In education, there are so many problems that, even having decided on a policy programme, the challenges faced by a Minister in getting it implemented are daunting.
A reform-minded Minister might consider teachers’ career structure. At the moment, teachers are paid based entirely on their length of service. The quality of their performance has nothing to do with it. But any attempt to introduce performance measures into teachers’ remuneration will meet with trenchant opposition from teachers’ unions.
Such a Minister might also want to address the ideology that has led to our catastrophic failure in literacy and numeracy. But how to do that, when that ideology permeates the school education sector, from the teaching profession to teacher training providers, right up to the Ministry of Education?
My advice to an incoming Minister is to look for small policy interventions that lead to a domino effect of positive change.
I would start with the Standards for the Teaching Profession. The Standards describe the capabilities a new teacher must demonstrate to be granted a practising certificate by the Teaching Council.
The current standards highlight commitment to the partnership model of the Treaty, professional relationships, student wellbeing, inclusion, empathy and safety. But they place far too little direct emphasis on effective teaching.
New Standards should require teachers to have a working knowledge of the science of human learning. To get their certificates, teachers should have to pass an examination to prove their understanding of learning science and to satisfy an expert observer that they can apply it in the classroom.
This reform would force teacher training institutions to place more emphasis on effective pedagogy than they do. Their reputations would suffer if their graduates could not meet the criteria for registration.
With Standards like that, the pernicious orthodoxy that holds our compulsory school system in a death grip would soon begin to shift. We’d have a cadre of young, well-prepared teachers leading the charge. Soon enough, everyone would want a piece of their success.
The only problem is, the Standards for the Teaching Profession don’t make for gripping election policy. Professional standards just aren’t that glamourous.
Fortunately, there’s another important reform that is much more likely to get voters’ attention. As well as new teaching standards, we need a new curriculum. More about that next time.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
Such a Minister might also want to address the ideology that has led to our catastrophic failure in literacy and numeracy. But how to do that, when that ideology permeates the school education sector, from the teaching profession to teacher training providers, right up to the Ministry of Education?
My advice to an incoming Minister is to look for small policy interventions that lead to a domino effect of positive change.
I would start with the Standards for the Teaching Profession. The Standards describe the capabilities a new teacher must demonstrate to be granted a practising certificate by the Teaching Council.
The current standards highlight commitment to the partnership model of the Treaty, professional relationships, student wellbeing, inclusion, empathy and safety. But they place far too little direct emphasis on effective teaching.
New Standards should require teachers to have a working knowledge of the science of human learning. To get their certificates, teachers should have to pass an examination to prove their understanding of learning science and to satisfy an expert observer that they can apply it in the classroom.
This reform would force teacher training institutions to place more emphasis on effective pedagogy than they do. Their reputations would suffer if their graduates could not meet the criteria for registration.
With Standards like that, the pernicious orthodoxy that holds our compulsory school system in a death grip would soon begin to shift. We’d have a cadre of young, well-prepared teachers leading the charge. Soon enough, everyone would want a piece of their success.
The only problem is, the Standards for the Teaching Profession don’t make for gripping election policy. Professional standards just aren’t that glamourous.
Fortunately, there’s another important reform that is much more likely to get voters’ attention. As well as new teaching standards, we need a new curriculum. More about that next time.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
4 comments:
>The current standards highlight commitment to the partnership model of the Treaty
.......... which is a political paradigm. As in North Korea, the govt here insists on public commitment to a political view for its employees. That is a breach of the human rights of those employees as both international and domestic human rights law state categorically that nobody should have a political dogma forced on them.
Alas, you're absolutely right, Michael. Just as welI I have no political ambitions for I would demand all reference to the Treaty to be removed immediately, and I'd sack anyone earning more than $150k pa in the Ministry for allowing the current 'reset' (which drips with CRT) to have been devised and promulgated thus far. That, I think, would sharpen the attention of those remaining MoE ideologues that we, the public, are not at all happy with our children being indoctrinated with revisionist nonsense and neolithic claptrap.
The huge emphasis on maori twaddle needs to be dropped. The ojective productive types who do not wish to fritter hours on matters maori in maori time and who are potentially effective teachers might then be attracted. A major problem is the lack of any effective discipline enforceemnt. Without a caning or few, and the treat of a low ranking of failure, my days at school wuld have been largely wasted,.
It is a formidable task to endeavoUr to improve the catastrophic failure we have in our schools.It would be helpful if the more articulate middle class recognized the after school tutoring industry that has sprung up is out of reach of lower income families.People who have already paid taxes for the ideological nonsense in both the pedagogy (methods of teaching) and curriculum foisted on their children in school are paying more fees for effective direct tutoring. When the issue of school fees arises nobody mentions this inequity. Maybe the parents who pay for these services have been convinced. their children are somehow at fault.
When my mother taught infant classes in the 1930 sand '40s in NZ, school inspectors graded teachers yearly A teacher lost grading and pay if on the assessments they were found wanting. This would have been quite unfair if the pedagogy was also defective but it was pre- progressive days before our excellent education was destroyed by the prevailing destructive pedagogies.
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