Teachers can’t be made, designed or engineered. Teachers, to use a mechanical metaphor, auto-construct. In other words, they make and are constantly remaking themselves throughout their professional lives. Sometimes reading a book in the summer holiday will stimulate change, or a conversation in a staff room, or, more rarely nowadays, staff training. But whatever the trigger, it is always the teacher themselves who actively decides to change.
This might appear a rather bland point to make. But sadly, it’s a necessary one. Recent attempts to ‘make’ good teachers have typically approached teachers as if they were programmable drones, to be deployed in some horrific youth containment exercise. New Labour’s ministers and their mandarins in Whitehall - and, I might add, far too many compliant teacher educators - sought to develop teaching machines. In this managerial dystopia, edu-machines were activated by OfSTED’s pedagogy punch card, whose instructions read as follows: all drones must start with learning objectives…followed by Q&A…an activity…learning checks…and a plenary.
Thankfully, real teachers haven’t taken the guff that goes by the name of ‘best practice’ too seriously. They’ve been getting on with their job: engaging young minds in the wonders of culture and ideas. They’ve been doing this by exemplifying as individuals the critical intellectual spirit we hope the next generation will adopt. Those who follow teaching scripts handed down from on high can never be good teachers. Instead they are pseudo-intellects, fakers and impostors, who are acting out rather than embodying active and critical engagement with knowledge and the wider world. Students can easily spot a hypocrite.
However, none of this means teachers should be left in intellectual isolation or subject ghettos. Teaching is necessarily an individual act, where the teacher themselves is the medium of instruction. But education is social, and teachers have a great deal to learn from others. How should this be achieved?
The Coalition has a particular - and in my view wrongheaded - perspective on this question. Education Secretary Michael Gove has argued that teaching should be conceived as a ‘craft’. He claims it is ‘best learnt as an apprentice observing a master’ (Gove, 2010). His recently published White Paper The Importance of Teaching (Department for Education, 2010) ratifies this narrow approach. It is at best philistine, and at worst actively destroys the very educational traditions Gove has rightly sought to defend elsewhere.
Teaching is far more than a simple craft skill. It is a social, political and moral activity. It therefore has an ethic that must be engaged with and understood. Teaching is also a cultural transaction that assumes the wisdom of adults and ignorance of children. The teacher’s role is to mediate between these worlds. Teaching, most typically, involves distinct subjects. This means pedagogues need to know what a subject is and is not. Put this together and it becomes clear that all future teachers require an education in education. Training is simply not good enough.
Providing all future teachers with an education in education will not guarantee they become good teachers. Individuals alone retain responsibility for their practice. But it will ensure that all teachers understand what education is, and are fully aware of its cultural significance and complexity. For me, the best, and now neglected way of doing this is to introduce teachers to the great inspirational theorists of education, writers such as Paul Hirst, Michael Oakeshott and Brian Simon. This is what is missing from teacher training today.
Educating the educators will not resolve all the problems schools face. But it just might light some intellectual fires in the minds of next generation of teachers. In doing so, it will encourage them to light similar fires in the minds of the young.
References
Speech to the National College Annual Conference in Birmingham, by Michael Gove, 16th June 2010.
Department of Education (2010) The Importance of Teaching, London Department for Education
Sources
From In Defence of Teacher Education published by the Standing Committee for the Education and Training of Teachers (SCETT), March 2011, which is available in full here:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:ff415d7a-2478-4040-ae2d-11f447b03b5b
The top image is of the building that houses the University College London, Faculty of Education and Society
This building was designed by Sir Denys Louis Lasdun and the photograph was taken by Matt Buck, it is used here under CC BY-SA 3.0 and it can be accessed here https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20458168