Harvard Graduate School of Education - Leadership: an Evolving Vision 2007

One of the things whch struck me in Professor Richard Elmore’s presentation today was his recurring use of the term “instructional practice”.

I know teachers in Scotland would be horrified by such a term - “we are not technicians” would be their immediate response. The other difficulty in the term is its association with the verb to “instruct “- to tell/direct, which for many teacher smacks of didactic and authoritarian methodologies.- “instructions are something that you get when you board a plane”

Yet one of the themes which have jumped out for me over the duration of the course has been the need to separate the classroom practice from the person if we are going to be able to have a true dialogue about the quality of that practice.

The problem with the word teaching is that is is associated with the noun - teacher, i.e. if you comment on my “teaching” you are commenting upon me as a person.

If we take heed of Elmore’s words there is an undeniable need to clarify a body of knowledge and skills associated with teaching - perhaps by using the concept of instructional practice it might be possible to step back from evaluation of the person - to an evaluation of the practice -which is surely where we want to be?

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:

1. Change the role of the student;
2. Raise complexity of content through more challenging instructional tasks; or
3. 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!