“Have you really got twenty years of experience?” The inspirational speaker asked the room, then paused for dramatic effect.
“Or have you just got one year of experience repeated twenty times?”
He smiled as if he’d said something very profound.
The speaker – hired by a school I worked for more than ten years ago – was saying we should be suspicious of experience because those with decades of it may be as novice as someone with fewer years under their belt.
It is an attractive message to those who haven’t been in their field that long – particularly if they are responsible for leading those who have. It affords a sense of legitimacy – the idea their solutions and ideas might be better than those who’ve put more time in because they made faster progress.
On the most part – with inevitable exceptions – I don’t think this is usually true of teaching.
The front-forward people-facing nature of it means improving fast is necessary for survival, and many of those who don’t get better find it too much of an ordeal to stick with for long. The ever-changing and near infinite variability in teaching means that whether teachers want to or not they are forced to learn – as they experience different needs, different behaviours and different curriculum they must change and adapt.
It is impossible to repeat the same year.
This does not mean all experienced teachers are effective and continue to improve at the same rate – the teacher plateau effect is well known – but in a world of imperfect proxies the experience of a teacher is not a bad one; while I know younger teachers can be competent and talented, when I heard my daughter was to have twenty-year veterans this year I was pleased.
In a landscape in which we struggle to retain experienced teachers, veterans are becoming increasingly rare creatures.
It’s a shame.
With inevitable exceptions this group is likely to have more teaching expertise and knowledge than those who lead them, especially in contexts in which early promotion is common, because promotion usually lessens teaching time.
On the face of it, it would make sense to devolve as many teaching decisions as we can to the experienced teachers who are most likely to know what’s best.
This – as a twenty-year veteran myself – is what I would prefer.
But I know it isn’t so simple.
No teacher operate as a fully autonomous actor and their success or failure is at least partially a product of the systems they operate in. These systems must encompass all those in them and must be compromises because no system can perfectly meet the needs of everyone in it.
Teachers in England are less experienced than in most other developed countries and the more experienced a teacher in England is the less likely they are to work in a disadvantaged area where the stakes are highest.
This makes it logical for school management, improvement systems and CPD to align themselves more to the needs of those with less experience than to those with more.
This may be what we see happening at scale now with standardisation of curriculum, teaching and CPD becoming more directive and allowing teachers a smaller say over what and how they teach.
It could be for the best.
Schools are not and should not be designed with the interests of adults most in mind and if more direction provides better experiences and outcomes for children then making compromises in favour of less experienced teachers might be the right call.
Or it might not be.
Here I worry about what I think of as “The Latter Career Christian Ronaldo Problem.”
This was the period after Ronaldo’s pace waned, but his finishing ability remained the best in the world.
To compensate for his lack of pace and his inability to press, and to capitalise on his intact finishing ability clubs that signed him adjusted their tactics to served his distinct skill set. This impeded the development of other players and made them dependent on Ronaldo’s goals, despite him being the cause of the problem in the first place.
Latter era Christian Ronaldo was the solution to the problems he created.
My concern is by calibrating our school system to the needs of our least experienced teachers we may create and then sustain a system in which direction becomes the solution to the problem it has caused too.
If curriculum is developed centrally then where and how will teachers learn to develop curriculum? If we try and develop teachers through iterative action steps and leave no space for personal reflection and work, then what happens when what they need to work on moves beyond the gift of the directive systems around them?
I fear this might deskill the profession and make strong direction seem more necessary.
But perhaps I am catastrophising and overthinking. Pretty directive systems and CPD probably are the right bet for many schools given the experience level of teachers in English schools, and I’m optimistic the improved way in which we now train teachers through the ECF will lead to greater expertise faster.
But I remain uneasy.
What if this model makes the latter years of teaching less rewarding? What happens to those who in the ECF now when they’ve been teaching ten years and if they become frustrated that what was once a scaffold has become a trap?
A year or so ago someone who trained at the same time I did – twenty years ago – told me their school had been taken over by a new MAT.
Despite a record of strong outcomes and many years of skilled curriculum work they’d been told from the next academic year they would be expected to teach from a standardised deck of PowerPoint slides.
Perhaps this overall was for the best. Perhaps this would lead to better outcomes for more children when all the schools in the MAT was considered.
Perhaps.
Although of course there can be no guarantee.
The only certainties were my friend felt close to despair and was left questioning whether they wanted to stay in teaching at all. “What is the point of being a head of department?”, they asked, “If I can’t decide what we teach?”
Is the departure of my friend and people like them from the profession a price we must pay for a greater good? Must we expect our most knowledgeable and expert practitioners to constrain their practice in the interests of those with less expertise than them?
Perhaps.
If so, it’s a very bitter pill to swallow – how happy are we with becoming better at your job causing more frustration and pain than satisfaction and joy?
How happy are we with a profession in which becoming more experienced really does come to mean doing the same thing every year?
Ben Newmark 