The Destruction of Teacher Autonomy

“Teachers, too, have their language policed and managed through the use of ‘question flow charts’: tightly structured classroom scripts and procedures for how to respond to ‘errors’ and ‘misconceptions’ which are designed to enforce standardised pedagogies.”[1] Ian Cushing

I’ve recently been mentoring a young teacher not called Peregrine Carmichael (he chose this name himself). Peregrine is in his second year of teaching, is a wonderful personality and wonders whether he has what it takes to be a good teacher. He has all the moral qualities required, is quite a serious intellect and inhabits the realm of joy easily and without artifice. He has everything a class full of children might want him to have. 

The pedagogic structures at the school were quite restrained as we’d had two poor Ofsted’s, the first of which felt entirely undeserved (I wasn’t around for the second) and the head teacher wanted a rising tide to lift all the boats up and a consistency of offer for the students. I get it. I slightly tightened up elements of my own practice because of it. But this was perhaps more difficult for Peregrine than he might prefer because, by nature, he’s not one of life’s conformists, not one of life’s ‘compliers’. He’s got something a bit extra, you see, and putting someone as bright as Peregrine in a box marked ‘consistency’ takes away quite a bit of, let’s call it, his Peregine-ness; it takes away the thing that is special about him, and he is intellectually strong enough to doubt things that others assert to be true without evidence or the ability to answer the question, “why?” I enjoyed working with him and did it voluntarily as I think Peregrine, given permission and guidance, has everything it takes to become a truly great teacher. But the key here is that, while I can put into place certain catalytic conditions that will help this young teacher grow, while I can teach him a few things, I cannot and will not and would not want to even try to ‘create’ him as a great teacher. He will create himself because that’s what great teachers do.

What young Mr Carmichael has – his questing spirit, his sense of humour, his pulsing humanity – cannot be created by structures or by systems. They may help a little at the earliest stages, but what he has is innate, the result of his upbringing. You couldn’t construct Peregrine from a toolkit. You can’t systematise Peregrine. If you could, you might want to, but you can’t. You see, teaching is quite a bit more subtle and nuanced than just barking from a script. Teaching is a deeply complex discipline. That is why teaching is a profession. 

The thing about great teachers is that they are all, and there are great teachers in probably every school in the world, great in their own way. It is the ‘themness’ of them that leads to their ability to influence, guide and educate young people. As we’ve seen with ‘Teach Like a Champion’, great teaching can’t actually be systematised, and things go very badly wrong when the machine forgets that it should be acting in service of the humans and not the other way around, creating what Christopher Hitchens calls “man-made structures of inhumanity”.[2]

In my first year of teaching, I was shown to a classroom and just left to get on with it. It was perhaps not ideal, particularly as the school was in what was at the time one of the roughest parts of the East End of London and was in special measures. The behaviour was often extremely challenging. I might have sunk, and there were times, as with all new teachers, in which I felt I was fatally holed beneath the waterline. But I didn’t sink. There was no fallback position, no Helm’s Deep. By the beginning of my second year, I could start to envision the type of teacher I might become, started loving what I did for a living. Crucially, though, while I was well mentored, no one thought it would be a good idea to tell me that there was a ‘correct’ way of teaching. There isn’t. Recall here the claims of an inexperienced teacher at Michaela: “one particular, optimal pedagogy;”[3] “there is an optimal way to teach.”[4]

I was lucky enough to find in teaching a role in which the things that had always previously counted against me in the ‘straight’ world – a quick sense of humour, a propensity for risk, a love of the blank page and what might be made with it, were now positives. I was given autonomy, left to create myself and I thrived. I didn’t need telling what to do. I just needed to work out who I was as a teacher and, once I’d found that out, how I might get better at being him. Twenty-eight years later, I’m still left alone to get on with it. I don’t need telling what to do as I am serving kids on a council estate and, if you can’t take that seriously enough to give of your constant best, then you probably need lessons in what is important.

