Teacher Agency, Professional Development and School Improvement

Judy Durrant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351604833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

Highlighting the role of teachers in school change, Teacher Agency, Professional Development and School Improvement explores the important related issues of professional identity, teacher self-efficacy, leadership and autonomy in the context of contested improvement agendas.

Providing analytical frameworks and practical models, this book:

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• Offers examples of projects, programmes and narratives to illustrate the role of teachers in school change

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• Invites readers to reconceptualise professional development and re-imagine school improvement

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• Focuses on enabling teacher agency as the foundation for improvement

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• Emphasises the importance of human agency to influence environments, lives and learning

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• Provides strategies for improvement with integrity amidst powerful accountability requirements and external forces for change.

At the heart of this book is a fresh perspective on schooling, in which teacher agency is considered a fundamental dimension of professional development and key to school improvement. This raises necessary and challenging questions about purposes and processes in education. With practical ideas and strategies that can be used to inform and evaluate practice and policy, Teacher Agency, Professional Development and School Improvement is essential reading for headteachers and teachers wishing to lead changes to improve their school and for teacher educators who support them.

1

‘… A DIFFERENCE NEEDS TO BE MADE’

School reforms and initiatives have profound effects on the lives and work of teachers and other education professionals. Increasingly over the last few decades, the teaching profession has been under siege, requiring ongoing reappraisal of definition and identity within organisations in pursuit of improvement. In the dynamic and volatile climate of contemporary education policy, this raises continual questions about the role of teachers within the hegemony of school organisations, in relation to processes of school change and decision making. These questions challenge concepts of teacher professionalism, problematise the professionalisation processes that teachers undergo both pre-service and as their careers develop, and concern the nature of the professionality that is enacted as teachers go about their work from day to day.

Performativity, priority and purpose in education reform

It is widely acknowledged that schools are subject to global neoliberal forces that pervade all aspects of teachers’ lives and work, with concomitant effects on children and young people. There are few places in the world that are not influenced by the ‘Global Education Reform Movement’, with the telling acronym ‘GERM’ (Hargreaves et al., 2001), with its emphasis on measurable performance (Ball, 2016; Sahlberg, 2016), setting a course for school improvement and systemic change in education that is governed predominantly by standards, targets and benchmarks of attainment and progress. There has been an upsurge of managerialist approaches to standardise the measurable parameters of improvement for economic and political ends and to centralise accountability against prescribed criteria, to ensure organisations and the individuals within them are on the required improvement trajectory. Schools compete for position in national league tables, while nations keep watchful eyes on their PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings (OECD, 2018). This movement, which has been represented as an insidious ‘germ’, a ‘slouching beast’ to be confronted (Ball, 2016) or a ‘juggernaut’ to be resisted (Frost, 2004), is characterised by relentless and overwhelming emphasis on performance, which threatens to annihilate alternative or additional aims for education. Teachers are subjected to particular ways of working which, whether explicit or tacit, are framed by purposes for schooling driven by market forces and global comparison, where processes become centrally controlled and target driven. Professionals are commodified (Robertson, 2007) and objectified as ‘factors’ (Biesta, 2016) in processes of competition and marketisation. Such universal political ‘creep’ silently negates challenge to its dominance, removing the possibility and relevance of debate, and threatens to undermine the purchase that teachers, teacher educators and other education professionals have over their lives and identities, professional practices and working environments. It can threaten not only their expertise, integrity and judgement, but also their humanity. Performative aims, presented technically within political reform as eminently rational and incontrovertibly beneficial, change not only the nature of teaching, but also teachers’ personal, emotional and spiritual constructions of themselves (Ball, 2003).

These global forces focus attention and energy on aspects of education that can be measured, such that we come to value most what we can measure, thereby engaging whole education systems in the ‘nonsense’ of ‘measuring what doesn’t matter’ (van der Wateren and Amrein-Beardsley, 2016) instead of agreeing what we value as the starting point. It is the worst form of the tail wagging the dog, as nations clamour for higher rankings, while headteachers involve their schools in ‘game playing’ by manoeuvring pupils so as to increase performance within the system (Spielman, 2017). Teachers’ values-based priorities are compromised as pedagogies are prescribed within narrow curriculum tramlines; children are tested and categorised while their choices for their own education are limited by schools to meet externally set benchmarks. The Director of the Education and Skills Directorate at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), which administers the PISA tests, has recognised the negative implications of performativity, arguing a case for a different kind of 21st century learning (Schleicher, 2010). He contrasts a 20th century approach that focused on basic education, ‘as though schools needed to be boring and dominated by rote learning before deeper, more invigorating learning could flourish’, with the need for contemporary education that includes elements of critical thinking and creativity in problem solving and decision making, developing skills of discernment. He concludes that:

Last but not least, education is about the capacity to live in a multi-faceted world as an active and engaged citizen. These citizens influence what they want to learn and how they want to learn it, and it is this that shapes the role of educators.

