Teachers and Schooling Making A Difference

Productive pedagogies, assessment and performance

Debra Hayes, Bob Lingard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000247589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

Teachers + Schooling Making a Difference takes seriously the question that teachers ask, 'What do I do on Monday?' and does provide answers.' From the foreword by Professor Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin Education debates are currently dominated by free-market ideologists who push privatisation and competition as the answer to every problem, regardless of damage to schools and pupils. Teachers + Schooling Making a Difference shows that we can think about education in a far more productive way.' Professor R.W.Connell, University of Sydney This book is a lesson in making hope practical.It makes a compelling argument for recognising, supporting and enabling teachers as central to progressive school reform.' Professor Jenny Ozga, University of Edinburgh What teachers do in the classroom really matters, even though schools cannot compensate fully for difficulties children may face at home and in society. Good teachers and good schools have been making a difference in children's lives for generations, but what exactly is it that works?Based on extensive research in 1000 primary and secondary classrooms, this book examines the tough questions about teaching methods, curriculum, assessment and teachers' professionalism. The authors isolate the key elements that make the difference in the classroom, and offer teachers practical approaches to working with all their students. Teachers and Schools Making a Difference is essential reading for teachers and school administrators who want to improve their professional skills and offer a genuinely democratic education.

1
Introduction

When a local public school is lost to incompetence, indifference, or despair, it should be an occasion for mourning, for it is a loss of a particular site of possibility. When public education itself is threatened, as it seems to be threatened now—by cynicism and retreat, by the cold rapture of the market, by thin measure and the loss of civic imagination—when this happens, we need to assemble what the classroom can teach us, articulate what we come to know, speak it loudly, hold it fast to the heart. (Rose 1995: 4)

The research on which this book is based has confirmed what most teachers and many other people probably always knew: that apart from family background, it is good teachers who make the greatest difference to student outcomes from schooling. Individual teachers have more impact on student outcomes than do whole-school effects; and particular classroom practices are linked to high-quality student performance. Based on a large-scale research project and a broad range of the educational research literature, we describe in this book the classroom practices that make a difference. We detail and name such practices as productive pedagogies and productive assessment. Our claim is that these practices are important for all students, and that all these practices are especially important for those students from what are often described as disadvantaged backgrounds. The good news from our research is that quality teaching can improve outcomes for all students. The bad news is that it is not commonplace. And the reality is that quality teaching alone is not sufficient to bring about improvements in student outcomes. Indeed, there are limits to what teachers and schools can do, although they can make a difference.

We believe that in order to make a positive difference in the lives of young people, teachers need to share (with each other and with students and their communities) a common understanding of the types of student performances they are working towards. Such understandings are achieved in schools through rigorous engagement in a dialogue that displaces the more common fragmented monologues of teachers working in isolation in their classrooms. Our primary concern is to contribute to such dialogue by describing what makes a difference and suggesting how to make a difference in schools. The classroom practices we describe are our contribution to the former, and our description of alignment of these practices with performances is our case for the latter. Alignment is underpinned by context and a recognition that schools are located in places where people live. Schools that make a difference matter in these peoples’ lives because they enrich and resource them, and they connect with their concerns and hopes. Alignment, then, is about teachers’ pedagogies and assessment practices mediating the achievement of valued performances in the classroom.

This book reflects the process of alignment by detailing productive pedagogies in Chapter 2 and then showing how these may be linked to productive assessment and productive performance in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. The key to alignment is not so much sequence as linkage—that there are explicit and coherent links between pedagogies, assessment practices and student performances, all of which should be intimately linked to the specific purposes and goals of schooling. We add the term ‘productive’ to signal in a clear and precise way those forms that make a difference and that, to our best knowledge, work in classrooms. Productive pedagogies and productive assessment practices make a difference to educational outcomes. Such practices in all classrooms will contribute to more socially just outcomes from schooling—the difference that is the focus of this book.

