Have you been asked to teach like a champion? Have you spent some INSET time discussing classroom routines? Are you and your teaching colleagues encouraged to use consistent language when describing pedagogical processes? Perhaps you’ve even been given a script to follow.
If the answer is yes to any of the above, then you are part of the move towards pedagogy alignment that is sweeping over English schools. Pedagogy alignment has two features:
- Teaching techniques and processes are codified i.e. named and described such that they can be easily adopted and scaled up.
- Teachers across a school or trust are asked to adopt certain pedagogies in a way that aligns aspects of classroom practice.
I have written about alignment previously, here to argue that autonomy (the ‘right’ to resist alignment) is not all it is cracked up to be, and here to suggest an alternative framing of the dichotomous debate around autonomy loss. As a headteacher, I have also asked teachers to do some of the above. As such, I have pinned some of my colours to the mast and am caught up in this movement as much as the next person. I suppose my personal position is that I see some gains to be made (in terms of the quality of education provided to pupils) by leaning into pedagogy alignment to some degree.
However, I am always cautious about the tendency for fads to emerge in education and the risks of getting too swept along. That is not to say that we should rubbish every new thing; part of the art of school leadership is to pick out the signal in the noise, to identify the things that will make a difference and ignore the rest. However, we must also be cautious not to label something as a fad when it might be a sign of a structural shift in the system – a fixture.
I was prompted to think more about this by Daniel Langley’s (@Daniel_Langley1) talk at the ResearchED National Conference (I write the morning after – I may be a bit jaded by the ‘session 7’ in the pub). Daniel is a Doctoral researcher with an interest in what happens when you try to codify and align classroom practice across a school (the title of his talk). This is a great topic for research in my opinion as we simply don’t know enough (or anything really) about the impact of the move to codify and align classroom practice.
I won’t be delving in this post into the rights and wrongs of pedagogy alignment. In essence, the two extremes of views cast this movement either as the ‘McDonaldisation’ of teaching or the silver bullet which will raise standards, close attainment gaps, and turn around failing schools. Of course, it is neither. However, I will leave Daniel to establish whether the benefits outweigh the costs and I look forward to reading his research when it is published.
What I would like to consider is whether pedagogical alignment is a fad or a fixture. Can we bunker down and let it pass, or is this the new reality for English schools?
By framing in this way, I am looking at the school system as a complex system. Complex systems exhibit emergent behaviours – things happen that we didn’t intend or cause deliberately. Over time, the system returns to some kind of equilibrium. This tendency gives us a way of thinking about emergent phenomena, movements, fads, or whatever you want to call them. However, complex systems can also settle into a new state; a permanent or semi-permanent new form. The changes stick! So, which will it be? In twenty years time, will we be looking back on attempts to codify and align pedagogy as another failed experiment, or will we have forgotten that things had ever been different?
In The Next Big Thing in School Improvement, we employed the wave metaphor to describe the educational fads, movements and policy surges that periodically wash up on the educational shore. The metaphor worked in so far as these periodic disturbances build, gain momentum, then eventually break when they encounter the friction of the complex reality of the education system.
In writing about educational waves, we took aim at past movements like the data wave. Waves that have since broken are an easier target than those we are still riding. Firstly, we can see them for what they were, with the benefit of hindsight. Secondly, whilst our past selves may have been caught up in the wave, our present selves have no skin in the game.
Is pedagogy alignment a wave? It certainly has some of the features of one.
Educational waves, like sea waves, build and are propelled by prevailing winds. Pedagogy alignment has been energised firstly by the ‘what works’ movement (i.e. evidence-based education). As Daniel Langley argued in his talk, once you start to identify ‘what works’, the logical next step is to want to scale up effective practices across the system. For this to happen, pedagogies must be codified so that they can be easily replicated.
Secondly, academisation and the formation of multi-academy trusts has ignited interest in the question ‘how do you improve schools at scale?’ Alignment of pedagogy is an attractive solution to this problem. At the same time these systemic changes were happening, there was an increase in innovation across the sector in both England and the US due to the ‘Free school’ and ‘Charter schools’ movements respectively. The most notable innovation is the aforementioned Teach Like a Champion (Lemov), which has been adopted by a significant number of schools on our side of the pond.
