The Routledge International Handbook of Teacher and School Development

Christopher Day, Christopher Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136715969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

The International Handbook of Teacher and School Development brings together a collection of research and evidence-based authoritative writings which focus on international teacher and school development. Drawing on research from eighteen countries across seven continents, the forty chapters are grouped into ten themes which represent key aspects of teacher and school development:

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• Issues of Professionalism and Performativity

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• What Being an Effective Teacher Really Means

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• Reason and Emotion in Teaching

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• Schools in Different Circumstances

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• Student Voices in a Global Context

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• Professional Learning and Development

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• Innovative Pedagogies

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• School Effectiveness and Improvement

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• Successful Schools, Successful Leader

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• Professional Communities: their practices, problems & possibilities

Each theme expertly adds to the existing knowledge base about teacher and school development internationally. They are individually important in shaping and understanding an appreciation of the underlying conditions which influence teachers and schools, both positively and negatively, and the possibilities for their further development.

This essential handbook will be of interest to teacher educators, researchers in the field of teacher education and policy makers.

Theme 1 Issues in teacher professionalism and performativity

Leslie N. K. Lo

DOI: 10.4324/9780203815564-2

Introduction

In public schooling, accountability issues emerge when stakeholders of the education system profess expectations of the schools and teachers who are charged with the responsibilities of educating and caring for children and youths on behalf of the community. Broadly perceived, these expectations have changed little over the years because the societal functions of school education have remained more or less constant. Thus, public expectations of schooling continue to reflect its developmental, selection, and socialization functions. Schools and teachers are expected to help students develop socially acceptable behaviours, attain necessary functional literacy, and ascend the academic ladder. For the fulfillment of our expectations, we have entrusted the education of our children to the teachers, despite continuing and widespread evidence of constraints on their ability to consistently demonstrate quality assurance and to uniformly offer general prescriptions for educational problems.

The reliance of public education on teachers was magnified by historical events that marked the popularization of schooling and higher education. The advancement, proliferation and increasing interventionist nature of national development agendas in public education has placed increasing implementation requirements upon teachers. Yet, despite being unable to control standards of entry and exit, judgments concerning competency levels and even, in some cases, classroom pedagogies, teachers as an occupational group have strived to gain legitimacy as professionals for status in society and control over their own affairs. Such profession-building efforts have spanned a long period of time and have yielded a mixture of results that have reflected the characteristics of local societal contexts. In the eyes of policymakers and the public, however, teaching remains a semi-profession and the notion of teachers as professionals continues to be an open question (see Chapter 3). The irony of the professionalization endeavors of teachers is inherent in the fact that, while the idea of becoming “professionals” has captured the imagination of teachers working in various parts of the world, their professional competence is being put under intense scrutiny. This phenomenon is largely due to the confluence of major changes in the management of public schooling which have been driven by concerns of governments for the economic and social well-being of their populations.

Globalization, accountability, and performativity in education

The promulgation of neo-liberal educational policies in certain advanced western societies was designed to introduce new ways of managing, financing and controlling the schools in order to raise standards of academic performance. The professed goal was to raise the achievement standards of students in the belief that this would enhance the nation’s competitiveness in the global economy. Large-scale educational reforms, the notions of choice, standards, and accountability were accentuated in the process of schooling. Globalization served as the great facilitator for spreading the reform experience of western societies. Aided by the work of global change agents—international organizations, educational consultants, sellers of technologies—standards and accountability became issues that became also constantly invoked in educational debates in non-western societies (see Chapter 1). As demands for accountability and transparency put increasing pressure on schools and teachers in the West to perform in accordance with pre-defined standards, performance measures were introduced in certain non-western societies to ensure compliance. Accountability and the “performance cultures” that were created to accommodate the operation of its principles, have deeply affected the direction of teachers’ work. The habitualization of working to produce preferred outcomes defined by performance indicators undermines teachers’ creativity and sense of professionalism.

Accountability in education has been expressed in different ways. As a business norm, accountability is applied to education in order to increase efficiency in schools. More specifically, “contractual” accountability, which is favored by government bureaucracies, is concerned with the fulfillment of particular expectations in terms of standards, outcomes and results. In contrast, “responsive” accountability seeks to understand the interests of stakeholders and to find ways to achieve and measure progress. This type of accountability is more concerned with the process of engaging relevant stakeholders than attaining measurable outcomes (see Chapter 2). Current trends in educational accountability point to the widespread adaptation of “contractual” accountability in school settings. The continuous application of auditing methods and technologies has created, it has been claimed (Sachs 2001; Ball 2003; Perryman 2006, 2009), a climate of surveillance in the schools in which teachers are pressured to comply with the dictates of a range of externally designed performance measures. As demands for this form of accountability have mounted, the erosion of trust between teachers, educational bureaucracies and community has become increasingly apparent¹²³ (Hargreaves 2003; Troman 2008).

The most clearly evidenced adverse system-wide effects of performativity are the narrowing vision of education and the de-professionalization of teachers (Jeffrey and Woods 1996; Adams 2008; Osborn 2008; Whitty 2009). When accountability operates as a high stakes exercise in which there is deliberate calculation of costs and benefits that carry with them tangible rewards and sanctions, such as the current emphasis on test scores, teaching and learning are likely to be geared toward securing measurable evidence for student achievement. Schools and teachers will focus their attention on those subjects to be tested, often to the detriment of other equally important areas of the curriculum. The consequences of such performativity measures are widely documented. They run the gamut from having a narrowing effect on the curriculum (Rinke and Valli 2010) to causing teachers to be more conservative in their approach to teaching (Hargreaves and Shirley 2009), and from tipping the accountability balance toward sanctions rather than rewards (Mintrop and Sunderman 2009) to creating goal distortions for schools and teachers who strive to obtain easily measured short-term outcomes (Kaplan and Owing 2008). Other consequences, such as the erosion of trust between staff members, the ubiquitous sense of surveillance, and the centralization of power to senior school leaders (Ball 2003; Lumby 2009), have led teachers in all but the best-led schools (Day and Leithwood 2007) to focus on their own self-interest and preservation, thus further undermining their professionalism.