The pervasiveness of pedagogies

In countries where dental checkups are commonplace, lessons on brushing, flossing and whitening are now routine parts of such a visit. In other words, a trip to the dentist has become a clinical and pedagogical experience (often accompanied by a dose of product comparison). A similar pedagogical shift is experienced if we visit an art gallery or a science museum, shop for electrical goods or switch on the television or computer. Teaching and learning are permeating all aspects of life; pedagogical activity is spilling over from formal to informal spaces. This shift has multiple effects, not the least of which are new forms of marketisation and consumerism, but here we want to focus on its educative dimension. The spread of pedagogical discourse is evidence of the move towards what Bernstein (2001) has called the ‘totally pedagogised society’. Pedagogy has moved out of the classroom; it has spread into other cultural and social spaces; and it is now an integral part of the practice of a wide range of workers other than teachers. Even family units have become sites of ‘parenting skills’, and the ‘world of work translates pedagogically into Life Long Learning’ (Bernstein 2001: 365). The imperative to keep improving reflects globalised labour markets and the insecurity of most employment today. As Rose (1999: 161) suggests:

The new citizen is required to engage in a ceaseless work of training and retraining, skilling and reskilling, enhancement of credentials and preparation for a life of incessant job seeking: life is to become a continuous economic capitalization of the self.

Education and pedagogy are not constrained or contained by time and space in the way they once were. Individuals are now the subject of ‘continuous pedagogic reformations’, to use Bernstein’s (2001: 365) evocative characterisation of this situation. However, schooling as an institution and set of practices remains an important site of pedagogy, despite the fact that learning (apart from a thinned-out conception linked to standardised testing) has disappeared from view in much of the educational policy landscape that has emerged in recent years.

This book is about teaching and learning in schools and classrooms. Based on the findings of a large-scale study—the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS 2001)—we describe the kinds of classroom practices and organisational processes that make a difference to the academic and social learning of students. We refer to this study throughout the book as the Productive Pedagogies Research (see preface). While we are concerned with improving the learning of all students, our particular focus is on improving the outcomes of students who traditionally underachieve and under-participate in education. We acknowledge that by declaring our intention in this way, we venture into highly problematic territory that has been thoroughly explored and raked over by the well-established arguments of critical, feminist, poststructural, postcolonial, race and other theorists over a long period of time. Their persistent articulation of minority standpoints, in the face of silencing discourses and other erasures, exposes the false assumption that a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach works with the same level of effectiveness for all students (Reyes 1987; Delpit 1995; Rose 1995). Evidence continues to show the effects of social class, and of other factors such as race, gender, ethnicity and locality with which it is interwoven, on students’ participation rates in schooling, their school performance, and their subsequent life opportunities (Anyon 1995; Lareau 2000; Van Galen 2004).

In presenting our research and discussion of teaching and learning in classrooms, we recognise that we risk being interpreted as positioning ourselves as outside arbiters and assessors of teachers’ pedagogical practices. We specifically wish to distance ourselves from what Ball (2004) has identified as a discourse of derision of teachers that blames them for not doing their job properly. Rather, our intention is to take up the challenge to speak with teachers about their work—which centres on the day-to-day rhythms of teaching and learning in schools—while also speaking to a broader audience of principals, parents, policy makers, politicians and others about how to provide equitable and just schooling for all.

The relationship between research conducted in schools and the reform of teacher practices is a complex and ultimately political one. Suffice to say here that we reject a model that sees teachers as mere translators of research conducted elsewhere. In conducting the research on which this book is based, we sought to operate in ethical, open and collaborative ways in the research schools and with the teachers. In presenting our research and ideas, we are not seeking to provide a calculus of pedagogies and assessment practices that can simply be layered into schools or imposed on teachers. We do not wish to tame and regulate pedagogies at a time of ‘multiplicity’—of multiple effects of globalisation and new technologies on identities, knowledges, practices, economies and nations (Dimitriades & McCarthy 2001). Rather, we report the research as a rigorously constructed but contestable map of pedagogical and assessment practices at a particular moment in Queensland government schools.

Schooling in Australia is ostensibly the constitutional responsibility of the state governments: there are some national developments but no national curriculum, for example, as in England; yet the state educational systems have much in common. While the research was conducted within one state educational system in Australia, and despite the contingent specificity of particular national and provincial schooling systems and indeed of individual schools, we argue that the research ‘findings’ have much broader applicability, given the common form of schooling across the globe (Meyer, Ramirez & Soysal 1992) and the emergent globalisation of educational policy developments (Lingard 2000). The issues facing schools and teachers in the Queensland research schools share some similarities with those being experienced by schools and teachers elsewhere.

