Teacher Autonomy vs. Forced Uniformity
October 22, 2007
Random observation about teachers: The very best teachers and the very worst teachers both typically want as much autonomy as possible.The gifted teacher wants permission to go above and beyond prescribed standards and materials. He wants to glean resources from a number of sources, using the best parts of them to meet the individual needs of the different students he serves. He wants the freedom to make lessons longer or shorter, to intertwine subjects, and to adapt lesson plans from day to day based on student learning.
The lousy teacher wants the freedom to teach whatever he wants. He doesn’t want to have to teach much of anything in subjects he doesn’t like. He certainly doesn’t want to be held accountable for generating lesson plans or for meeting certain standards and benchmarks, because all of this just forces him to work harder and do more stuff he doesn’t enjoy.
The trouble is that we haven’t done a good job of allowing the gifted teacher the freedom to fly while still imposing tight-but-necessary restrictions on the lousy teacher. So all teachers get tighter standards imposed on them, causing the lousy teacher to at least be mediocre, but reducing the great teacher to just being fairly good.
Just as teachers are expected to differentiate their instruction based on student talents and needs, maybe it’s time for principals and other administrators to differentiate this autonomy piece with respect to the talents and needs of the individual teachers they serve.
Entry Filed under: Education, Elementary Education, Fifth Grade, First Grade, Fourth Grade, Second Grade, Secondary Education, Students, Teaching, Third Grade, school. .
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1.
Jenny | October 22, 2007 at 8:51 pm
Well said. I think the same is true for schools. We seem to feel a need to have all schools use the same curriculum in the same way at the same time. If we could trust principals and teachers as professionals and allow them to make decisions for their populations our educational system would improve rapidly.
2.
Sailorman | October 24, 2007 at 11:07 am
Good point.
Obviously, you can evaluate the effectiveness of this in a fairly simplistic fasion by looking at whether
(negative effect on the good teachers) * (%age of good teachers)
exceeds
(positive effect on the bad teachers) * (%age of bad teachers)
Anyone want to guess on what they consider those %ages to be?
3.
Jeremy | October 24, 2007 at 5:06 pm
How true. The problem with standardization is multi-faceted. It squelches the creativity of the best teachers, and often drives them from the profession. It enables lazy teachers to rely on the system for what they ought to be producing themselves. And it gives those in the middle an incentive to toe the line in order to keep the system, and those who run it, happy.
Centralization of power over desired outcomes is a slippery slope for centralization of control over means. Read Friedrich Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’ — although it’s an economic study, I believe it’s completely applicable to this issue.
But policymakers — since policy, by nature, implies uniformity — will only worsen the problem over time by actively trying to ’solve’ the problem of student achievement (whatever that is — see my blog for a recent post on the topic). That is, so long as policymakers work to centralize power at the highest levels.
That’s my bit.
jdg