Steve Rollett, Deputy CEO, Confederation of School Trusts
That said, to borrow a phrase: you can take the person out of teaching, but you can’t take the teaching out of the person. By which I mean that part of me which was a teacher hasn’t simply vanished since I moved out of the classroom into a career in education policy. This is because part of my professional identity as a teacher was rooted in the specialized professional knowledge I had acquired. Some of this was knowledge about how to teach, some of it was knowledge of what I taught, but it was knowledge nonetheless.
And this knowledge has not simply evaporated.
But nor has it remained static or sufficient. I have no doubt that if I returned to the classroom or school leadership tomorrow, I would face a rather steep learning curve as I grappled to regain mastery of all that I needed to know to be effective. Part of this is to do with memory – some of what I knew is no longer at the tips of my fingers and effort would be required to become reacquainted.
Some of it, though, is because in fields like education knowledge doesn’t simply stand still. In the six years since I last worked in a school much has remained broadly similar, but lots has changed too.
This isn’t only because some great teaching epiphany has taken place since; it’s because the discourse itself has moved on. New policies and innovations have taken hold, new voices are elevated, and new ways of working and being in education have been established. And some of what I knew, the voices and thinkers, will have been critiqued, re-evaluated, built upon and extended, and some of it discarded.
This isn’t down to a shift in the underlying processes of the mind (human evolution doesn’t move that quickly); it’s the product of people. Arguably, it’s part of our professional responsibility to each other to discuss, debate, argue and advocate. And out of the heat and light of these exchanges we forge new knowledge and new ways of knowing. I would go as far as to say some change is therefore inevitable.
And yet, how well do we organise our school system around this? How well do we create the time and space for professionals to engage in these processes? It happens in pockets, for sure (and often in teachers’ own time), but how well has the school system valued this amidst the myriad of competing priorities that schools and teachers face?
It’s perhaps ironic that despite the government’s pride in advocating a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum for students the building and distribution of professional knowledge of teachers and leaders has not been given the same status.
There has been some progress, of course. The Early Career Framework and reformed NPQs have sought to codify and distribute a current ‘best bet’ for the knowledge it is felt teachers ought to possess. This is a good thing. It is, in CPD terms, a commitment to distributing the ‘best that’s been thought and said’ in relation to aspects of pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and so on. A good thing indeed.
But it’s also entirely insufficient for a long-term conception of how we build knowledge and professionalise teachers.
Knowledge about teaching, knowledge of our subject, ways of being and knowing as a teacher, tend not to stay immutably fixed. Accordingly, true CPD should not only be a matter of delivering a static canon of techniques: the clue is in the ‘continuing’ part of CPD.
Unfortunately, ‘continuing’ has largely been taken by policy makers to mean only that teachers should receive more training as they progress through their careers; it’s a reflection of an individual’s journey rather than a description of the way knowledge itself builds and changes over time.
But CPD shouldn’t only be concerned with the regularity with which we distribute knowledge to teachers, it should also be appreciative of the ongoing creation and repurposing of knowledge too.
None of my critique here is about tearing down what has been built recently in CPD, such as the Early Career Framework and reformed NPQs. It’s more about saying ‘what next?’ for our conception of teacher knowledge.
There is a space here for thoughtful policy makers to occupy, and this space is not characterised by a commitment to a solution, such as ‘delivery’ of a particular course. Rather, it is characterised by a commitment to a problem, because it’s recognised that the problem (building knowledge) is itself subject to continual processes of re-appraisal.
Our systemic response should therefore be to raise the value we place on connecting professionals to that problem as much as it is to any particular solution, method or approach.
I’ll close by returning to where I began: me as a teacher. Does what I’ve set out above mean that ‘what counts’ in professional knowledge constantly changes so that it is permanently in flux and is thus effectively unknowable? No, I don’t believe that’s the case.
But ‘what counts’ does have the capacity to change. And so, in order to authentically and effectively be a teacher in 2022, I must connect with the knowledge and discourse of the profession and my subject.
If 2016 me was cryogenically frozen and reanimated in 2022 what changes in professional knowledge would I observe?
I’ll see that the language and practice of assessment is no longer as interested in ‘levels of progress’ and flightpaths, as it was when I last worked in a school. I’ll see that the term ‘differentiation’ is used differently, or not at all, in many schools. I’ll see these things and I’ll want to know why, I’ll want to know what new knowledge or perspective has changed these things or made them obsolete.
I’ll also see that in my subject, history, there are new emphases, new debates and new perspectives. I’ll see, for example, that my departmental colleagues in 2022 are thinking carefully about how they teach Black history. Of course, back in 2016 we also thought we were thinking carefully about how we taught Black history, but I will recognise now that some of how we used to do this was problematic.
For example, when we taught Black history as separate ‘bolt-on’ episodes in an attempt to be inclusive, we were actually at risk of writing Black people out of the long-standing fundamental historical plotlines that we taught in lessons most of the time; things like the Industrial Revolution, where too often we taught it as somehow separate from – or neglected to mention - the experiences of Black people whose enforced labour provided the cotton that we discussed in lessons on Arkwright. Our attempts at inclusion too often marginalised the already marginalised.
A helpful colleague in my 2022 department might even lend me their copy of David Olusoga’s ‘Black and British’ (published in 2017) to help me better understand the significance of this, for the Black children we teach, but also for all children we teach. Perhaps I’ll use some of the histories in Olusoga’s writing to rework my 2016 curriculum and more authentically improve the diversity of my curriculum.
These are just illustrative examples, of course, not an exhaustive list.
My point is that in order to make it in 2022 I will have to connect to the discourse. Ideally though, I’d have remained connected to the discourse throughout the period from 2016 to 2022, rather than having to play catch up; I’ll have followed it as it unfolded over the past six years. And I would have played my own – albeit modest – role in shaping it along with my peers.
For me that’s much closer to what it really means to be a knowledge-rich education system.
In the second part of this blog I offer some thoughts on how we might go about supporting teachers in this endeavour.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
