Anything goes

In The Earned Autonomy Trap, I made the case for purging the phrase earned autonomy from our professional lexicon. My core argument was that autonomy is undesirable in a knowledge-building profession as it equates to isolation, and that neither teachers nor the system get better when the knowledge-builders are isolated.

Instead, I argued, greater expertise should lead to more connection to others, not less, and more responsibility for making the whole system better.

What I did not address was how we can break out of this trap. Arguing against autonomy is difficult as it is perceived as disempowering to teachers. Autonomy is highly valued and for many is core to their concept of being a professional. Furthermore, teachers have come to regard the removal of autonomy as inviting greater scrutiny (letting the vampire through the door). The framing of autonomy as a right, a protection, and a privilege earnt through time-served is problematic.

The urge to align

I have had the opportunity to talk to and hear from leaders of school trusts and those seeking to influence the development of the school trust system recently, both at a CST conference and through visiting multi-academy trusts. If I made a word cloud of what is being talked about, the term ‘alignment’ would be written large at the centre. Alignment is the talk of the town. But what do people mean by it?

For some, alignment in a trust is about allegiance to a set of principles and values which then underpin how schools are run. For others, the desire to align goes further, to bring into line school practices such as behaviour management and curriculum development. In some instances, this alignment reaches right into the classroom and seeks to set out the ‘preferred’ teaching techniques or by scripting teaching. In all cases, alignment is seen as a good thing by those seeking to improve schools through a trust system. However, strong views are held about the forms of alignment that can be observed across the system. My conclusion is that when we talk of alignment we aren’t all talking about the same thing.

A further problem with alignment is that it is cast in opposition to diversity, localism, and autonomy, all things that are fiercely guarded by those on the front line. The concern I hear most often by school leaders in local authority schools and single academy trusts is that they do not want to lose their school’s unique identity or to be required to prioritise alignment to a trust vision, values, principles, or practices, over meeting the needs of their community. The concern I hear most often with teachers in these schools is that they will lose the freedom to decide what and how to teach. Placing alignment at one end of a spectrum and diversity, localism, and autonomy at the other presents a dichotomous choice within which the only solution is compromise somewhere in the middle ground (or a power struggle in which one side wins and the other loses). Trade-offs become inevitable whereby the greater good is achieved at the expense of local freedoms. My conclusion is that the framing of this debate is not helpful.

Reframing

It may be helpful to reflect on the human tendency for loss aversion. Loss aversion is the idea that losses loom larger than gains, made famous by Kahneman and Tversky in their work on prospect theory. For example, imagine you are offered a gamble on the toss of a coin whereby you win £120 if it lands on heads, or lose £100 if it lands on tails. Rationally, this is a good gamble, but most people refuse to take it. However, when offered to write off a debt of £120 if the coin lands on heads, but add a further £100 to the debt if it lands on tails, most people choose to gamble. There is no difference between these two gambles other than the framing and the tendency to value the avoidance of loss over the benefit of a gain.

Loss metaphors evoke strong reactions. When greater alignment is framed as a loss of autonomy, it is no wonder that teachers and school leaders are reticent. For this reason, it may be unhelpful to present alignment and autonomy as a trade-off. Instead, perhaps we should frame alignment as a membership of a club which brings benefits: better behaviour, more manageable workload, higher student outcomes, access to a professional community, opportunities for advancing our practice.

In fact, those who want to make the case for the benefits of alignment should drop the word autonomy altogether. That is not to say we should ignore the feeling of loss that people refer to when they talk of losing autonomy. What people fear is the loss of control and this concept is wrapped up in the word autonomy. But there are other words that encapsulate this meaning in a more constructive way.

Agency

To be an agent is to influence intentionally one’s functioning and life circumstances. In this view, personal influence is part of the causal structure. People are self-organizing, proactive, self-regulating, and self-reflecting. They are not simply onlookers of their behavior. They are contributors to their life circumstances, not just products of them. (Bandura, 2006)

Agency is the sense of control you feel over your life and your ability to influence and handle situations. Whereas autonomy suggests being ‘left alone’ to ‘do as one pleases’, agency suggests that individuals have influence over their environment. Rather than build up walls of protection from the outside world, those with agency feel able to engage in the social world and make a positive contribution to it.

Agency can not only survive within an aligned system, it is arguably central to its health. Alignment without agency is automatons following instructions. What a healthy aligned system requires is that the agents within it help the system to dynamically evolve. Rather than losing control through system alignment, agents must feel that they are able to handle the situations they face better and also contribute to the system-knowledge that helps others to do the same. Alignment will undoubtedly reduce choice at one level, but by taking less effective choices off the menu, agents within an effectively aligned system should be free to direct their intellectual energies to higher level pursuits.

This is all quite abstract and complex ideas are hard to sell. So let’s try a thought experiment.

A la carte

Imagine you have a night out at a local restaurant. After a short while, the waiter comes to your table and asks what you would like to order. “Could I see the menu please?”, you ask. The waiter replies that there is no menu, you can choose whatever you please.

How do you feel about this? On the one hand, you can choose whatever takes your fancy. On the other hand, where do you start?

Menus are not merely for the convenience of the restaurant. Customers expect for a menu to be curated by chefs who have carefully considered how to combine the finest ingredients to satisfy your palate. This curation is part of what you are paying for. Menus reduce our choice but we retain agency to decide. Whilst freedom is restricted in the sense that we can’t have whatever we want, in another sense we are freed (if the restaurant has done its job well) from being served a dish that just isn’t any good. It is the difference between what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called negative liberty (the ability to do whatever one wants) and positive liberty (the ability to fulfil one’s own purposes).

The parallels to teaching are clear. If one’s goal is to be the best teacher you can be (and why wouldn’t it be?) your ability to fulfil this purpose will be enhanced by a curated menu of pedagogies. Rather than the erosion of freedom, our liberty is enhanced.

When I shared this analogy with Peps McCrea, he asked “Why not one choice?”

I think there are three reasons for maintaining a rich menu:

1. We do not know enough in most (if not all) domains related to teaching to identify ‘one best way’.
2. The contextual complexity of the classroom means that local knowledge, situational awareness, and professional judgement will always be required.
3. People are more satisfied with their lot if they have chosen it (as demonstrated in the experiment whereby participants were either offered tea or coffee, or told they could only have coffee. Those who would have chosen coffee anyway in the latter group rated their satisfaction with the coffee lower than those who got to choose).

A menu approach brings benefits to both novices and experts. The novice teacher benefits from the system knowledge which has curated the menu. They can focus on building a repertoire of pedagogical approaches. More expert teachers can focus their energy on developing judgment about how to select and adapt their pedagogy. [Thanks to Sarah Cottinghatt’s ResearchED talk for these first two steps]. The most expert teachers can then be invited to innovate new dishes and curate the menu. This is what Ollie Lovell meant by ‘struggling at the right level’ (whom I quoted in my previous post).

Agency zone

I think the above image captures where I am at with my thinking on agency and alignment. On the left, we have ‘anything goes’, the Wild West where we fail to curate and codify our knowledge. On the right, we cater for the range of expertise in the system through an approach which values agency as a means by which alignment leads to better outcomes.

We need a language of alignment that is framed not in terms of what is lost but rather what there is to be gained. Professional agency speaks of informed choice, knowledge-building, and shared endeavour. It is a win-win social contract where everyone struggles at the appropriate level and positive liberty thrives over a destructive ‘anything goes’ philosophy. Let’s talk of trading up, not trading off.