Teacher Professionalism and being treated as a Teacher Professional

There is an inherent tension that lies somewhere between what it means to be a professional in the education sector and being treated as a professional. Some teacher colleagues would say that they know they are “valuable to the organisation but do not feel valued”. In part, this can be attributed to time being a limited commodity. This brings a growing sense of urgency to address what is perceived as a declining academic performance that jeopardises the attainment of Australia’s aspiration for excellence and equity in school education (Department of Education and Training, 2018). Implementation of the Professional Standards and Leadership Profiles (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014a, 2014b) has become a central focus for improving the expertise and quality of the teaching profession to improve student outcomes (DuFour & Marzano, 2011; Hattie, 2015; Sharratt & Planche, 2016).

‘Improvement’ is currently measured through comparisons of standardised testing regimes that continue to pit state against state, system against system, school against school, and teacher against teacher (Zadkovich, 2017). Yet, the Professional Standards and Leadership Profiles call for increased collaboration among educators (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2014a, 2014b) as a strategy for improved student outcomes (Department of Education and Training, 2018). Collaboration is a personal and professional investment that requires economical, organisational and structural considerations within a school context (Vangrieken, Dochy, Raes, & Kyndt, 2015). Most importantly, it requires time and organisational structures that enable collaboration to be meaningful and authentic (Flanagan, Grift, Lipscombe, WIlls, & Sloper, 2016; Ford & Youngs, 2017; Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen, & Grissom, 2015).

Time, when viewed as a commodity, has the capacity to reduce professional conversations to a ‘laundry list’ of ‘we have to, or we need to’ as forms of compliance under the guise of collaboration. Yet, time has the power to shape conversations from the superficial to the rich and robust (DuFour, 2004; DuFour & Fullan, 2013; DuFour & Marzano, 2011; DuFour & Reeves, 2016; Flanagan et al., 2016; Sharratt & Planche, 2016). Time-bound organisational structures can reduce teacher professionalism and the work of educational professionals to a series of steps that is repeated throughout the school year. Marching through Growth Cycles, Learning Sprints and other catchy phrases can symbolise the urgency reflected in compliance-measured, scripted pathways to denote what passes as ‘learning for all’. Professional autonomy can be lost at the expense of creating ‘consistency’ and ‘alignment’ or the misinterpretation of strategies and the development of a common language (Marzano, 2017). Current organisational structures and processes cannot always provide the time, place or space for educational professionals to engage in conversations that may lead them to reimagine flexible and innovative ways of working (DuFour & Reeves, 2016), that can address educational issues that confront them on a day-to-day basis.

Being valuable and being valued as an educational professional requires an examination of how the enactment of the Teacher Professional Standards and Leadership Profiles shape and misshape educational purposes and processes, including power imbalances that may exist for those that are directly impacted by them (Biesta, 2017). It is time to ‘disrupt the conversation’ so that we might review contemporary notions of teacher professionalism and educational work in light of what it means to exist in and with the world in a grown-up way (Biesta, 2017). An exploration of this nature in school contexts requires time and organisational structures that value and promote conversations that may move “towards ways of doing and being that do not simply accept the given order but have an orientation towards the change of the existing order so that different ways of doing and being become possible” (Biesta, 2013, p. 3).

So, what can leaders do to address this inherent tension that lies somewhere between what it means to be a professional in the education sector and being treated as a professional?

1. Lead as interactional practitioners and theorists. Leaders who do this seek to understand competing tensions that can bring about disconnections and misconceptions of the professional work expected in schools, and that is being undertaken for different positional roles. It also includes discussions about the perceived support mechanisms in place. At times, leaders can undermine professionalism because decision making is based in imagined past realities, that can distort their imagined current realities for individuals and the organisation.

• Understand that complexity is a natural phenomenon in schools that requires leaders with additional and different types of knowledge, training, and professional experience. Leadership apprenticing is important but not sufficient and requires considerable investment in continued learning for all. The value for learning by doing is present but not at the expense of misrepresentation of theory or research.

• Invest in opportunities for dialogue, that value data in real ways. That is, the lived experiences of those working within schools is data and can contribute meaningfully to conversations about numerical data that is used for informing decisions. Ignoring the lived experiences says they don’t matter and by extension, that professionally, one set of voices is more valued than another.

• Challenge yourself to move from binary thinking to embracing contradictions and the paradoxical or overlapping perspectives (Donnelly, 2020).

One last consideration… invite an “insider-outsider” to observe and provide feedback. A pair of neutral eyes may see what we are blind to!

Joanne is an educational practitioner that works alongside school leaders to support the implementation of school improvement initiatives using practical, researched based approaches.

References

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2014a). Australian Professional Standard for Principals and the Leadership Profiles. Education Services Australia Retrieved from https://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/default-source/default-document-library/australian-professional-standard-for-principals-and-the-leadership-profiles652c8891b1e86477b58fff00006709da.pdf?sfvrsn=11c4ec3c_2.

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. (2014b). Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.  Retrieved from https://www.aitsl.edu.au/teach/standards.

Biesta, G. (2013). Interrupting the Politics of Learning. Power and Education, 5(1), 4-15. doi:10.2304/power.2013.5.1.4

Biesta, G. (2017). The rediscovery of teaching. Routledge, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315617497

Department of Education and Training. (2018). Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools. Canberra Retrieved from https://docs.education.gov.au/system/files/doc/other/662684_tgta_accessible_final_0.pdf.

Donnelly, G. (2020). Leading Change: The Theory and Practice of Integrative Polarity Work. World futures, 76(8), 497-518. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.2020.1801310

DuFour, R. (2004). Whatever it takes: how professional learning communities respond when kids don’t learn. Bloomington, Ind.: Bloomington, Ind.: National Educational Service.

DuFour, R., & Fullan, M. (2013). Cultures built to last: Making PLCs systemic. Bloomington, IN.: Solution Tree.

DuFour, R., & Marzano, R. J. (2011). Leaders of Learning: How district, school and classroom leaders improve student achievement. Melbourne, Victoria.: Hawker Brownlow Education.

DuFour, R., & Reeves, D. (2016). The futility of PLC Lite. Phi Delta Kappan, 97(6), 69-71. doi:10.1177/0031721716636878

Flanagan, T., Grift, G., Lipscombe, K., WIlls, J., & Sloper, C. (2016). Transformative collaboration : five commitments for leading a PLC. Moorabbin, Vic.: Moorabbin, Vic. : Hawker Brownlow Education.

Ford, T. G., & Youngs, P. A. (2017). Creating organizational structures to facilitate collegial interaction among teachers. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 46(3), 424-440. doi:10.1177/1741143216682501

Hattie, J. (2015). High-Impact Leadership. Educational Leadership, 72(5), 36-40.

Marzano, R. J. (2017). The new art and science of teaching ([Revised and expanded edition].. ed.): Bloomington, IN : Solution Tree Press.

Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S. O., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. A. (2015). Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams and Student Achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 52(3), 475-514. doi:10.3102/0002831215585562

Ronfeldt, M., Farmer, S. O., McQueen, K., & Grissom, J. A. (2015). Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams and Student Achievement. American Educational Research Journal, 52(3), 475-514. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831215585562

Sharratt, L., & Planche, B. (2016). Leading Collaborative Learning: Empowering Excellence. Moorabbin, Victoria: Hawker Brownlow Education.

Vangrieken, K., Dochy, F., Raes, E., & Kyndt, E. (2015). Teacher Collaboration: A systematic review. Educational Research Review, 15, 17-40.

Zadkovich, G. (2017). Defending pedagogy from test data mania. Education, 98(2), 1.