Had someone given me a script to read out, I probably wouldn’t have lasted much more than a few months and would have spent the last twenty-seven years working on a construction site instead. That would have been a waste of a minor talent, and the thousands of kids I’ve been lucky enough to be responsible for over the years would have missed out on sharing a room with a nutcase. 

Teachers are writer performers. We are at our best when we perform material that we’ve written ourselves as, if we are self-aware, we know our own abilities better than anyone else does. My teaching has weaknesses and strengths. I’m not wonderful at differentiation, very good at marking; I struggle with admin, but I’m funny; I can take too many risks with language, but my knowledge of poetic device is prodigious. Like many people, if I’m really interested in something, I’ll go far into it with a passion and drive. If I’m not into it, I struggle a bit. Thankfully, I’m deeply into equipping the kids from the bottom end of society with a voice and the skills they’ll need to have a chance as I used to be one of them and, without the loving care of my English teacher, Mr Latham, I would have been a skilled or unskilled manual labourer.

I can’t perform other people’s material very well at all as it’s written by someone that doesn’t know much about my performance chops. Other people’s material isn’t tailored to my skillset and it’s never intentionally funny enough.

As a case in point, last year I had a Saturday job in a tough school in a major city: so tough was it, at points, that my first lesson with one class was the first time I’ve had to have SMT in-lesson support since my first year as a teacher. The head of English, a twenty-something Teach First ambassador,[5] was insistent I use his resources. I wasn’t enormously happy about this as I’ve been refining my own resources on the subject over decades. But I needed the money, so I tried my best to behave.

The lessons were tightly scripted and, to put it plainly, were clearly the work of someone whose knowledge of the mark scheme and the skills required to teach students how to write were pretty nascent. I tried to let him know that I kind ofknew what I was doing with this stuff, I’ve been doing it for a long time and have some ability with the written word, but he was intractable, insistent. So, I taught a lesson with a ‘what a great one looks like’ model answer provided by someone who, by the looks of it, had never read a decent columnist and which had a clunking grammatical error in every second sentence. Having done what I was told to do by a twenty-something, which was seriously difficult as I’m very bad indeed at doing what I’m told, I contacted the firm that had booked me into the school. It is owned by a mate of mine. I sent an email to my mate. Now, I warn you here, as has been mentioned, I’m supreme at being professionally arrogant, I’m world class at overweening and this is going to sound delusional (if also funny). It went something along the lines of: “Kev, can’t you do something about this? I am working with rubbish material and can’t give of my best to the kids. You can give Al Green a nursery rhyme to sing, and he’s going to sing it well. He’s Al Green for f***’s sake. But he’s still singing a f***ing nursery rhyme and that’s not the best use of Al’s falsetto.”

The point of this is that talent exists. You can coach a great player, but what he is, is himself. You could tell Nureyev he’s doing it all wrong, but that would be an imposture. You have to allow talent to find its way. Teaching is the art form that includes all the other art forms. To insist on conformity in such a form is to crush and deny the possibility or the existence of talent or brilliance.

Of course, students should have a right to a guaranteed minimum standard but, by nature, this is concerned with the bottom end of things and, all the time we are focused on the minimum, we are forgetting there is a middle aspiring to the top and a top aspiring to better itself. An obsession with consistency is a deliberate look away from and a denial of the existence of brilliance which, therefore, destroys it as an experience our students might have a right to occasionally expect. Must we all be concerned with the minimum, the efficient way of doing things? Must we, graduate professionals, model obedience to pallid conceptions so that our students understand that the same submission is required of them?

Under much of the recent system, the message is DO WHAT YOU ARE TOLD by a higher authority. It is a view from the bottom. 

And so: scripted lessons. It may be that your response, if you are one of the brigade to whom I stand as smiling enemy, is that they are an entirely innocent way of helping teachers, particularly early career teachers. It may be that you are thinking, “But Phil, they’re great. Everything is solved. No one has to think any more.” Alternatively, you might be an experienced and talented, or an inexperienced and talented, classroom teacher who is aghast at the idea of teacher autonomy being stolen from them, who is profoundly anxious at the political elements to this, who feels stifled by being asked to sing cover versions of poorly written tunes.

