like us. That’s fine. Although shared planning seems to work quite well for us, I am aware of no large-scale evidence to support it. To me, it is more a logical argument laced with a little common sense.

I am certain there are teachers so brilliant, whose stars shine so brightly, they could not possibly teach to a plan someone else has written without reducing themselves in some way. Maybe they just go into a classroom with a board marker and make it up. I think this is tremendous. I have no idea how to scale such an approach or build a school around it, but that’s my failing. Teachers should be given the option to create such schools and parents should be given the option to send their children there. More typically, there are plenty of schools with a fairly hands-off approach that let teaching teams and teachers decide for themselves what to do. That’s not my school but more power to them.

Teaching Standards should be studiedly neutral on issues such as these and they should allow for many different types of school to flourish. They should not be neutral on evidence relevant to teaching practices.