When it comes to developing your teaching practice, what you do matters somewhat less than what everyone else does. Such is the interdependence of teachers in a school.
Why does this matter? It matters because many of our attempts to help teachers improve ignores this interdependence and assumes that the impact of a teacher’s pedagogy is predominantly due to their skill as a teacher.
To illustrate, imagine a teacher who has decided to introduce mini-whiteboards into her lessons. She expects this innovation to increase the attention students pay to the questions she wants them to think about and hopes that it will give her a better sense of whether students understand what has been taught.
Now, if this teacher is the only person using mini-whiteboards in her school, she will have to work hard at building good habits in their use by students. However, she will get to choose what these routines should look like. The students in her classes will find the use of mini-whiteboards novel, at least to begin with. This novelty could increase her credibility with students, or have the converse effect if their introduction is not managed well. Even as the lone innovator, the impact of the teacher’s actions are affected by the behaviour of other teachers in the school, even though their practice may not have changed.
Next, imagine that the introduction of mini-whiteboards is a whole school innovation. If introduced well, the good habits required to use mini-whiteboards should be established more quickly and assuredly. Perhaps some practical barriers are also overcome as students are issued with their own whiteboards rather than the teacher having to hand her own class set out. So far, so good for our teacher, although she has lost some agency and say in how she develops her practice, and loses her innovative edge over her peers.
But things start to get tricky for our teacher. Some students regularly forget their whiteboards and she finds that the lesson start is delayed as she works out who doesn’t have them and lends some of her own class set out (which don’t always get returned). She then notices bad habits creeping in. Her expectation is that students ‘hover’ the board until asked to ‘show me’. However, every lesson she has to reset these expectations with students. She speaks to some of them about this: they tell her that she is the only one who makes them do this.
After about three weeks, students begin to look fed up when asked to get their whiteboards ready. A few have to be reminded that they must write something on the board and cannot opt out. The teacher decides to scale back the use of mini-whiteboards. When a senior colleague visits her classroom, they feed back on the lack of whole class participation and ask that she works on this.
I have chosen to illustrate the point with an example whereby the introduction of the pedagogical approach appears not to have been well managed. But the interdependence would apply equally if everything went as planned. An individual’s practice may be supercharged by a slick, consistent and sustained development across the school.
Whatever an individual teacher does, the effect will be contaminated by other teachers’ practice. Contamination is a factor we should be explicitly considering when working with teachers to develop their practice. Their efforts must be adaptive not just to the students they teach but to the emergent behaviour of every other teacher. The interdependencies are largely invisible and the feedback loops are multiple, which means it isn’t possible to predict how this is going to go. We can only observe and respond.
I am mindful writing this that these interdependencies are far more significant in secondary school than in primary due to the fact that students at secondary level have many teachers. Developing teaching practice in secondary schools is therefore, at least in this respect, more complex (although their are factors at primary level that increase difficulty, not least the unpredictable nature of younger children).
What do we do with this insight? First, we should caution attributing the effect of a teacher’s actions entirely to the teacher’s skill. Second, we should factor interdependence into our thinking about developing teaching practice across a school. Third, the guidance, training and support should be adaptive to the emerging behaviours of teachers and students with an expectation that agents will adapt their behaviour over time. Pedagogical innovation cannot be implemented; it must be allowed to emerge.
Matthew Evans 