In our technological age it is universally believed that there is a technique to solve every problem. It’s just a question of finding the right technique and applying it. The technique to improve education seems to be a rigorous regime of performance management. This regime is having the (presumably unintended) consequence of driving many dedicated teachers out of education.
These days, in every walk of life, we are all expected to
bow down before the altar of performance. Every day (in every way) we all have
to get better and better. If we don’t keep up we’ll be run down by the mass of
people behind us. Everybody’s running but are we getting anywhere?
In this performance environment teachers are constantly
monitored, observed, assessed and judged in order to improve the quality of
teaching. But what exactly are we measuring and do we really know it’s an
indicator of good teaching?
Let’s take an example. At an academy run school (where
students are processed like threads on a carpet loom) there were two teachers:
one was consistently judged to be ‘inadequate’ in lesson observations while the
other teacher was consistently judged to be ‘excellent’. The ‘inadequate’ teacher
got demoralised and pressured into changing the way they taught, the
‘excellent’ teacher felt good and was encouraged to carry on in similar
fashion. Based on this picture we would probably want our kids to be taught by
the ‘excellent’ teacher and not the ‘inadequate’ one. But we’d be wrong.
Both teachers had the same set of students so any difference
in performance between them is not down to groups with widely different
abilities. And yet, in terms of teaching outcomes as measured by exam results,
the ‘inadequate’ teacher got among the best results in the school and the ‘excellent’
teacher got among the worst results. Now who do you want teaching your child?
Clearly there is something wrong with how teacher
performance is being measured. And what I think is wrong here is that when
teachers are assessed, through lesson observations, they are measured in terms
of their adherence to a very formulaic model of the ‘ideal’ lesson. Therefore,
teachers of little imagination and bureaucratic tendencies score highly,
whereas truly inspiring teachers, who don’t stick to a formulaic pattern in
their teaching, score badly.
Probably, every inspiring teacher anyone ever had (including
the people who invented the measurement system) would score ‘inadequate’ under
the current performance regime. If I’m right about this then the more strictly
the performance regime is enforced the more quality of teaching and outcomes
will decline rather than improve. We have an education system with people
busily running around enforcing something that will have the unintended
consequence of making learning boring, pedestrian and ineffective.
Bruno Latour, the French philosopher of science, coined the
term immutable mobiles to refer to
the way science employs summaries of information, abstracted from the messy
reality of the real world, in order to be able to share and distribute
information. It is through the employment of immutable mobiles that science is
able to persuade and have power over the objects it studies. It’s a useful concept
to have in mind when thinking about how teaching is monitored and assessed.
In his sociological studies of laboratory practice Latour
noticed that ‘anything and everything was transformed into inscriptions’. That
is, it was noted, written down, compiled into data, summary statistics, charts
etc. An immutable mobile is this two dimensional summary of data, often in the
form of charts, graphs or tables which is easily transported, hence mobile, and
immutable in that it does not change when it is transported.
For instance a map is portable, whereas what it represents
is not, and the statistical results of tests on laboratory animals are mobile
whereas the laboratory and its contents are much harder to move. What is represented
in the map and the graph stays the same when it is moved from one location to
another.
These immutable mobiles are the things that scientists spend
most of their time thinking about, and they are used to persuade people to
subscribe to the conclusions the scientists draw. Ironically, big shifts in
scientific thinking are not made through observation of the real world, but through manipulation of the abstractions derived from
it, in the form of immutable mobiles. As Latour says, ‘why is it is so
important for Brahe, Boyle, Pasteur or Guillemin to work on two-dimensional
inscriptions instead of the sky, the air, health, or the brain?’
Immutable mobiles are essentially abstractions from reality
and enable scientists to convince people, without the need to go to the
original sources. And these immutable mobiles give people power over the things
represented in them and actually come to replace the things themselves. As
Latour says, ‘The objects are discarded or often absent from laboratories.
Bleeding and screaming rats are quickly dispatched. What is extracted from them
is a tiny set of figures.’
Another feature of immutable mobiles is that they form cascades whereby more and more data are
combined into ever simplified aggregated figures that are used to persuade.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Education too has its immutable mobiles and cascades in the
form of teaching assessments, Ofsted reports, and league tables. And of course
there’s not a bleeding rat in sight though they must be there somewhere.
But the problem with all of this is that it is an
abstraction. It is not reality. It is not a true reflection of the teaching
situation in the classroom. So, when the ‘ideal lesson’ is put into a formula
and teachers are more or less forced to use it, this is potentially very
damaging, because the formula is based on an abstraction (an immutable mobile)
that does not accurately reflect the real world situation. The more zealously
these simplistic assessment methods are employed the more harm they will do.
Teaching is essentially a relational activity. And it is
this, the essence of good teaching, that is missing from the immutable mobiles.
In the hands of zealous educational bureaucrats they are causing unintended
consequences that are damaging our education system and driving talented
teachers out of the profession.
Colin Pink
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