Why is this an issue? It puts the emphasis on the purported deficiencies of individual teachers rather than on collective capacity to improve teaching.
It detracts from system quality — the systemic problems within our education system. “Teacher quality” is a way for politicians to place the blame elsewhere when they should be committing to addressing the root cause of these problems: inadequate and inequitable funding, excessive teacher workload, unreasonable administrative loads or teachers being required to work out of their field of expertise.
Stories about teachers were disproportionately negative.
The second key thing I found is media reporting on teachers consistently talks about their work as simple and commonsense, as though all decisions made by teachers are between two options: a right one and a wrong one.
The phrase “teachers should” appears about 2300 times in my database. Examples include, “teachers should be paid according to how their students succeed”, “teachers should not adopt a cookie-cutter approach to learning”, “teachers should arrive in classes prepared” and “teachers should not be spending time organising sausage sizzles”.
Research conducted in the 1990s, and still widely referred to by scholars, found teachers make roughly 1500 decisions in the course of every school day.
Recent research, including some I’m doing with colleagues, suggests teachers’ work has greatly intensified and accelerated over the past 30 years. So it’s likely that 1500 decisions per school day is now a very conservative estimate.
These decisions include everything from “which texts will we focus on in English next term?” to “should I ditch what I’d planned for this lesson so we can keep having this conversation because the students are absorbed by it?”
It also includes social decisions, such as “do I intervene and potentially escalate what’s going on at the back of the classroom or just keep a close eye on it?”
Every single one of those decisions is complex. But in media coverage, claims of what “all teachers” or “every teacher” can, should or could do come thick and fast.
Teaching is relentlessly difficult, and while not everyone needs to understand that, we do need to pay some respect to the 300,000 or so Australians who navigate the profession every day. Just because the complexity may not have been evident to us in our 13 years as school students doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Finally, I found stories about teachers were disproportionately negative in their representations. I did find “good news” stories in my research but they were outnumbered by articles that focused on how teachers, collectively and individually, did not measure up.
This included the linking of “crises” to “poor quality” teachers. Take, for example, former education minister Christopher Pyne’s comment that “the No.1 issue, in terms of the outcomes for students, is teacher quality. In fact [the OECD] said eight out of 10 reasons why a student does well in Australia or badly is the classroom to which they are allocated. In other words, the teacher to whom they are allocated.”
In other words, “teacher-bashing” is the norm when it comes to stories about teachers in the Australian news media.
As we consider what to do to improve teacher numbers in Australia, we need to think about the way we talk about teaching and teachers in the media.
If all people hear is that teachers are to “blame” for poor standards and they should be finding their demanding, complex jobs easy, this is hardly likely to encourage people into the profession. Nor does it give those already there the support and respect they need to stay.
Loading
Nicole Mockler is associate professor of education, University of Sydney. This article first appeared on The Conversation.
Fascinating answers to perplexing questions delivered to your inbox every week. Sign up to get our new Explainer newsletter here.