(Schleicher, 2010)

Nearly a decade later, the performative agenda shows no signs of abating. Where generations of school students and their teachers are beset by neoliberal framing which dictates what schooling should be, deeper questions need to be asked about how people can flourish within the pervading system, influence their own situations and prospects, and contribute to systemic change. Teachers’ conversations capture the anxieties of this professional climate. We agonise over sub-levels of progress and share strategies to turn red to green in ‘RAG’ ratings of performance status. We create ‘flight paths’ for children’s progress, monitored through regular ‘data drops’, and remove them from subject classes they love for interventions to improve test scores in subjects deemed to matter more. Schools select and exclude students to massage school statistics, while government funding is directed to rescue schools in disadvantaged regions where communities have lost confidence and teachers are leaving. In response to a significant and entrenched decline in applications, inspectors in England are holding university and school-based providers of initial teacher education accountable for maximising recruitment, while the government has reduced the entry requirements (Ward, 2018).

Where there is much cause for concern in these global trends, action is prompted at local level to counteract damaging and unhelpful effects for individuals and schools. This is not a therapeutic argument about assuaging fundamental professional issues with platitudes to improve wellbeing and reduce stress. Critical thinking, reflexivity, debate and dialogue have a vital role to play in problem solving in teachers’ everyday practice but also, as Ball (2016) asserts, in recognising what is helpful and trustworthy. This critical advocacy may involve resisting destructive forces and restricting harm, while establishing alternative points of view and different ways of working. All participants within the system, from children and adolescents to teachers to system leaders, may be involved in pushing the boundaries within their own spheres of influence, as a core purpose of education and professional practice. This promotion of people’s existence as subjects of action and responsibility, rather than as objects of the directions of others, is referred to by Biesta (2014) as ‘subject-ness’. If active and engaged citizenship born out of creative and critical thinking is to be incorporated into the curriculum and embedded in pedagogy as an aim for children and young people, then this must also be modelled by their teachers if it is to have any integrity.

Portraits of teachers in landscapes of change

In this book I adopt a position of advocacy for teachers as leaders of change and drivers of school improvement, drawing on experience and evidence from previous research and development work (Frost et al., 2000; Durrant and Holden, 2006). This positioning was the foundation for my doctoral research. I set out to illuminate ways in which teachers respond and contribute to improvement in different organisational and policy contexts, and how they are nurtured and supported or constrained and frustrated in their endeavours. I considered the extent to which teachers can operate effectively within externally imposed policies and organisational structures, cultures and norms of practice and the extent to which they are able to exert structural and cultural influence. A message emerging emphatically from the study was the contested nature of improvement: the matters upon which teachers were compelled to focus their attention were not necessarily those prioritised in formal school improvement processes.

There is an explicit connection here between individuals and organisational improvement, concerned with the relationships between agency and structure (Giddens, 1984). The doctoral research that provides the basis for this book examined the nature of the complex interaction between individual teachers’ values, concerns, perceptions, experiences and actions, and processes of school improvement in the context of national educational reform and global societal change. It explored relationships between leadership and learning, education and schooling, professional action and identity, within the lived experiences of teachers and their students. Central to the discussion are questions about how teachers’ agency is enabled or constrained by organisational structures (themselves responsive to systemic enablement and constraint) and how teachers thereby contribute to improvement as they themselves define it. This in turn relates to the grand narratives of education reform, where the nature, definition and purpose of school improvement is contestable in an ‘age of supercomplexity’, or even ‘liquidity’ (Barnett, 2008).

