Teacher Stories.
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Hi Bruce,
I’m in my 42nd year of primary school education now and sadly I will be calling stumps in the next 2 or 3. Not because I’ve lost any passion for teaching, but totally because of the system we are forced to work within. Sure there are some good things happening, but on balance we are disengaging more children than I’ve ever seen in my career.
We’ve become slaves to compliance with some deputy principals and a number of admin. officers working full time in this capacity. And of course many teachers are spending more time recording data and attending meetings about data and maintaining consistent practices across cohorts than actually planning for teaching and learning.
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The fun has disappeared from learning. There is no more seizing of the teachable moment and using our current contextual issues to bring learning to life. No more integrated learning. Your old idea of “playing school” has faded from our repertoire. Teachers are driven by deadlines, meeting test dates and covering the overwhelming amount of content. Sadly much of this content is far from “kid friendly”.
What we now do to make up for the boredom of the curriculum (think C2C and its assessment pieces which are mandated at my school) is create a range of extra curricular experiences to help our kids find something to hang onto. These experiences while valuable and provided by large numbers of very talented and dedicated teachers, happen in lunch times and after school. So our sporting teams, choirs, cheer-leading teams, rock bands, school musicals, robotics clubs and many other activities provide an outlet for those who participate in these opportunities. Unfortunately the “in class”, subject-segregated teaching times (think High School model) are mostly just ‘survived’.
Regards.
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Hi Bruce,
I finished up at the end of 2021 after working 0.4 for the last three years. After 6 years of pedagogical coaching and “Master” teacher roles I felt a bit burned out - the model of delivery saw me working across years 1 - 6 and modelling teaching of Maths/ English day in, day out as well as devising, putting into practice and reporting on a school-based action research program each year. So I didn’t exactly rest on my laurels at the end of the career.
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I agree totally with your sentiments about education funding, NAPLAN and what we’ve done/are doing to our children. Unfortunately I see it as an issue that is much bigger than education - its more of a structural ideology that runs right across our system of government and has brought us to a turning point in history - peak global debt, peak inequality, peak mental health issues, rising autocracy around the world etc. It’s caught up in the neoliberal ideology of minimising the state and pursuing policies that favour the few over the many. Privatisation across multiple sectors has led to monopolies and profit gouging, with profit dominating any thoughts of service provision or acting for the common good.
In education we’ve had this corporate performance culture take over, to the point that the 2010s were defined by the collection/ analysis/ comparison of data for its own sake, and of course this led to a certain type of teacher/ leader floating to the top. In many ways teachers were deskilled with the introduction of the "Curriculum into the Classroom" program which many schools mandated. Each learning area stood alone as the belief was that integrated units had degraded the rigour of individual learning areas such as Science. Of course there were always examples of teachers who used the thematic ‘grab bag’ approach to planning integrated units, but in general they allowed children to find purpose and connection in their learning.
So in a classic case of history repeating (after a number of years of teachers slavishly teaching from the C2C bible in stand alone subjects), some ‘innovative' leaders decided that we needed to start integrating some of our subjects to prevent the crowding of the curriculum. This occurred in my last couple of years teaching.
What has been happening in eduction hasn’t been all bad. We all improved in many aspects of teaching despite some of the management issues and there were some great programs at times. One example was making the skills and language features required for particular types of reading comprehension/ writing more visible to children through modelled, shared, independent and guided reading and writing sessions. This really was the type of teaching that we got from the WA First Steps programmes back in the 90s but few people had heard of or used these ideas. I also reintroduced a lot of hands on teaching when I was maths coaching as well as using games and many teachers had no awareness of teaching in this way - particularly in years 4 - 6. Unfortunately we have often discarded some good stuff in the cause of renewal and stamping the impression of new and updated onto a school’s or a government’s website.
Lots of issues abound in education: from engaging the students of today, changes in parenting styles, having an appropriate blend of technology and real life experience, strategies to deal with the crowding of curriculum, mentoring beginning teachers for future success ( to stop the terrible attrition rate), continual reinvigoration of established teachers etc. I would say that as we head towards peak inequality etc, that we may see opportunities for a different type of governing and a very different world by perhaps the early 2030s. In general our millennials need to rise over the next decade as they overtake the Boomers in numbers. We certainly can’t go through another decade like that of the LNP for 2013 - 2022.
Regards.