LOCAL MUSINGS

Who would want to be a teacher today?

by DOUG PATTERSON

Istill have relatives and friends actively engaged in education and follow the current ‘classroom trends’ with interest. The implementation of a new ‘National Curriculum’ seems to be currently dominating what is happening in high school classrooms.

It would appear that Education Queensland now expects that every teacher will teach the same unit of work in the National Curriculum pertaining to their subject area at the same time, with the clear expectation that every student will learn the same things at the same time.

To monitor this, some schools have insisted that teachers establish lesson outcomes, how these comply with the National Curriculum, how they will be achieved, and then measure how well they have been met – lesson by lesson.

Not only is such an expectation counter-intuitive, it displays a limited understanding of curriculum implementation, the interactive dynamic of the teachinglearning process in the classroom and the extra time teachers would need to jump through these administrative hoops.

The first assumption that a single lesson is somehow a stand-alone, isolated unit of work with its own goals is unrealistic.

A lesson on trench warfare is a part of a unit of work on the impact of World War I on the world then and now. Depending on a range of factors, like the age and readiness of the students and the depth of the study, this unit could be designed for anything from five to ten weeks.

It would have its outcomes or objectives and each individual lesson builds on previous lessons and informs subsequent lessons as students work towards these goals. This process involves a continuing review of how each individual lesson contributes to these and to try and somehow formally measure/test the individual success of a particular lesson seems both unnecessary and impractical.

The second assumption that the teachinglearning process is somehow a technical process of input and output that can be readily measured also flies in the face of reality.

The ability and willingness of students to engage in this process is dependent on their readiness to do so, and readiness is dependent on a range of socio-economic factors. The problem is that these are often seen as constants in a student’s life and ignore the reality that a family can experience hardship, divorce or homelessness that impact on a student’s readiness.

A ‘switched-in’ teacher knows that what worked yesterday isn’t going to work today and the prepared plan A has to be shelved and a more reactive plan B adopted.

The technocrat would say that this teacher failed because they did not follow the approved plan. However, if the focus of teaching is the welfare and readiness of the students, not the curriculum, then surely that teacher has at least attempted to respond to the changing needs in the classroom.

The artificial requirement to treat each lesson plan as a unit plan with its own justification, goals, and assessment items that must be approved by admin, adds hours of extra paperwork for teachers who usually have four lessons a day to plan for.

In the 1980s, a joint QTU/Ed. Qld research found that teachers were working a fifty-hour week on average and 50% of their 10 weeks a year holidays. Then, teachers didn’t have to keep detailed profiles on student behaviour that they do today, nor complete the never-ending paper work to satisfy everincreasing accountability measures.

When teachers now spend more hours on paperwork than they do actually teaching, their readiness to actually teach is diminished.

If teacher readiness is declining and student outcomes are not noticeably improving, then the implementation of the National Curriculum can only be measured as a failure.

But, maybe the very notion of a National Curriculum itself is the problem. I am not convinced that it is that important that every 15-year-old in Australia needs to be learning the same thing in June, 2023.

There was, and perhaps should still be, room for a school to tailor its curriculum to meet the needs and particular interests of its community, without compromising standards and jeopardising entry into further educational opportunities.

Responsive teaching cannot happen in a technologically-driven model, yet responding to the needs and interests of the individual, the community and the nation is at the heart of relevant education.

To put the apparent needs and interests of the nation over those of the others, lessens the opportunity for schools, teachers and students to claim ownership of the teaching/learning process and actively engage in it.

Teachers have never been better trained so they need to be given the professional opportunity to develop and implement a more responsive and relevant school-based curriculum, not treated like technicians on an assembly line needing constant supervision.

Who would want to be a teacher in the current climate being created in some schools.