This week I have been reading my favourite blogs and I am always inspired and encouraged by the work being done by great teachers in our schools. Not only are they doing innovative and engaging learning in their classrooms, they are sharing their intellectual property with us to encourage us all on our own journeys. Blogs are almost like an online staffroom, creating a ‘dream team’ to have professional and critical conversations with passionate teachers.
I meet or engage with great teachers everyday either in person or online in connected learning networks all over Australia. ‘Education is undergoing one of the greatest paradigm shifts since the invention of the printing press’ (Mark Treadwell 2012 Catholic Education Conference), and there are new ways of knowing and doing that are impossible to ignore if your motivation to teach is to engage, inspire, and nurture people, young or old, to be critical and active citizens in a global community.
It is with great disappointment then when I log on the the Smarter Schools website http://www.betterschools.gov.au/ (with all that saturated advertising on television and radio I became a little suspicious- some may say cynical) that I am left feeling that the professional integrity of all teachers is being called into question yet again.
I am in total agreement that education should be held to high standards, and I wholeheartedly agree that Federal and State funding should be equitable for all students across all sectors. Extra funding for children that have traditionally been marginalised and forgotten by mainstream schooling is also welcome and necessary.
What raises the most concern for me is that funding will be tied to more national testing, standardised curriculum, imposed programming and instruction for Literacy and Numeracy, data driven pedagogy, and a one size fits all policy implementation. The onerous (and growing) list of ‘subjects’ that is expected to be delivered in the primary school setting is bordering on lunacy.
The proposed hoops that practicing and beginning teachers will be expected to jump through in order to ‘prove’ their worthiness and their professionalism diminishes the hard work, long hours, and great work that is already being done in Australian classrooms to support students to be successful. To have to pay for the ‘privilege’ of gaining accreditation for your efforts which often go way beyond the walls of a classroom and the job specification, is to devalue and undermine the integrity of all educators.
To all the great teachers out there please keep doing what you are doing- the kids need you not to give up. Ultimately the society of the future will have more to do with the social and emotional work being done in our classrooms today, than by some conservative government body who believes that data and testing will improve results.
My Plato's Cave 