By Jaya Carrier
I hope everyone has had a good first week back! To start off the academic year, particularly in thinking about teachers creating bespoke performance management targets, I was interested in the inherent tensions between teacher autonomy and a heavily standards-driven profession. As such, I was interested to read the work of Mockler, written in 2020: see here for access to the report - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19415257.2020.1720779 Objectives: To understand the impacts of standards frameworks on the teaching profession and on teacher professional development. Summary: The key findings were:
- Neoliberal influences on education around the world - including greater regulation and standardisation - have often constrained more authentic forms of professional learning. One consequence of this is that teacher professionalism is undermined
- It focuses on a case study from New South Wales, Australia, wherein the creation of a set of very rigid professional standards led to a significant undermining of teacher professionalism
- Mockler concludes that to mitigate against this, school cultures need to privilege and value risk-taking and trust in teachers, which in turn heightens senses of teacher autonomy and ownership
Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:
- This argues that the standardisation of teacher practices has mostly negative impacts; what, if any, are the positives impacts of the standardisations of teacher practices?
- What is the balance between the standardisation of teacher practice and teacher autonomy?
- How do my own practices of professional learning fit into this?
If you would like to discuss this further with me - please let me know! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.
Thanks, Jaya
This is really interesting, Jaya, thank you for sharing. This question certainly resonates: "What is the balance between the standardisation of teacher practice and teacher autonomy?" There are some obvious parallels with the topic of *student* autonomy vs standardised learning within a single classroom. In both cases, I would suggest the discussion has to consider the degree of "granularity" of both the teaching standards and the curriculum standards. There are variations globally in both, from highly detailed and prescriptive to much "high level" standards, which leave more room for autonomy but which rely on more collaborative discussions to be successful (either between teachers and colleagues, or between students and their teachers).
ReplyDeleteYes, we need to trust in teachers, as long as QA validates that trust. Similarly, we should also trust in students and increase their autonomy, unless formative assessments tell us we need to intervene. I'd love to discuss this with you further!