Promoting excellence in the teaching service
THIS year there has been a lot of disagreement and acrimony about education, but I want to point out something parents, politicians and the sector can agree on: The quality of teaching that young people experience really does matter.
Yes, the exact degree to which it matters is disputed; some studies show the ‘‘teacher effect’’ size on student learning accounts for 60 per cent of variance, while others put it as low as 7 per cent. But in the end, we all agree that this is important, and all young people deserve to experience excellent teaching.
New Zealand performs highly on international tests. Achievement rates for all groups of students in NCEA are increasing year by year.
Nevertheless, we all agree that we can still do better. Teachers and schools are never going to be able to solve all our social and economic woes, but we can help to make a real difference.
Everyone I know in the sector, from the senior managers in the ministry through to trainee teachers on their first teaching placement, shares that moral purpose and idealism.
That is why the Post Primary Teachers’ Association set up a Quality Teaching Taskforce this year. This group worked with sector leaders, academics and politicians to look at what we can do within the education system to encourage and promote all teachers to do their personal best.
The answers this group came up with are not silver bullets or politically flashy, but neither are they prohibitively expensive or unobtainable. What they will do is steadily and systematically build the professional capacity of teachers, and they are strategies that have worked in countries like Singapore, Canada and Finland.
First is promoting collaborative inquiry, which means teachers work together to innovate and solve problems, working out what their students’ needs are by using data, making changes and then looking again at the data to see what has happened, constantly evolving their teaching to fit the students they have.
Second, different career pathways are designed so teachers with specific strengths and skills can share them with their colleagues, with trainee teachers and between schools.
Third, there is greater opportunity for professional learning for teachers and this is tailored and useful, rather than generic.
Fourth, the teacher appraisal system is designed around development and improvement, and if this is done well then accountability will happen naturally as a result.
Fifth, that the criteria to describe good teaching practice, which already exist in the Registered Teaching Practice, are used and widely understood by teachers to guide their development and professional growth.
What these strategies don’t do is assume the main motivation for teachers is money – like performance pay does – or all that’s required to be an effective teacher is a police check and willingness to give it a go – as proposed for charter schools.
They don’t rely on tastier carrots and bigger sticks, but treat teachers the way we try to treat our students, with high expectations, respect and mutual trust.
Russell is principal of Naenae College and was the New Zealand Secondary Principals’ Council representative on the taskforce.