The first 100,000 words: Writings on Education by a Teacher

The key question I would like to explore is: As a profession, how should we best represent ourselves. As @beardface noted earlier on Twitter, the common metaphor and analogy for teachers and teaching currently are Doctors and/or Medicine. This may seem like a positive association, which is true for pay, conditions and status, but the persistence of the idea, and its over-application, also holds issues. Specifically, Davies (1999) conceived of Education as medicine in the debate around the ‘what works’ and ‘evidence-based’ practice and research (Hammersley, 1997; Olson, 2004; Slavin, 2002, 2004). In response, Olson (2004) rejected the analogy made between education and medical research, commenting on the differences between a ‘drug’ being administered and an educational intervention. Whilst Hammersley (1997) shifted the analogy to align educational research with surgical operations made up of complex decision-making. What I am questioning here, however, some 20 year...

After writing a blog around the difficulty of teacher representation and the four spheres of knowledge that seem unattainable for any one teacher (Politics – Policy – School – Classroom) to truly be across. I was contacted by Clare King ( @clarelorelei ), who has been called upon to make a submission to the ‘ Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession ’, she has been contacting politicians and received positive responses particularly from Andrew Laming and Pasi Sahlberg. Below is my version of her submission, which will likely be different to the below. If anyone else is interested in writing their own ’10 policies to improve the status of the teaching profession’, have a go and let myself ( @steven_kolber ). In addition, if there are experts in any of these areas, feel free to let me know where I am (undoubtedly) incorrect, or off the mark.                                   ...

                                               Teacher activism and discussion has centred around the concept of improving the esteem of our profession and improving the reach of our profession’s voice. Teachers feel that for too long politicians have dictated terribly flawed and faulty policy ideas to our workplaces. Stripped of our agency, we feel powerless ad this contributes to our sense of burnout. Or as Gabbie Stroud would say, “not burnout, but Demoralisation”. We are demoralised and disempowered. The Parliamentary Inquiry into the teaching profession typifies this thrust from teachers into the public sphere, supported by the rise in status of Eddie Woo and the more recent emergence of Gabbie Stroud as our spokespeople. Stroud’s genius is the way that she has been able to put into words an idea that is understandable to politicians, shows strong fee...

#edureading - Introduction for the new or interested participants Rather than type out the same instructions multiple times. Read here for the summary of what #edureading is and how you can get involved.  If you are interested in participating with us, the first step is to create a short video introducing yourself to the group, by following this link here:  https://flipgrid.com/35c76cfb . It is worth looking over the existing participants to get a feel for the group that you are interested in engaging with.  After that, you should begin engaging with the questions for the article or book that you are interested in discussing. There will sometimes be a video produced by me to give you an overview of the article, how long it should take, an overview of the questions and so forth. All relevant things are available here:  https://sites.google.com/view/educational-reading-group/home The format of our discussion is an 'Asynchronous' (i.e. not at the sa...