Academisation (and I was in classrooms a long time before this happened) did some very good things. I’ve been involved in academy chains that have set up schools that went into challenging areas and provided a substantially better education than the predecessor schools. To say this is not the case is to deny the truth. But there are elements to having increasingly corporate organisations run education that are, at the very least, uncomfortable: not the least of which is the divide between two different kinds of people.

I’ve long argued that, to an extent, teaching is the only profession that denies the laws of physics: the cream stays at the bottom. But I have also worked with some absolutely wonderful human beings who were brave enough to have taken on the reins of headship for reasons other than careerism and whose gentle and spirited guidance has transformed communities. But I’ve also worked with people at that level and above whose psychologies and motivations I’ve found troubling: people whose drivers appeared to be entirely personal. What such characters generally share, other than the dress sense of a pulsing stereotype, was that, when pressed, they did not actually know a huge amount about our core business: teaching. They were in positions of control in a profession over people who knew more than them, yet who devised the pedagogic culture? The suits.

So, the first question with scripted lessons, aside from whether it is possible or appropriate to fully script minute-by-minute what is, in reality, an ever-changing, semi-improvised dance, is whose script? I don’t know whether to delve too far into this, but what it seems easy enough to conclude is that it is potentially a totalitarian solution. If we recall that, given its freedom to do so, human life tends towards pluralism, a drive to complete conformity is clearly a move away from this. It is also, quite obviously a denial of the existence of expertise, and this brings us into the arena of the political. If expertise does not exist, or is denied even if it does, then it becomes obvious that the deliverers of knowledge, if not held by society or the system they inhabit to be experts can, in fact, be anyone at all.

The subtext here is obvious. If we think back to Lemov’s background at Harvard Business School and his view of teaching through the lens of efficiencies, then we are in a time in which the education of children is viewed predominantly through a pair of glasses that notice only the financial. The biggest cost of education is the teachers. If the real establishment can make them cheaper, then there is more money available to siphon upwards. Scripted lessons are a covert means of de-professionalising a profession to make it cheaper. There will always be men in blue suits who see a dollar in schools that combine a go at scripted lessons with a denial of the humanity of the teachers and children so that both are subject to crushing workloads that temporarily drive-up test scores while destroying the people concerned. These test scores will then be publicised by the propaganda machines as evidence that scripted lessons work and that teaching can be de-professionalised, abolished even.

The people arguing for scripted lessons have sold their colleagues down the river. They are part of a political move to de-professionalise the teaching profession so that education costs Daily Telegraph readers less in taxes. Of course, in doing this, it is possible some of them will also make a profit as they have been involved in writing the scripts that the new teacher-automatons must follow line-by-line. In doing so, if we reference what happened at Uncommon, they are in danger of allowing people who are not at all trained as teachers to be stood in front of classrooms either reading off a script. A former teacher at Uncommon identified how this worked in the USA. Do not let it come here. This is a profession and a noble one. Do not let the asset strippers destroy it. Do not let the asset strippers destroy children’s rights to be taught be experts. “We were all expected to teach one way, to fit one mould of success. 100% compliance every time. Which didn’t account for the teachers as individual humans, and certainly didn’t treat the kids like much more than test scores.”[6]

 

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[1] Ian Cushing, Language, Discipline and ‘Teaching Like a Champion’, British Educational Research Journal 47/1 (Feb 2021) p??.

[2] Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books: New York 2002) p3.

[3] Jake Plastow-Chason, Rethinking Initial Teacher Training in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p158.

[4] Jake Plastow-Chason, Rethinking Initial Teacher Training in Birbalsingh, Katharine (ed), Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way (John Catt: Woodbridge, 2016) p165.

[5] Imagine the author’s involuntary shudder at this linguistic ugliness.

[6] David Brand, It Was Like a Horror Movie – Staff and Students Criticise Charter Network’s Rigid Education Model, Queen’s Daily Eagle 1 July 2020.