Teachers

How should we know you?

I’ve recently completed an examination of the public discussions regarding the nature of ‘quality’ teaching (Bahr & Mellor, 2016), Professor Nan Bahr writes. It didn’t take long, since the features of what constitutes ‘quality’ in teaching are rarely, if ever, discussed. Instead, what I’ve found is a rather large body of literature, policy, and commentary on what are presumed as key performance indicators for quality teaching. Basically, if we don’t quite know what something is, then maybe we can find proxy indicators through the impacts there are on things around them.

Measure anything

In the case of teachers, the quality key performance indicators for teaching have been national standardised test outcomes such as National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) scores and ratings (eg Piccoli, 2015), Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings (eg Education International, 2013; McNeilage, 2013; Snook, O’Neill, Birks, Church and Rawlins, 2013) and other metrics such as teacher retention, schools’ suspension rates, and so forth. Basically anything that provides a measurement that could loosely be connected to the impact of school experience.

The interest in ensuring ‘quality’ teaching has been rather instrumental, and has given rise to a transactional view of teaching, that is identifying inputs for these key performance outputs. There has been little interest in actually understanding what ‘quality’ in teaching might be. I think this limited consideration of the complete and nuanced role and complexity of the teacher and their teaching has had some damaging effects. Policy for teacher accreditation and public discussion of quality in teaching has focused too heavily on the suite of competencies that a teacher needs to demonstrate, and this is just a small part of the picture.

So, how should we know teachers and teaching? How should we understand ‘quality’ teachers and teaching? In my recent review of the national context for initial teacher education program accreditation, it was clear that ‘quality’ in teaching and teacher education is very dimly understood. As a result, the policies, processes and public commentary surrounding the issues of teacher appraisal and teacher education program accreditation have been distracted (Bahr & Mellor, 2016; Bahr & Pendergast, 2016).

Quality banned

Jane Caro has called for the word ‘quality’ to be banned in the public discourse of teachers and teaching (Caro, 2016). In this she is reacting to the nasty way the term is used to negatively depict the profession based upon spurious KPIs as proxy indicators of performance. I totally understand this reaction, but my interest is in why people at large, otherwise intelligent people, don’t see the complexity of teachers’ work. Why do people who clearly care about the education system, and the needs and impacts for learners, reach for low hanging fruit of these particular types of KPIs, for the use of tick lists of demonstrable competencies, to evaluate ‘quality’ in teaching?

Invisible teaching

I propose that it is because much of what teachers do is invisible (Bahr & Mellor, 2016). The visible parts of teaching include the things that a teacher is actually seen doing in the classroom. In Australia, we have all been to school, and I believe that commentators rely on their recollections of what they have personally seen teachers doing, from their perspective as a learner, to guide their understanding of the role. This is a naïve community view.

The visible teacher questions, directs, advises, keeps order, presents, assesses and makes corrections and participates in team teaching with others. We can see these things, and so we can check them off on our list of competencies. Yet, as every teacher knows, the deeper professional aspects of teaching are actually invisible, and underpin these visible things.

These are parts of the professional role that learners would not have seen, and I believe there are several levels of complexity in this invisible spectrum. The simplest includes the range of activities teachers engage in to frame their classroom work. These include activities such as planning, meeting, collaborating with colleagues and the broader community, and professional development.

Macro and micro

There is actually a full ecology of influences on these teacher actions that form an invisible spectrum for teachers’ work. At the next layer of complexity are the micro contextual elements where a teacher needs to know and understand intimately the features of their students, class, school, community, and have well developed conceptions and responses for culture, gender, their discipline/subject, and the leadership requirements of their career stage as a teacher in their local and cluster professional community.

Finally as an outer layer of influence on teacher action, and requiring deep professional knowledge to inform all other actions, is what I’ve called the macro contextual elements. Included here are things like knowledge of, and compliance with, a range of systemic and national policies, curriculum, responding to public commentary and conforming to required accountability measures. So, I argue that the visible aspects of a teacher’s role are just the tip of the iceberg of teacher professionalism. The full array of elements that constitute a teacher’s work are rarely considered in public commentary, and this results in simplistic and damaging conceptions of what might constitute ‘quality’.

