A new book calls for an urgent transformation of the education system including new success metrics and fresh approaches to teaching.
The book, The Teaching Improvement Agenda, argues that current schooling and teaching practices are based on an outdated industrial age design.
The publication is the result of a collaboration between David Lynch and David Turner from Southern Cross University, Richard Smith from Central Queensland University, and Barnett Berry from the Learning Policy Institute.
“There have been enough government reports and ongoing debates about education, schooling, and teacher education to realise that the time has come for the profession to change course,” the book argues.
“Transforming what is now a 200-year-old system strongly influenced by the logic of the industrial age is challenging.
“At its heart, change propositions fundamentally react to a sustained cultural problem because of the power of the status quo, the lack of clarity about the purpose of schooling, and a lack of coherent understanding of the field of education and its complexity.”
The authors argue that the education profession, particularly classroom teachers and school leaders, are becoming exhausted keeping the current system operating.
“The international problem of teacher shortages should be seen as the proverbial canary in the coal mine,” they say.
“This might be a comment about society’s political leaders not having the gumption to resolve what it means to be educated.”
The authors say the solutions to the issues in the system would not be resolved by preserving the “expected norms” of a school day, introducing more to the curriculum to appease lobby groups or reinforcing old teaching mindsets.
People’s lives, and how they work, had changed profoundly and schools needed to change to address this.
The book outlines seven key strategies for achieving the necessary transformation.
- Governments must show leadership in defining the society they want to engineer
“The first important consideration in any transformational agenda is leadership. It requires top-level buy-in, which implies a level of courage. Change requires clarity of purpose followed by robust, committed and informed leadership for success.”
- New success criteria
“’Success’ in modern society takes many forms. For those in ‘education’, it…points to the need for different types of schools and a journey of education that is not defined by just ‘getting into university’ or achieving ‘a qualification’ but ongoing learning and adaptation through life.”
- A new grammar of schooling
“The central organisational feature of current schooling is mass education. This is an affront to the life potentials of every young person enrolled, in that no system that makes decisions for the masses will ever be able to ensure every individual succeeds.”
- Teacher preparation attuned to specialist education knowledge and skills, honed for the real world
“Teacher education programming at all levels of the profession must go beyond the ad hoc release from class models that predominate the classroom teacher’s life. It must find ways to address the theory-practice divide resulting from the most common on-campus and practicum model of initial teacher education and move to a new set of stratified teacher education qualifications.”
- Introducing the “consultant” role as catalyst for change
“In an operational sense, the role of consultants, which we have co-opted from the logic of how the medical profession organises its specialists in hospitals, provides complex learning design, diagnostic and education process advice, and guidance to those ‘involved others’. (It) coordinates these multi-discipline professionals into the actioning and achieving outcomes specified in individual learning plans.”
- A “stratified” set of teaching roles
“Stratification is about sustainably repositioning teachers for complex and multi-dimensional work. It can be understood as a new set of teaching roles within a new grammar of schooling, and for each new teacher role, it is a defining scope of practice. Scope of practice means teachers are no longer ‘individuals positioned to be all things to all students’.”
- Increasing research into education, teaching and teacher education and packaging it for teacher consumption
“At the heart of such calls for change in schooling, teaching, and teacher education is a deficient body of research evidence to inform and guide the preparation and practice of teachers. This problem is compounded by educational research not being packaged nor organised to be instructive to the work of teachers.”
The authors acknowledge that change may require the sacrificing of “sacred cows” that have been in place for tens, or even hundreds, of years.
“We recognise the difficulties of generating and sustaining change in the education field,” the book says.
“Moreover, as former classroom schoolteachers, we recognise that frontline teachers prioritise the interests of children and are interested in anything that can assist them in their complex everyday work.”
Given this, the book argues that the trigger for change must come from progressive thinking by the “political class” rather than through “democratising influence”.
The book is available on this website.
