Adaptation and Selection

The proposed College of Teaching should allow for diverse evaluation models, and seek to create new professional routes to turn ‘failure’ into adaptation.

In my previous post, The Red Queen, Evolving the Profession , I wrote that the new College of Teaching should learn an important lesson about failure from evolution. ‘Running to stand still’ is the only way to keep up with any complex environment. So should it be for teaching.

Dynamism and adaptation is the  reality of other professionals. After all, who’d want a Doctor that was still using trepanning, just because ‘it has always worked’ for them. Doctors are expected to keep up with research, understand the data, and to specialise where they have the most ability and interest.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin’s_finches

Two implications:

Firstly, while I’d welcome the possible collaboration between SSAT and CoT, to use the lead practitioner model, I am concerned that this seems to indicate that there will be only one portfolio / evaluation tool.

One system to cover all teachers, pedagogies, curricula, resources, phases and settings? As we know, there is a danger of ‘teaching to the test’ in any learning system, and though the descriptors offered by the SSAT are excellent, the means of assessing them should allow for variation and diversity.

I suggest that the SSAT LP Framework becomes an ‘open standard’ that encourages a rich ecosystem of providers (both existing and new) to feed into. No school is the same, but it is right that there are national standards. These must be reviewed on an annual basis, and updated to reflect the leading edge of classroom practice and CPD.

Secondly, not every teacher can be good at everything. Though there are a small number of truly exceptional teachers, they are either channelled into SLT or leave the profession for consultancy.

We have a far too simplistic professional structure. In mainstream schools, there are just classteachers, and management. There is very little specialisation, and far too few possible roles. SENCos are a rare hybrid, but few schools provide the time for these teachers to specialise fully, or integrate their specialism into the practice of colleagues.

We all know fantastic subject specialists who are terrible at pastoral care, or data fiends who struggle to manage behaviour. These might be generalisations in a profession of generalists, but the wider point holds. All can improve, and we want more great teachers, but what will happen if the professional standards we set do not allow schools to find a more positive way to deal with this natural selection, and interests of individual professionals.

Instead of punishing this variation, we should be able to adapt and evolve roles to keep these expert educators in the profession. As we see in medicine, with surgeons rarely able to relate to humans, and GPs who can comfort our sick children, there is  a model for doing this.

I also believe that teachers who specialise would also have better capacity to collaborate more effectively with other professionals who work with young people, including Edpsychs, pediatric OTs, social care, and GPs. This would add to the professional status of teachers

I believe in the College of Teaching and wish that more colleagues were positively engaging with the debate and helping to shape our professional body. The College of Teaching must avoid the event horizon of initiatives that have gone ‘supernova’ in the past, and work towards a new professional  paradigm for education.