Cogs in a machine: the language of teacher professional standards
Last week I met with seven first year out teachers to talk together about their experiences.
They described many things:
the isolation they experienced,
the tiredness,
the breakthroughs,
their battles to keep hold of ideals in the face of bureaucratic pressures,
the students who challenged and sustained them,
their love of their disciplines,
the restorative pleasure they got from meeting together like this.
One of them – a beginning teacher already making a mark in her school for her disciplinary passion and fierce commitment to both standards and students – talked about how oppressive she found the bureaucratically-imposed teacher standards, which required her to tick boxes which paid no regard to the actual teaching she was doing with real students. She despaired, she told us, when she saw colleagues attending to the box-ticking at the expense of their classes.
Documents like the teacher standards
… represent teachers as cogs in the bureaucratic machine, who need to be told what to do, what to know and how to be a ‘good’ teacher, with little acknowledgement of the complex subjective and objective influences on teachers’ work. [10]
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Ryan, M. and T. Bourke (2012). "The teacher as reflexive professional: making visible the excluded discourse in teacher standards." Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI:10.1080/01596306.2012.717193.