A profession without a practice
Professor Richard Elmore claims that “education is a profession without a practice”.
He justifies his assertion through reference to an absence of a clear body of knowledge and a clear body of practice.
For Elmore the weakness of the profession is the mistaken notion that:
autonomy = professionalism
Yet such a relationship is essentially anti-professional - “Within a true profession an individual does not have autonomy over it’s body of knowledge and it’s practice” - which would appear to be the case for education. Yet other professions such as medicine, law, dentistry or accountancy have a body of practice and knowledge, which must be learned, mastered and implemented within agreed and non-negotiable norms.
Professor Elmore proposes that there is no unified agreement on what constitutes high performance/high quality instructional practice. Such a situation results in “the deep and central pathology” which afflicts education i.e. we change “readily and promiscuously in response to the environment”. Yet surgeons don’t change the way they carry out a heart bypass operation because the government has changed - so why do we in education change our practice everytime we face a shift in political administration - the differnce is that surgeons’ practice changes in response to research - wheras the majority of teachers are essentially divorced from research and are quite happy to support such an assertion..
Elmore went on to call for the profession to begin to take control over its practice and knowledge. The however, is that IF we were to agree a body of practice and knowledge then, just as with other professions, there would have to be an expectation that there would be less varation in practice from one classroom to another.
The reality, however, is that there is enormous variation from one classroom to another. In fact research proves that the major factor in determining pupil success is the difference between the teachers. For example, if a pupil has one teacher who has poor instructional skills - the pupil will take over 3 years to recover; of the same pupil has two consecutive years of being taught by a teacher with poor instructional skills they will take 5 years to recover; and if they have three consecutive years they will never recover.
So how do Head Teachers currently address such problems?:
They either move teachers around to ensure that pupils don’t get two consecutive years of poor instruction; or
they attempt - all to rarely - to remove such teachers from the system;
Elmore expanded upon these when he suggested there were only three ways to improve the quality:
- Change the role of the student;
- Raise complexity of content through more challenging instructional tasks; or
- Increase the knowledge and skills of the teachers; this would necessitate
*you cannot do one without the other
I’m certainly taken by these ideas, particularly the notion of establishing unambiguous, consistent, shared and rigorously upheld norms of instructional practice which permeate a school and an educational system.
Inspirational!
Harvard Graduate School - School Leadership » Blog Archive » Instructional Practice or Teaching? wrote:
[...] A profession without a practice [...]
Posted on 19-Jul-07 at 10:52 pm | Permalink
Alan Coady wrote:
I thought this a very interesting post – not least because at its heart is the nomenclature of my own job. For some reason, this is a bafflingly prickly subject in our profession (Instrumental Instructors) and asserting at one of our in service days that our working day contains more instruction than teaching would have a similar result to lobbing fireworks and tear gas into the room.
Although variations exist in ideas of interpretation, expression, these areas exist only in as much as they rest upon the two foundations of instrumental learning - technique and literacy.
Without technique expression remains trapped in the body and without literacy* there is nothing to interpret. The human skeleton and musculature are constants and therefore technical pedagogy changes very little across the years and around the globe.
As for ending the will o’ the wisp nature of education in the face of changing administration and ideas, it simply seems like a choice that we do not have. I’ve lost count of the amount of times that forthcoming change to practice in literacy and numeracy features on the news. In some subjects (history for example), governmental agents feel the need to oversee not only methodology but content.
Could it be that there is insufficient distinction between our body of knowledge and our working conditions? To extend Professor Elmore’s medical analogy, Governmental influence may not affect how a heart by-pass operation takes place but possibly where it takes place, how many can be afforded in any given time, who deserves one and who is paying.
* The only alternatives are unlimited demonstration time; unlimited audio-visual resources; super-human aural and memory skills
Posted on 25-Jul-07 at 10:14 am | Permalink
Harvard Graduate School of Education - Leadership: an Evolving Vision 2007 » Mind, Brain and Education wrote:
[...] For me this linked very well with what Richard Elmore had been syaing about the importance of the “instructional task” which must challenge and involve the learner. [...]
Posted on 29-Jul-07 at 12:31 pm | Permalink
Don’s Learning Log » Blog Archive » Allegiance Leadership - a destructive force wrote:
[...] On further reflection - and the thought has only just struck me - allegiance leadership, with its roots in communalism has a strong relationship to what Richard Elmore has been saying about autonomy being antagonistic to professionalism. For it seems to me that the allegiance leadership model is all about creating an autonomous “state” which operates under its own code of conduct and separate culture, with little reference to that outwith its boundaries - however false these boundaries might be. [...]
Posted on 04-Aug-07 at 8:27 pm | Permalink
Don’s Learning Log » Blog Archive » Professionalism means sacrificing some autonomy wrote:
[...] I think I was able to link this to what Richard Elmore had been talking about in the summer where he suggested that autonomy does not equate with professionalism. Just as there are many teachers who believe their practice is their own business and that they should be free to practise as they please, so there are some in CLD who believe that it should be their own personal judgement about what constitutes ‘good’ practice and that this is a matter for them and them alone. [...]
Posted on 10-Sep-07 at 9:28 pm | Permalink