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