As a systemic movement, “performance cultures” (or “performance management”) is a top-down initiative imposed on schools and teachers. Performance evaluation is conducted to ensure that certain preferred goals are achieved and pre-determined standards are met. On an institutional level, the validity and efficacy of performance evaluation rely on a sound defense of the clarity of its purpose, the reliability of performance measures, as well as the conduct of its implementation. Whether performance evaluation is seen as a tool of repression, an instrument of quality assurance, a development process or a combination of the last two depends on its intentions and on the kind of philosophical approach that it adopts. If “performance cultures” are designed with subjugation and coercion in mind, then the teaching profession will have to live with the “terrors of performativity” (Ball 2003) for a long time to come. If the initiative is based on a developmental approach, which allows various stakeholders to collectively articulate their interests in educational improvement, then the teaching profession should be able to exercise its moral authority to advance the broader interests of students, parents and community. Driven by professional rather than bureaucratic concerns, this developmental approach will facilitate professional discussions that can make expectations of teacher performance more reasonable, explicit and purposeful. From the discussions, shared understanding regarding teaching and learning processes, outcomes and shared language about professional practice should also emerge (see Chapter 2). In this way, the performance initiatives of policymakers may even come to have a positive effect on schooling.

Salient observations

From the chapters in this section, several salient observations on teacher professionalism and performativity can be made.

First, the compliance of teachers with the demands of performance policies may be said to reflect the vulnerability of the teaching profession. Goodwin, for example, argues that low entry requirements in some countries and less than rigorous training in others have caused this “feminized” profession to be more vulnerable to externally imposed changes (see Chapter 3). Other evidence presented in the chapters in this section also suggests that the robustness of teachers’ professionalism is being seriously tested by the threats of sanctions and the tyranny of audit.

Second, teachers’ inability to exercise their professional autonomy in dealing with the demands for accountability and the force of performance measures indicates the erosion of professional autonomy in their work. The exercise of professional autonomy assumes professional insights, confidence and conviction. These qualities are being pushed to the periphery by externally imposed performance cultures and the associated routinization of teachers’ work, which has done little to help them develop a broad vision of education in terms of their daily practice. For many, the spirit of experimentation has given way to the habitual calculation of rewards and sanctions in work routines that promote conformity and aversion to spontaneity and informed pedagogical risk-taking. Supported by interventionist strategies and measurement technologies, evaluative mechanisms and processes now operate in concert with rules, regulations, standards regimes, mission statements, strategic planning and attainment roadmaps to ensure compliance of schools and teachers. Serving also as a surveillance tool of bureaucratic accountability, evaluation and inspection systems have transformed broadly educative cultures of teaching into the pursuit of measurable achievements.

Third, performance policies imply a low level of trust in the professionalism of teachers. They were not conceived overnight, but resulted from lengthy processes of deliberation on educational quality, achievement standards and the competence of teachers to achieve desired outcomes. Decisions to measure teacher performance against certain objective criteria were a clear indication that policymakers were unsure of the competence of teachers. The establishment of standards regimes and detailed performance indicators in many countries represent a further refinement of methods and technologies. Moreover, by associating rewards and sanctions with teacher performance, these policies have also created competition among teachers at the expense of trust. This in turn has caused more tension, isolation, less sharing, and a decline of professional learning among teachers in many schools. In the community, public trust in the teachers has also declined. To various stakeholders in the community, especially parents with children in schools, the increased formal scrutiny of teachers’ performance signals that the competence of teachers, and the quality of education that they provide, can not be trusted, and the overwhelming public indifference to the teachers’ plight in schools signals its misgivings about the quality of education that they provide.

Finally, for issues of accountability to be framed appropriately in the context of schooling, key questions regarding the purpose and direction of performance policies and measures need to be addressed. The arguments presented in the chapters of this section centre upon issues of purpose, methods and meaning of the accountability project. If schools and teachers are to be accountable, then to whom should they be accountable, and by what means? Government and educational bureaucracies have played a pivotal role in the design, implementation and maintenance of the accountability project. Their moral and social obligation is to ensure that students receive high quality education from highly qualified and competent teachers. However, governments and educational bureaucracies are not the only stakeholders who have an interest in the competence of teachers. Other stakeholders, such as students, parents and community, also have high expectations of the teachers, for their welfare depends on how well teachers can educate every child. More so than any other stakeholders, in the most intimate way, teachers are accountable to their students. Since teachers’ actions rely as much on emotions as on intelligence and will, the means of encouraging accountable actions should be motivation rather than coercion. Given this, the purpose of the a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Connecting teacher and school development: policies, practices and possibilities
• Theme 1 Issues in teacher professionalism and performativity
• Theme 2 Conjuncture and disjuncture in teachers’ work and lives
• Theme 3 Reason and emotion in teaching
• Theme 4 Schools in different circumstances: contexts make a difference
• Theme 5 Student voices in a global context: rights, benefits and limitations
• Theme 6 Professional learning and development
• Theme 7 Innovative pedagogies
• Theme 8 School effectiveness and improvement
• Theme 9 Successful schools, successful leaders
• Theme 10 Learning about professional communities: their practices, problems and possibilities
• Index