Our intention is that the research reported throughout this book be used by teachers to engage in substantive professional dialogue of the sort that improves their classroom practices and takes account of their specific systems and school populations. Indeed, one of the ‘findings’ of the Productive Pedagogies Research, which we reported on in our earlier book Leading Learning (Lingard et al. 2003), was the importance of a school culture of professional dialogue and responsibility, supported by dispersed and pedagogically focused leadership, for enhancing the effects of schools on student learning (see Lee & Smith 2001). Thus our intention is that the research story of this book should be used, rearticulated and recontextualised by teachers and schools. It is also our intention to engage policy makers in debates about classroom practice, so that learning in its fullest meaning is given a central place in the educational policy landscape from which it is so often absent.

It is our belief, and hope, that we provide compelling arguments in this book as to why teachers and their practices should be at the centre of educational policy. In some educational systems this has been done—but in controlling and regulating ways, which have denied teachers the sort of space for professional dialogue that we are calling for here (Mahony & Hextall 2000; Ball 1994, 1997a, 1999, 2004; Apple 2001). Unfortunately, for the past decade or so policy has been done to teachers rather than with them. Perhaps the worst-case scenario is educational policy in contemporary England. As Ball (1994, 1999) has pointedly put it, teachers have been the objects rather than the subjects of recent educational policy changes, and multiple and competing discourses ‘swarm and seethe’ around the contemporary teacher. Mahony and Hextall (2000) have thoroughly demonstrated the deprofessionalising effects of such policy aimed at teachers in the UK context. Top-down imposed change works with a different logic of practice from that of classroom teaching, and pedagogical considerations are all too often absent. We suggest that more trust of teachers and more support for schools are needed in contemporary educational policy so as to constitute schools as reflective and inclusive communities of practice. Such trust would enhance professional dialogue about productive pedagogies and more likely align outcomes with those most often articulated in statements about the purposes of schooling. Those policy makers involved in the regulation of pedagogies desire the achievement of such outcomes but, paradoxically, the practices they encourage often work against the achievement of high-level intellectual outcomes for all.

As well as speaking to educational practitioners—teachers, school leaders, systemic personnel and policy makers—this research speaks to another community of readers, that of educational researchers and theorists. At a later point in this chapter we give an account of our research procedures, to open them to scrutiny, debate and further engagement. Throughout the text we address the work of a range of educational theorists to locate ourselves in, and advance, debates on the nature and purposes of schooling. Thus, a central aim of this book is to contribute to a professional discussion about classroom practices and their effects, while also contributing to broader debates about schooling, including consideration of the relationships between educational researchers, schools and policy makers. Underpinning our position is a valuing of schooling and an appreciation of the complexity of its purposes.

‘Making a difference’

In picking up the discourse of ‘making a difference’, we acknowledge a significant tradition of research on schools, inequality and social justice, to which the work of Connell, Ashenden, Kessler and Dowsett (1982) in Australia made an exemplary contribution. In contrast to the optimism of early compensatory education programs, which assumed that educational interventions could redress the social inequalities stemming from students’ home backgrounds Connell et al. (1982) illustrated, through their empirical research and accessible analysis and argument, the complex ways in which social class, gender and family articulated with opportunities in schooling. This research appeared alongside the work of reproduction theorists—neo-Marxist and other—who provided compelling accounts of the ways in which schooling itself perpetuated inequalities, particularly those of social class. Subsequently, multiple voices from the margins—feminist, black, postcolonial, postmodern, gay and lesbian—have questioned whether mainstream schooling could ever valorise the nuances of difference without speaking over them. It is now clear that a plethora of institutional practices work to generate and reproduce inequalities in ways that are not easy to counter. Not least of these is the hegemonic or competitive academic curriculum at the core of schooling, and the ways in which it is taught and assessed.

Over two decades after Connell et al. published their research findings, more is known about schools and social inequality but possibilities for intervention remain as challenging as ever. While there is currently a more sophisticated understanding of schools and social inequality (Thrupp 1999), there is reduced state commitment to redressing it. Concern about schools and social justice has been shifted aside in current public debate by education policies that stress individualised responsibility for achievement, the importance of private contributions to school funding, and market approaches to school choice. In the current times of neoliberal globalisation, the gap between rich and poor within and between countries is widening; new patterns of dominance and marginalisation are developing around access to the network economy; identities are more fractured; and global violence and its visibility have sharpened with 11 September and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Ira...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of contents
• Series Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Productive pedagogies
• 3. Productive assessment
• 4. Productive performance
• 5. Schools can make a difference
• Bibliography
• Appendix
• Index