On the defensive

When I trained as a Further Education teacher in the early 1980's you were strongly encouraged to go into the classroom with a lesson plan, one that had a bit of variety. Going in without having much idea what you were going to do really wasn't a good idea and variety was needed to stop students getting too bored. It was reckoned that a typical attention span was about 10 to 15 minutes and so an hour long lesson should contain at least 3 or 4 different phases. So far so sensible.

At around the same time the then Secretary of State for education, Kenneth Baker, began to go in for a bit of traditional teacher bashing. This reflected the establishment's view of teaching as a profession that you only entered if you really weren't good enough for anything else as well as providing convenient scapegoats for wider policy failures.

Of course, those of us in the profession knew that some teachers were really good, others were good enough and some were a bit crap. Those who were having real trouble didn't need telling they just needed an honourable way to get out. This was not, however, what they were likely to get. 

I'm sure it would do most graduates good to teach for a while and early enthusiasm would carry a lot of them through the first 4 or 5 years. But from then on, the pressure to be upfront and available, to keep your temper while those around are losing theirs', to give your attention to students at the same time as responding the demands of management, can all get a bit too much. This doesn't mean that there aren't marvelous people who are able to carry on indefinitely but I have little doubt that they are a minority and that the rest struggle on as best they can.

The response to the "poor teacher" problem was to introduce more and more bureaucracy. It wasn't enough for just probationers to have neatly written lesson plans, these had to maintained in minute by minute detail for the rest of your career. Gone was the trust that allowed a head teacher or college principle to make an appointment and then let you get on with it. The decision had to be continuously validated by a stream of documentary evidence. Gone was the spontaneity that made the occasional great lesson; the one where a student comment or query is picked up and developed there and then without worrying about deviation from the plan. 

Whereas previously the task had been to do the job as well as you could, it now became one of demonstrating that you weren't doing it as badly as you might. The emphasis shifted from the positive to the defensive. Some teachers liked this but many others didn't. They felt that their autonomy, and hence their professionalism, had been undermined and that things about the job they liked, the contact with students and the sparks of understanding that they generated, were no longer as important as covering your back. 

Its probably no surprise that I no longer teach full time. I still get called back occasionally, but that's because they know I can pick things up at a moments notice and apparently still make them sort of interesting; though I doubt I'd be so interesting if I was there all the time. 

Nowadays, I try to get things done in the public realm and have a fair amount of contact with local authorities. This doesn't mean that I've escaped defensive management. Often, instead of making a decision, which might turn out to be wrong, they either commission consultants to produce a report; so the outcome becomes a wad of paper on file rather than an actual something on the ground, or they adopt a decision making procedure. 

To give an example, I was part of a group who helped draw up our Borough's Cycle Strategy. The authority had decided to give scores to all the possible schemes based on several different criteria each given different weightings. These were presented to us as scores out of 100 "to two decimal places". At the mention of two decimal places the numerate people in the room began to giggle, to the evident mystification of the official who'd thought we'd be impressed. But, even though none of us felt that the scheme at the top of the list was the most important, without getting involved in the minutiae of the criteria and their weightings, there was nothing we could do about it. The decision making procedure had spoken and, because they'd followed the procedure, no blame could be attached to the outcome. Yet another victory for the defence.