Introduction
Teacher policy is high on the education agenda across the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland (UK and NI) as well as internationally, a key focus of which is the improvement of teacher quality and effectiveness in order to raise pupil learning outcomes. This emphasis on teacher quality and effectiveness often sits with other education reforms including curricular and assessment reforms and changes to the management and governance of schools. In relation to teachers, there have been changes to teacher preparation, the regulation of the teaching profession , and the professional development of serving teachers. While reforms to the initial preparation of teachers can be rapidly established through structural change and funding, what has proved to be a more complex process is the question of improvement and enhancement of teaching practice across the body of serving teachers. In these endeavours to improve teacher quality and effectiveness, two broad approaches are evident across different education systems: firstly, an approach premised on accountability that combines institutional quality assurance with performance management of individual teachers and, secondly, a developmental approach which foregrounds professional learning as the key to improving teacher quality and effectiveness (Forde and McMahon 2015). Over the last two decades in various education systems these two broad approaches have co-existed with greater emphasis placed on one or other at different times, but these approaches have collided on occasion, particularly in schemes to enhance the practice and status of experienced teachers (McMahon et al. 2007). More recently, while policy and practice continue to draw from this mix of development and accountability, there has been a subtle move from reviewing the performance of a school largely through external quality assurance reviews to now include scrutiny of the performance of different levels in a system:
- education systemsâwhether national or state level
- local education systemsâcouncil or district level
- individual schools
- individual teachers.
Performance is largely measured by pupil attainment and so the scrutiny associated with this has intensified, fuelled by comparisons of different systems using international benchmarks, notably through the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (OECD 2018a) conducted by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Sellar and Lingard 2014). PISA is one of several assessment programmes such as Trends in International Mathematics and Science (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) developed by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA). These latter two programmes include data on teacher development while the OECD now has a cycle of teacher surveys, the Teaching and Learning International Study (TALIS). The TALIS studies have been drawn on substantially at the International Summits on the Teaching Profession (ISTP) (Asia Society 2011â2018), where the central concern is teacher quality and effectiveness.
The focus of this book is to examine the significance of teacher expertise in the policy drive to improve quality and effectiveness. First though, a note about the use of the term âteacher qualityâ. Darling-Hammond (2013) makes an important distinction between âteacher qualityâ and âteaching qualityâ, arguing that teacher quality might be thought of as âthe bundle of personal traits, skills and understandings an individual brings ⊠including dispositions to behave in certain waysâ (p. 11) and âteaching qualityâ relates to the âstrong instruction that enables a wide range of students to learnâ (p. 12). There is a relationship between teacher quality and the quality of teaching and learning but, this is not a linear process of cause and effect, where improving teacher quality (however this is defined) will lead seamlessly to improved teaching and so to improved pupil learning outcomes. Darling-Hammond (2013, p. 12) argues that other factors have a significant impact on pupil engagement: âteaching quality ⊠is also strongly influenced by the context of instruction, including factors aside from what the teacher knows and can doâ. The focus of this book is on teacher expertise as a central idea underpinning âteacher qualityâ in building a teacherâs capability . A range of policy interventions have tried to define, scrutinise, regulate and enhance teacher quality to raise pupil achievement. The political focus on teacher quality as the means of achieving system improvement calls for an interrogation of this policy stance, and associated interventions, and a consideration of an alternative approach.
In this book we propose that we need to re-imagine the question of teacher quality, not as an issue to tackle deficits in teachers. Instead we need to adopt a developmental stance that recognises and builds teacher expertise as the core of professional identity and practice. We need to enhance the expertise of as a wide group of teachers as possible, thereby building accomplished teaching. As a starting point, we need to examine current constructions of teacher professionalism , of the teaching profession, teachersâ career and teacher learning and evaluation, to understand what might impede or facilitate the development of teacher expertise . We also need to consider recent policy interventions in the UK and NI, as well as further afield, intended specifically to build high quality teaching âthrough schemes that recognise and reward high performance and through strategies designed to build collaborative practice. Our intention in this book is partly to scrutinise current policy developments and approaches to enhancing teacher quality, both at an international level through organisations such as the OECD, and at a national level. We begin in this chapter by exploring the question of system improvement and teacher quality and then look to some of the drivers for change evident with the different education systems in the UK and NI.
Starting Points: Accomplished Teacher and Accomplished Teaching Project
The origins of this book lie a project on Accomplished Teachers and Teaching (Forde and McMahon 2011) funded by the Scottish Government and the General Teaching Council Scotland (GTCS) which in itself grew out of two areas of research interest which came together around a common question about the development of expertise: work on firstly, the chartered teacher programme in Scotland (McMahon et al. 2007; Reeves and et al. 2010) and secondly, teacher leadership (Forde 2010, 2011; McMahon 2011; Forde and McMahon 2014). These projects suggested that we needed to pay attention to teacher expertise in pedagogy as a means of bringing about improvement.
The first strand of the Accomplished Teacher and Teaching Project gathered examples of approaches to the recognition, support and in some cases, reward of accomplished teachers. The second strand investigated the concept of âaccomplished teachingâ. These ideas underpinned the development of career-long teacher education (Donaldson 2011). However, it is clear that this reform programme is not unique to Scottish education but is shaped by and contributes to wider global trends and debates about education and the teaching profession. The initial focus of the Accomplished Teachers and Teaching Project extended to include the exploration of the issues evident in teacher policy both across education systems in the UK and NI as well as globally, especially through the work of supranational bodies as the European Union (EU) and the OECD. In this book we want to approach the topic of teacher quality from a different perspective, particularly the ideas of teacher expertise and accomplished teaching.
While there are significant policy demands for improvement in teacher quality and to build a âhigh quality teaching professionâ, only limited attention has been paid to considering what we mean by âteacher qualityâ and a âhigh quality teaching profession.â In our view we need to understand teacher quality in terms of teachersâ pedagogic expertise and accomplished practice, and to achieve a high quality teaching profession we need to build accomplished practice, not just among an elite within the teaching profession, but across as wide a group as possible and to sustain this level of practice over teachersâ lengthy careers. There are examples of expert, excellent or exemplary teachers which have been investigated, and indeed we discuss many of these in the course of this book. However, we argue that focussing on only a small proportion of the teaching profession will not bring about the necessary improvement in teacher quality required for system-level change and improvement. Therefore our contention is that we need to build âaccomplished teaching,â that is highly skilled pedagogic practice that fundamentally looks at, and seeks to address, learnersâ learning needs. Currently teachers work in contexts where they are held to account for their practice. However, such an approach, where teachersâ practice is shaped by prescription and quality indicators, fails to recognise the deeply contextualised nature of teaching. At the core of accomplished practice we suggest, are sets of understandings and practices that enable teachers to:
- readily assess the learning needs of diverse groups of learners they are responsible for;
- draw from a rich repertoire of teaching strategies to create the conditions for effective learning for these diverse learners;
- display a readiness to explore and innovate in their teaching, particularly through enquiry pedagogies;
- use evidence from pupil responses and the outcomes they achieve to evaluate their own teaching practice; and
- seek opportunities to grow professionally particularly through collaboration with others.
In order to develop accomplished teaching across a critical mass of the teaching profession, we need to set aside simplistic formulations of teaching as a craft or a set of technical skills . While instructional techniques such as explanation, demonstration and questioning are important, we need to understand that the process of successful teaching using a learner-centred approach, requires considerable expertise on the part of the teacher. Goodson (2003) argues that there is considerable debate about what we mean by âexpertiseâ. In this book we examine this idea of teacher expertise , how it might be defined, developed and recognised, by drawing from the field of studies on experts and expertise...