Here I write a blog version of the panel presentation speech I gave at the Australian Council of Educational Leaders national conference. The three Editors—myself, Cameron Paterson and Jon Andrews—each spoke during our panel on a different theme from the Flip the System movement (you can read more about Cameron’s panel presentation on democracy in education here, and Jon’s on education leadership here, on their blogs). My contribution to our panel explored one aspect of our upcoming edited book Flip the System Australia: What Matters in Education: teacher voice.

The absence of teacher voice in education policy and practice

We three Editors are current teachers and school leaders in Australian schools with more than 60 years of experience between us. We are thrilled to have co-edited a book on flipping the education system. Part of what brought us together is our shared belief in the profession of which we are a part, and its expertise.

Yet, teachers are mostly absent in the formulation of policy, on advisory boards, and on media panels. Mostly, ‘experts’ are wheeled in to speak for or about teachers and school leaders. An example is this week’s conference, during which there are 30 concurrent sessions on offer, in three time slots, despite there being around 130 abstracts submitted by Australian educators keen to present on their practice and to learn from one another’s experience. Non-practitioners or ex-practitioners of course have something to offer, but their dominance in conference programs at the expense of practitioner presentations diminishes teacher and school leader voice, and the value of the profession.

Sometimes, practitioners are consulted, such as in the recent Gonski 2.0 review and the recent review of teacher registration, but rarely are teachers invited to the decision making table. The media is particularly unhelpful, often presenting polarising or critical views of the teaching profession. Rarely, a teacher is invited along. For instance, on Monday’s upcoming Q&A television program, Maths teacher Eddie Woo (who is being marketed as an ‘internet sensation’) has been invited onto the panel as a teacher representative. Perhaps a shift towards listening to teachers is afoot, but it would be nice if the teachers consulted were of the ‘ordinary’ as well as the ‘celebrity’ variety.

Flipping whose voices are sought and heard in education

Flipping the system is in part about amplifying, elevating, and valuing the voices of those actually working in schools. We believe that the power to transform education is within it, not outside it.

Yesterday, Dan Tehan addressed the ACEL national conference and said that everyone went to school so everyone has an opinion on education. He has never received so much advice or so many opinions as in the last month since he became the Australian Education Minister. We would argue that the opinions of those at the whiteboard and in classrooms around our country are expert opinions that should be sought out, and listened to. Our teachers are experts in their subjects, and in teaching and learning, and their opinions about education are informed by their daily work with students and parents. Dylan Wiliam has written that “each teacher has a better idea of what will improve the learning of their students, in their classroom, in the context of what they are teaching them, than anyone else” (2014, p.33). Those working in schools, who prop up the system and are actually responsible for the learning and wellbeing of students in classrooms and schools, have richness of experience and breadth of expertise.

There are some practitioners, including we Editors, who share our thinking via blogs and social media, but we wonder: who is listening? And do those educators sharing their views represent and characterise the system at large and indeed the variability of contexts across Australia’s education landscape?  As Editors, we are aware of our own privilege and limitations.

We have been deliberate about the contributors to the book. It has 27 chapters, 15 of which have authors who are currently teachers or school leaders. We have deliberately structured the book to privilege notions of teacher leadership and democracy. Dr Kevin Lowe, one of our Indigenous authors, pointed out that Aboriginal contributions are often tacked on to the end of books, appearing as an afterthought. He challenged us to think carefully about who we foregrounded. We put the section on teacher voice up front, followed by the section on democratising education.

Below, I briefly describe some examples of chapters from this book that foreground teacher and school leader voice.

Australian teacher and school leader voices

I have written a chapter that draws on the teacher and school leader interviews of my doctoral research around professional identity. It suggests that professional trust is central to building the profession as one which seeks to grow and understand teachers and teaching, as opposed to the often competitive, blame-ridden portrayal. I write in my chapter that “education is not an algorithm but a human endeavour, and one that can be improved through attention to the intricacies of the people operating within the system.”

A chapter from Tomaz Lasic talks about the makerspace in his public school. A chapter from Ben Lewis discusses the program for Indigenous students at his school. Yasodai Selvakumaran shares her experiences of out-of-field teaching. A chapter from principal Rebecca Cody talks about how school leaders have to navigate the dual demands of external accountabilities and the holistic education of their students.

