As my day-to-day classroom experience recedes, I will be focusing occasionally on some of the wider perspectives that I feel teachers and schools need to have – and which in my experience have been squeezed virtually to extinction by the pressures on the modern profession. (At the risk of labouring the point, further discussion of many of them will also be found in – ahem – a certain forthcoming publication…)
It seems that the current recruitment and retention crisis is focusing minds.
John Tomsett wrote a thoughtful and honest piece recently in response to the growing teacher shortage. He is right to conclude that classroom teachers’ lives need to be made less intolerable. That is what some of us have been saying for years!
He also cited an inspirational piece of writing by Geoff Barton, calling for a reinvention of the profession of teaching in all its cultured and humane glory.
https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-views/2018-lets-reclaim-career-teaching-what-it-can-be?
Again, this is what some of us have been trying to perpetuate for decades. In some ways, it harks back to what teaching was – and who teachers were – in the days before the intrusion of Big Management. But for all I knew it that worked on its own terms, my own small part of the education system disapproved, and eventually pressed the button marked ‘Reject’. Why would they not: I was (in their eyes only) resisting their direction. But their chosen alternative does not seem to be getting the education very far either, it would seem.
John faces a problem: for all his good intentions, he is (now) a manager; even in his recent piece, the current difficulty is seen through the prism of the manager. His proposed solution to the problem is a management one, albeit involving wider consultation; how could it be anything else? But as in many fields, a significant part of the problem in schools is excessive management: what we need are un-managers.
Management is much of the problem: it is very largely an invention of post-industrial societies for the employment of people whose more productive options have been exported or otherwise disappeared. Its very existence creates certain operational and cognitive difficulties for organisations. Management is parasitic: it produces nothing of itself: its whole point is to intervene (interfere?) in what other people are doing and control the way in which it is done. This might be a little less problematic if it didn’t also suck so many resources out of the system. If management stops directing, then it becomes too easy to ask difficult questions about its necessity, and as we all know, turkeys don’t vote for festive seasons.
Even when the motives are entirely good (which is not always), the immediate effect is to compromise the autonomy which is such a significant part of people’s motivation. That in turn can severely alter not only the practicalities of how a person operates, but also their sense of purpose about their work. In my case, I experienced both: the insistence of managers that I should work in a way that suited their priorities and preferences rather than my own – and the erosion of my self-professed motives for my work. It was the reluctance to accept this that caused some of my recent difficulties.
Teachers are intelligent and skilled people; they work in complex environments deploying subtle and sometimes barely-defined cerebral skills. They need at all costs to retain sufficient flexibility to preserve the choices and values that make them persevere with their work. Most of them are experts at self-management (by comparison with many outside of teaching) – and they do not need other people telling them what to do. Unfortunately, telling other people what to do is the key premise of the vast majority of managers. The conflict is irresolvable – and the effects on the teaching profession are all too clear to see.
This is not to say that we don’t need managers: schools don’t run themselves. The mistake is believing the same about successful people, who often do. The immediate effect of management presence in my lessons was tangibly to make me less effective: it’s called the Hawthorne Effect! Others played the system by putting on show lessons; neither makes for good classroom practice – or a sense or professional pride.
There are other models of management that are less intrusive, less threatening, and more supportive – but the education system does not seem widely to cultivate them. What is more, in the drive to make schools conform to management priorities, many of the skills, attributes and attitudes referred to by Geoff Barton have been extinguished in favour of a more utilitarian, technical approach. And that does not work either: it removes much of what makes for a truly successful teacher.
I would like to suggest to John and concerned others, that they don’t formulate yet more management solutions – because solutions they are not, simply another iteration of the same problem. What we need is un-management solutions. In the words of what now seems to be an apocryphal saying: “Hire good people and get out of their way”. And be ready with a helping hand – if and when it is requested.
teaching personally 
Reblogged this on The Echo Chamber.