Much deeper swells have been building for decades, including the rise of school improvement ideology, increasing levels of accountability, and the belief that schools are a device for social engineering – improving life chances for disadvantaged children by closing gaps in educational outcomes. In combination, these changes in beliefs about what schools are for and what is within their gift have fueled a tendency to reach for Big Things that have the power and reach to transform educational outcomes at scale.
However, what makes this potential wave different to others we have seen – the late-90s personalisation agenda, the data obsession of the early 2000s, the recent flurry of curriculum innovation – is the changes in wider society that are unlikely to go away. Most significant, in my view, is the teacher recruitment and retention crisis which particularly effects secondary schools. What we have seen is a shortage to begin with in certain subjects which has meant that non-specialist teachers have been increasingly deployed to teach ‘out of subject’. This creates the need for increasingly specific and fool-proof curriculum materials to minimise the harm a non-specialist can inflict (which has also contributed to the excitement about things like knowledge-organisers and banks of PowerPoint resources). As the crisis deepens, which it now is, it is not simply that we can’t get teachers with the right subject knowledge, but that we cannot find enough teachers at all! The consequence of this is an increase in lessons being taught by teaching assistants, cover supervisors and unqualified teachers. These teachers do not know the subjects they are teaching but also do not often know how to teach. The answer to this is to carefully structure and script lessons and to equip these ‘teachers’ with a set of off-the-shelf pedagogies. This is all happening at a time when secondary school student numbers are booming and many teachers are leaving the front-line through burnout, early retirement, or being pulled into more lucrative, attractive, and family friendly cross-trust roles. It is a f***ing mess, frankly.
In another great session I was in yesterday, ‘internet personality’ (smiley-wink face) Sam Freedman, ex-government policy advisor and author of the recently published Failed State, predicted that the school system may be heading the same way as the NHS and other failing public services in that it will have to look to immigrant workers to meet the demand for teachers. This is increasingly happening. Now, these immigrant workers may be brilliant, but school systems around the world differ significantly. The English education system is a peculiar beast, not least in what we expect of teachers, particularly when it comes to managing student behaviour. If we do indeed end up with a very different workforce, as looks likely, the current ‘fad’ for codifying and aligning classroom practices may become fundamental to maintaining standards in our schools.
We are seeing some interesting things happening in the system. The man sitting next to me in Daniel Langley’s session had been teaching for five years in a school which had gone ‘full TLAC’. He professed that he didn’t know any other way to teach. One of the respondent’s in Langley’s research strongly stated that they simply wouldn’t teach in a school that didn’t provide centralised lesson plans and materials, lesson scripts, and prescribed codified teaching practices. This is the generation of teachers who are (hopefully) with us for the next thirty years. Perhaps they would prefer not be be involved in curriculum design or to spend their evenings planning lessons. What I see on the ground as a headteacher in a school which is behind the curve (deliberately) is that interview candidates fall broadly into two camps (for teaching and leadership posts) depending on which schools they have spent their career in. There are increasing numbers of candidates whom I simply can’t consider because they lack the mindset and skills to do the job that I need them to do. It is not that they aren’t good practitioners, but that the expectations gap is too great. The job of teaching is significantly different in a full-aligned and codified MAT than it is in my context. Conversely, the career options for teachers and leaders at my school (including myself) are curtailed by this widening gap. I am not making a moral point here, merely observing what is happening and pondering how this is going to play out. I suspect that the entire school system may have to shift to a new norm and that the pressures to align with this new norm will continue to build.
Or I may be wrong. Perhaps the factors which have driven these changes will relent and the system will settle back into the state it was in before. If this is the case, there will be significant legacy effects – or sediment if we extend our wave analogy. If teaching does not become a radically different job as a result of the systemic changes I have described in this post, perhaps it will be turned on its head by AI instead. The future is impossible to predict. What we can do is ride the wave and remember that there are forces we cannot control.
Matthew Evans 