Thinking about teachers and learners....

We are facing another poorly thought through idea about how to improve the teaching and learning in our schools  - the suggestion is to reward our best teachers with more pay. Great.....that is just like giving the best  kids in the school a big shiny badge that says 'prefect' so all the other kids can work out very easily who they have to thump when they are waiting in line at the canteen.

Improving the outcomes of students in our government schools is a really tricky business for all school leaders.
The idea of paying our best teachers more money will create a two tiered, us and them pay system.
Which I believe will be detrimental to the collegiate and supportive educational systems we are trying to achieve within our schools.


Who are the best teachers in our schools? How will they be identified? Are they teachers who work well with the disengaged and disenfranchised youths who are now enrolled compulsorily into our systems until they reach 17? Or are they the teachers whose examinations results are consistently high? Are they teachers whose students rank in the top achievers of the state and are selected into the new scholarship schools for the gifted and talented? Are they the teachers who build important safe learning environments for our student who have been drug addicted, abused and neglected? Are they teachers who work in remote and hard to staff schools year after year without seeing much change or improvement amongst their students who are often indigenous, or who work in low social economic communities, with newly arrived, traumatised refugees who may speak two or three languages, none of which are standard Australian English?


Answers to these questions should help to establish what school's really value - and help to decide who are Our high quality teachers.

The proposal to pay excellent teachers more money also suggests that there will be a group of more lowly paid, middling to poor teachers - this group may become more economically  viable for some Principals to employ, particularly in some regions where the financial constraints on a schools resources are such that teachers who are middling to poor quality will be a better use of already stretched resources. These regions can have more of those kind of teachers for less or about the same amount of money as having just one or two top quality teachers ...  .... tempting if you are, in a remote area, have difficult to manage students or are in need of a new roof or classroom instead of a quality teacher. 


I see this as segregating a profession - the middling to poor teachers perhaps can have the middling to poor students? Or they can teach students who are not destined for university programmes? Or have the students who are not as intelligent as .....hmmm all sounding a bit uncomfortable now...!  


Will the two tiered pay system really have an effect on providing quality teaching?



Shira Leibowitz recently commented on an article that appeared in the 'connected principal' website. I found her comment really interesting , she asked us to consider a brief reflective activity - originally proposed in a book by Palmer, they are questions about who we consider to be teachers who made a difference to us through our educational experience.

(Connected Principals ) 
 Have a go at doing this activity now

1. Remember a teacher who made a difference in your education / life.
2. Consider what it was about that teacher that made the difference for you.
3. Now consider what it was about yourself that made it possible for this teacher to make a difference.


I liked the idea that defining what made the teachers able to make a difference to us was in fact something held within us, the learner, not external to us, as in within the teacher!


So by rewarding teachers externally (with more pay- if you are a good one) it is really only rewarding a person for something that they are only partially involved in creating - the learner is really responsible for creating the 'space' inside themselves to learn ....

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