Executive Summary
Deborah Eyre, Founder and Chair at High Performance Learning, talks about how aligned autonomy is the way to increase teacher satisfaction and performance.
From mandating to trusting
If you ask a teacher what they want most they routinely cite more freedom to teach in a way they believe plays to their professional strengths and gets the best out of their students. If you ask a policy maker or headteacher they are more inclined to want teaching done ‘their way’ and so they set rules about what they want to see. This disconnect inevitably leads to dissatisfaction across the profession and problems with teacher satisfaction and retention.
Given that most teaching is judged acceptable or above, this obsession with mandating, observing and judging teachers is unhelpful and counterproductive. Which is why the best schools have abandoned tools such as classroom observation and measuring teacher performance and instead look at how to develop teacher capability using approaches like Performance Coaching and Professional Learning Communities. This assumes teaching is mostly ‘good’ but could do even better, rather than ‘prove to me that you are good, and sends the positive message that trust is implicit
If you want great teaching. Unleash your teachers.
"You can mandate adequacy, but you cannot mandate greatness; it has to be unleashed."
Klien.J, 2007 1
Why teacher autonomy is key to high performance teachers
Teachers are highly skilled, knowledgeable and independent of mind but can sometimes feel insecure and need reassurance – which is why mandating can never really work. In reality, all teaching is enhanced through daily practice in the classroom. It’s hard to capture this ‘developing tacit knowledge’ in a checklist, flow chart or even for a teacher to describe it, but it is going on all the time and practice is constantly being refined.
The autonomy to develop tacit knowledge makes teaching more enjoyable but if you are in any doubt about why teachers need autonomy then take a look at the literature on what drives professionals2, it’s quite revealing but resonates strongly with the teaching profession.
All schools want their students to perform highly, and you only get that if you have high performing teachers and leaders. So, if you want your school to excel, trust your teachers.
Aligned, not unleashed, autonomy
Of course, this idea of unleashing teachers is a great one from the teacher point of view but from the leadership perspective it creates some risk. What happens when they don’t do it well? What if performance drops? How can we manage the risk?
The best way to reduce risk is through working to secure aligned autonomy teachers free to teach the way they wish but working towards outcomes which have been agreed across the school. And not just academic outcomes, they may be personal, social and cultural outcomes. A robust and well considered teaching and learning framework helps create this. It provides a universally agreed structure but also enables flexibility. That way individuals are free to be creative but within an agreed set of parameters. The best scenario for both sides. For example, The High Performance Learning Framework helps the school set out what it is aiming for, but allows individuals and subject of phase teams to create their own pathways to success.
Alongside this clarity of intention, alignment benefits from a well-functioning professional habitat in which this professional knowledge creation is actively supported. A habitat where teachers are encouraged to reflect on and talk about their practice, a richly developed feedback culture where teachers collaborate, comment freely on each other’s work and seek help and guidance. This is the foundation of continuous improvement. Facilitating structures such as professional learning communities and peer to peer coaching serve to support this and will inevitably lead to better alignment and continuously improving practice in a manner that far exceeds classroom observation.
High performing schools have high performing teachers and that comes through a culture of aligned autonomy.
In the end managing teachers is just like judo, it’s better to use the strength of the professionals rather than fighting their strength. Teachers find it satisfying to do a job that is expert and responsible. Helping them to do it better by trusting them to do their best is the way top schools get to be world class.
1 McKinsey and Company (2007). How the world’s best-performing school systems come out on top. London: McKinsey and Company.
2 De Bruijn, H. (2011) Managing Professionals. London: Routledge
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