Cameron Malcher discusses education podcasts as a vehicle for ‘talking up’, sharing teacher voice and making education debates public. Drawing on his own experience of podcasting, he illuminates the great potential it possesses to engage the profession in debate and empower teachers.

Academic and international voices about voices

If you were to look through the Table of Contents, you would notice that there are not just teacher voices, but a spread of views, including some scholarly voices and some international perspectives. We don’t think teachers should be speaking alone but speaking with the multiplicity of stakeholders within the education space. This morning Andy Hargreaves talked in his keynote about solidarity, which can be within our contexts and districts, but also across nations and systems. Those chapters in the book written by academics or consultants either include teacher voice, advocate for the presence of teacher voice, or are focused on teacher expertise and experience. Lyn Sharrat’s keynote yesterday was a great example of a researcher whose work keeps her firmly connected in with classrooms and teachers in a range of countries and communities.

In their chapter, Australian academics Anna Hogan and Bob Lingard draw on teacher perceptions via a survey around commercialisation in education. They found that teachers were concerned about a loss of teacher professionalism and personal wellbeing in the commercialised school environment. The teachers in their survey warned that increasing engagement with commercial providers must be balanced against concerns that commercialisation can threaten the holistic development of students the democratic purposes of public schooling.

In a chapter on large-scale assessments, Greg Thompson, David Rutkowski and Sam Sellar argue that there is an absence of teacher voice in interpreting PISA results and they call for educators to engage in dialogue around external testing regimes and their use in informing education.

In a chapter on teacher wellbeing in crisis, Andy Hargreaves, Shaneé Washington and Michael O’Connor claim that “there is no student wellbeing without teacher wellbeing” and acknowledge that teachers struggle to collaborate effectively amidst the frenetic rate of reform in education and ever-increasing workloads and accountabilities.

In his chapter, Gert Biesta argues that policy and subsequent accountabilities have led to a transformation of the role of teacher, in which teachers are undermined and often deprofessionalised by the language of policy and practice. He says that “the idea of teaching as an effective intervention runs the risk of turning students into objects to be intervened upon rather than engaging with them as human beings who are trying to figure out who they are and what this world is they are finding themselves in.” He adds that “the biggest irony is that teachers, in an attempt to liberate themselves from micro-management and top-down control, turn to an approach [such as evidence-based practice] that makes their students into micro-manageable objects of control, rather than seeing them as human subjects whose own agency is at stake.”

Carol Campbell, in her chapter, also frames the purpose of education as developing the betterment of humanity, and we conclude the book by drawing attention to the human aspects of education.

A key thread here is that of considering the human beings within our schools, something that sounds obvious but is often lost in the relentless call for data, evidence, and quantitative measures of learning, leadership, and effectiveness.

Teacher voice: The challenges

Our challenges in representing teacher and school leader voice in this book serve as an example of the challenges our profession faces in speaking out and speaking up. These included that:

• Ours is only one book, one platform, and so only a limited number of perspectives could be included. As soon as we filled the volume with contributions, we felt that we could fill a second volume, too.
• A number of teachers and school leaders were invited to contribute but were either too busy or felt too vulnerable to do so. There are real risks to teachers and school leaders in sharing their views publically.
• Sharing our views is unpaid. Asking teachers to write, blog, or present is asking them to take part in unpaid labour, outside of their day jobs, and to become part of the noise out there, with no guarantee of being listened to.
• As teachers and school leaders, our service is first and foremost to the students in our schools and it can feel like a misuse of time to pontificate about education outside of our classrooms and schools. We would argue, however, that speaking up and speaking out can be a service to students and education more broadly.

One small step

Our book is a microcosm of what we would like to see more of in education, although we regret not including student voice in the book. It is one drop-in-the-ocean attempt to amplify, elevate and value the voices of teachers and school leaders. We hope that in our Australian context it will lead to politicians and policymakers seeking out the views and expertise of those in schools. Flipping the system in this way is about building networks and flattening hierarchies so that we can all work together for the good of the students in our schools.

References

Netolicky, D. M., Andrews, J. & Paterson, C. (Eds.). (2019). Flip the System Australia: What matters in education. Routledge.

Wiliam, D. (2014). Teacher expertise: Why it matters, and how to get more of it. Ten essays on improving teacher quality. Available from: http://www.claimyourcollege.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Dylan-Wiliam.pdf .