For teachers, no news is good news (The Age)

 

For teachers, no news is good news

Steven Kolber

As a teacher and a parent, education news, for me, is rarely good. We, teachers and parents, use news reporting to shape our understanding of the education system. But recent research has found that teachers are demoralised by endless negative news coverage of teachers and teaching, with the 200 parents surveyed also noting the negative tone of education reporting. With many teachers noting news avoidance as a strategy to counter this demoralisation.

 

The early indicators from this year’s NAPLAN results show that Victoria has led the nation across all test areas. Despite our extended lockdowns, we must emphasise that this is a superb result for our teaching workforce in Victoria. These results are timely as the Australian Education Union and the Department of Education are negotiating the new enterprise bargaining agreement for Victorian education workers.

 

Yet when there is positive education news, such as this, it is often quickly overlooked or minimised. Just like Australia’s top 10 ranked performance in Maths and Science on the TIMSS assessment of December last year, which appeared and disappeared quickly with minimal discussion.

 

Whilst these early NAPLAN results offer more questions than they answer, and with academics wary to jump to conclusions, it’s timely to consider the ‘good news’ here.

 

As a teacher who has participated in the 139, and counting, days of remote learning, I can proffer some answers that large-scale testing cannot. Here’s what we can say: Remote teaching and learning is difficult, the pivot has been swift, and for most, the learning curve steep. We can also safely say that this method of teaching will be with us into the future as an unavoidable necessity.

 

Much like the recent erroneous comments of our own Prime Minister, this is actually something we must ‘learn to live with’. We know a narrative of ‘learning loss’ is not helpful for the improvement and rebuilding processes necessary to right the ship of Australian education. These two sets of results suggest that teaching excellence exists within Victoria, and Australia, even under the most trying of circumstances.

 

More expert teachers in schools, including the tutoring program, the ongoing work of the Middle Years Literacy and Numeracy support initiative, professional practice days, and other injections of money have not surprisingly, yielded results. As ever, funding that is used to empower teachers and trusts our professional expertise yields positive results. Schools, that is, teachers and education support workers, have bent over backwards to keep students engaged, reconnect with those who’ve gone missing and continued to provide a world-class education for all students.

 

Here’s what we must say: Fair pay for the best in Australia, Victorian teachers have gone above and beyond at great personal cost, to put on a brave face and keep learning occurring. We must pay this effort in kind. More good news is needed to crowd out the bad, so that teachers can retain confidence in their superb competence.


Originally published: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/time-for-some-good-news-for-teachers-20210903-p58og9.html 

Running Word Count: 51,703

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The fraught issue of teacher representation

Image
                                               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...
Read more
Image
Ranting, raving and complaining Hattie and the tenor of debate within Education I agree with the contention that Australia is within the grip of a movement described as “the Cult of the Guru” with John Hattie as the visible figurehead and Visible Learning as the corporate and commercial arm. It is worth noting that the emergence of Hattie within Australia closely mirrors the rise of Dylan Wiliam’s in the United Kingdom and more recently the USA. Wiliams’ Classroom Experiment and Hattie’s Revolution School TV programs, Wiliam’s Learning Sciences International and Hattie’s Visible Learning bear much in common, though their agendas differ. So, it is clear that this is not merely an Australian trend, but one aspect of the broader ‘Global Education Reform Movement’ (Sahlberg 2006; 2016), a trend whose examples I am sure others more qualified than I could add to. The critiques of Hattie’s methods are numerous and robust (Bergeron & Rivard, 2017; Higgins & Simpson, 2...
Read more

Building a Custom Lightboard: Portable, robust and tall!

Image
Building a Custom Lightboard: Portable, robust and tall! My forthcoming National Education Summit presentation covers what I believe to be the full range of instructional video outputs and methods for creation. The goal of the presentation is to introduce teachers to the range of possibilities that exist and to consider which of these they are prepared, or already equipped to implement in their own settings. To support this, there are suggestions around tools that may need to be purchased and leading experts, besides myself, who would be good contacts in moving towards these methods. The ‘Forms of Instructional Video’ below are my current understanding of the available forms, in what must be considered an ongoing project of discovery: Forms of Instructional Video External Document Camera Phone as Document Camera DSLR and Tripod w/ Directional Mic Face-to-Webcam Camera Purcha...
Read more