Many would argue that teachers should be working at the leading edge of change, intellectually, emotionally and politically (Bascia and Hargreaves, 2000). The research explored whether teachers perceive themselves to be victims, instruments or instigators of improvement in different situations. The evidence showed not only how the teachers contributed and responded to formally defined school improvement, but also what they were working to improve and would like to change, within and beyond formal school and national agendas. The study encompassed the nature and extent of teachers’ engagement with school change processes and their perceptions and experiences of contributing to school improvement ‘from within’ (Barth, 1990). Central to the investigation was a valuing of teachers’ stories.

Teachers’ stories

The starting point for methodological development was Bruner’s (1991) assertion that people have a natural disposition towards narrative construction of reality, where their thinking is mediated through cultural products such as language and symbols. An important foundation for the research was therefore an understanding of the notion of teachers’ stories and their role in the research process. This invites the reader to take seriously the notion of the ‘researcher as storyteller’ (Apple, 2009). Narrative is necessarily personal and interpretative; its eventual form excludes other possible stories as we search for the stories we want to tell (Thomas, 2011; Schostak, 2006). The research questions for this study took a deliberately phenomenological stance, where teachers’ interpretations – what they thought and perceived – were as important as the technical and instrumental dimensions of their work – what they did and how they behaved. This is particularly significant because teachers’ thoughts and perceptions influence how they engage with their organisations and enact their professionalism.

Stories enable us to gain access to complex worlds and lives, comprising human elements and the social and cultural forces that shape them (Bolton, 2014) and making tacit and intangible phenomena explicit. This kind of reality is concerned with verisimilitude – the ‘truthlikeness’ of stories and interpretations that are nuanced (Murphy, 2005). The forces and factors that condition how teachers think and act are understood narratively, ‘by the stories teachers live and tell’ (Anderson, 1997: 131), indeed some would argue that story is the only way to know teaching and understand the local phenomenon of practice (Doyle, 1997). According to Beijaard et al.’s (2004) research, teachers define their identities by a narrative thread that draws together their interactions with their ‘professional knowledge landscape’ into living, personal theories. In this study, I developed a concept of teacher portraits within school landscapes of change, focusing on six teachers in two contrasting schools.

The research process

I set out to capture the experiences and identities of the individual teachers, presented as textual portraits within the contextual landscapes of their schools based on a range of information. The two English schools selected for investigation are not intentionally ‘typical’, they are simply two schools chosen from many. The first, which I named ‘New Futures Academy’, was an academy launched at the start of the period of study, created from a merger of predecessor schools to drive up standards in what became the last few months of the Labour Government, entering the uncharted waters of the coalition between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats in May 2010, during the period of study. The second school, which I named ‘Castlegate’, was a well-established special school for primary and secondary aged students with severe, profound and complex learning needs. Both were selected as ‘moving’ schools (Stoll and Fink, 1996) undergoing considerable change and initially shown to be on an improving trajectory.

Research methods were selected and adapted to examine the rich, fine grained detail of individual professional lives in relation to changing organisational settings. This involved exploration of the experiences and perceptions of six teachers of different ages, genders, career stages and roles, selecting three within each school in order to provide an element of organisational as well as individual contrast. Further explanation of the research design is included in Chapters 4 and 5, where the evidence from the study is presented. Central to teachers’ narratives is the much-referenced notion of ‘making a difference’ (Fullan, 1993; Day, 2017) to students’ lives and learning.

A difference needs to be made

Clearly ‘difference’ is not neutral; its parameters are contestable, connecting with the purposes of education from the teacher’s perspective. The most experienced teacher in my study, Pam (pseudonyms are used to protect anonymity), articulated powerfully the ways in which she adeptly navigated waves of reform and changing school priorities, carving out her own path founded on personal values and professional priorities. She used new policies and frameworks strategically, as ‘hooks’ for her own agenda, finding alignment and support for what she knew needed to be done. Thirty-three years ago, Pam had applied for a teaching job in New Futures Academy, intending to stay for a couple of years. Now, she pondered her reasons for staying:

People say you stay because you make a difference. I came here because a difference needed to be made. Sometimes I think I can make a contribut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. ‘… a difference needs to be made’
• 2. Improving schools in context
• 3. Professional development, identity and agency
• 4. The role of teachers in changing schools
• 5. Leading school cultures to support teacher agency
• 6. An agentic framework for education
• 7. Agency in action: participation and voice
• 8. Agency for sustainable futures
• Index