I suggest that we can’t rely on commentators to intuitively understand the complexity of the teacher’s role. As a profession we need to remind them by problematising the concept of ‘quality’ in teaching, destabilising the notions that the popular KPIs are appropriate, and providing a more complete compendium of qualities for excellence in teaching. I’m not suggesting that we need to shelve the competency framework of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) devised by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). I think these competencies are important. I do think though, that we need to recognise the vitally important personal qualities that a teacher brings to the teacher/learner relationship that transforms the learner and their learning (Bahr, 2016a).

Personal attributes

I describe these as personal positive attributes, and include personal qualities such as humour, a cooperative and democratic attitude, kindness and consideration of the individual, patience, fairness and impartiality, and enthusiasm. I have discussed some of these in detail in recent publications (Bahr, 2016a; 2016b; Bahr & Mellor, 2016). I believe that it is this array of personal positive attributes that serve to evoke productive behaviours by teachers bringing their basic competencies (APST capabilities) to a level of teacher excellence (Bahr, 2016b; 2016c). Such personal positive attributes can be developed to enhance the impact of teachers’ professional work.

Now I don’t mean impact in a cold KPI counting sort of way. I mean the impacts that matter: the impacts an excellent teacher has on a learner’s conception of themselves as a learner, on their capacity to self direct and self regulate their learning, on their motivation, their creativity, their aspiration, and their self awareness and wellbeing. These are, of course, the important characteristics needed for building a society and communities that are strong, resilient, productive, innovative and healthy (Bahr, 2016b; 2016c).

So I return to my opening question; teachers – how should we know you? We need to know you as complex professionals working in an extended ecology of practice whose excellence depends on professional knowledge, productive behaviours and a suite of highly developed personal positive attributes that tailor learning for the benefit of each individual and for society as a whole. We need to understand that teaching is not simply about measurable outcomes on standardised tests, and we need to establish more mature and nuanced perspectives on what constitutes ‘quality’ in teaching.

If you are interested in reading more about building quality in teaching and teacher education, our monograph Building Quality in Teaching and Teacher Education (Bahr & Mellor) published by the Australian Council for Educational Research is available for free download from http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=aer

References

Bahr N 2016a Positive personal attributes: why teachers need them and how teacher education can help (despite negative media). EduResearch Matters. August 15. Retrieved from: http://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=1702

Bahr N 2016b Dr Seuss and quality teaching Part 1: ‘Today you are you’ . Teacher. 7 September. Retrieved from: https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/article/dr-seuss-and-quality-teaching-part-1-today-you-are-you

Bahr N 2016c Dr Seuss and quality teaching Part 2: ‘There is fun to be done’. Teacher. 8 September. Retrieved from: https://www.teachermagazine.com.au/article/dr-seuss-and-quality-teaching-part-2-there-is-fun-to-be-done

Bahr N & Mellor S 2016 Building quality in teaching and teacher education. Australian Education Review 61, Australian Council for Educational Research. Retrieved from: http://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=aer

Bahr N & Pendergast D 2016 NSW Education Standards Authority: is this new authority genuine reform or political spin? EduResearch Matters, September 5. Retrieved from: http://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?s=Bahr

Caro J 2016 The Drum, Tuesday June 14. Retrieved from: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-14/the-drum-tuesday-june-14/7510740

Education International 2013 PISA: a call for quality teachers and quality public education. Retrieved from: https://www.ei-ie.org/en/news/news_details/2783

McNeilage, A. (2013). PISA study highlightsd resources and teacher quality as factors in the world’s top-performing school systems. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from: http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/pisa-study-highlights-resources-and-teacher-quality-as-factors-in-the-worlds-topperforming-school-systems-20131204-2yqzp.html

Piccoli A 2015 Lifting teacher quality the key to raising NAPLAN outcomes. The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved from: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/lifting-teacher-quality-the-key-to-raising-naplan-outcomes-20150818-gj1gar.html

Snook I O’Neill, J Birks S, Church J and Rawlins P 2013 The assessment of teacher quality: an investigation into current issues in evaluating and rewarding teachers. Education Policy Response Group: Institute of Education, Massey University. Retrieved from: http://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/fms/Massey%20News/2013/9/docs/EPRG2013_Treasury.pdf

Nan Bahr is Professor and Dean (Learning and Teaching), Arts, Education and Law Group at Griffith University