Thoughts on the Future of Teaching

Top school systems select and educate their teaching staff carefully, they provide an environment in which teachers work together to frame good practice, they encourage teachers to grow in their careers; and they have moved on from administrative control and accountability to professional forms of work organisation. Still, the laws, regulations, structures and institutions on which education policy tends to focus are just like the small visible tip of an iceberg. The reason why it is so hard to move school systems is that there is a much larger invisible part under the waterline. This invisible part is about the interests, beliefs, motivations and fears of the people who are involved in education, parents and teachers included. This is where unexpected collisions occur, because this part of educational reform tends to evade the radar screen of public policy. That is why educational leaders are rarely successful with reform unless they build a shared understanding and collective ownership for change, and unless they build teacher capacity and create the right policy climate, with accountability measures designed to encourage innovation rather than compliance. The most essential reason why teachers’ ownership of the profession is a must-have rather than an optional extra lies in the pace of change in 21st century school systems. Even the most effective attempts to translate a central curriculum into local classroom practice will drag out over a decade, because it takes so much time to communicate the goals and methods through the different layers of the system and to build them into traditional methods of teacher education. In a fast-changing world, when what and how students need to learn changes so rapidly, such a slow process leads to a widening gap between what students need to learn and what and how teachers teach. The only way to shorten that pipeline is to professionalise teaching, that is to ensure that teachers not only have a deep understanding of the curriculum as a product, but equally with the process of curriculum and instructional design and the pedagogies to enact and enable the ideas behind the curriculum. The challenge is to build on the expertise of the teachers and school leaders and to enlist them in the design of superior policies and practices. Where systems fail to engage teachers in the design of change, teachers will rarely help systems in the implementation of change.