I was fortunate enough to interview Gabbie Stroud, recovering teacher and author of Teacher, recently as part of the IEU’s Book Club.

We did it via TLN and Adobe Connect, as Gabbie is based in Merimbula, and I was in Parramatta. It was a fantastic event - Gabbie is a natural storyteller (something that is readily apparent if you’ve read Teacher) - and she is warm, friendly and passionate when talking to an audience - something that is no mean feat when speaking via an online platform, rather than face to face. I’ve written about Teacher in other places, and I don’t want to cover the ground again - although it is fertile terrain. Instead, I wanted to build on something that Gabbie said in response to one of my questions. I had asked her to identify what she thought were the three most pressing issues facing educators today. Gabbie said there was really only one, and many of the problems stemmed from this particular issue: standardisation.

Gabbie went on to explain that she was concerned that standardisation was related to many of the issues teachers spoke about when they were talking about workload. Gabbie argued that the pressure to develop standardised results has led to the growth in things like high stakes testing, increased workloads requiring planning, preparation and assessment, and the need to record and maintain accreditation through professional development registered hours. Gabbie then vividly described how she had, on occasion, wished that the students could have a pupil free day so that she could catch up on her ‘work’ - a feeling that I, and other participants in the interview understood only too well.

I think that Gabbie makes a really important point here; she speaks mostly about students - children - and the way that this emphasis on accountability and standardisation seems to be turning all students into cardboard cutouts and emotionless automatons. It is a cry against accountability and instead a call to embrace personalisation - but personalisation in a human to human sense, rather than the technologically-loaded way that the term is often used in educational discussions today. It’s also a call to put the trust back in teachers to be able to recognise their students, where they are at, and how best to help them learn what they need to learn - rather than taking that responsibility out of the hands of teachers and placing it in the domains of systems, private companies or governmental bodies.

It’s a compelling argument - putting humanity back into teaching - and I think it goes further than that, too. It’s not only students who are being forced to conform to certain standards, and being held to account if they don’t. Teachers, too, are being forced to adopt levels of standardisation that I think may potentially be harmful to learning, teaching and the profession as a whole. Partly, this is because teachers have lost control of their own profession; too many people are making decisions about what teaching should look like when they have never been involved in the classroom. I’m not saying that external parties don’t have a role to play - of course they do - but it’s the complete absence of teachers’ voices that’s the problem. Too often, people who make decisions that directly affect teachers and schools are unaware of the complexity of a teacher’s role within the classroom. These people often have a simplistic notion of what teachers do - ie they deliver curriculum - and the relationship aspects of teachers’ work is often minimised or entirely overlooked. It’s a variation of the old banking model of education where children are not even willing but almost entirely passive recipients of the knowledge of teachers. It also links to demands to move towards a ’knowledge-rich’ curriculum. 

The role of teaching is complex. In a high school, most teachers are required to develop and maintain meaningful relationships with more than 100 students. In primary schools, teachers might have less students, but they’re expected to know the students in much more detail - and they also have to build and maintain relationships with students’ parents. This is complex and challenging work  that is often overlooked. It can take years to learn to do that. The APSTs do identify this, but I feel this is merely a nod in that direction, rather than any detailed recognition of the centrality of this to teachers’ practice.