Educational Leadership: When What is Necessary is Not Sufficient

Dr Paul Brock Memorial Medal Address, 2022
(Published in The Australian Educational Leader, 45(2), Term 3 2023)

This address was given at the NSW Australian Council for Educational Leaders Awards Night, on the 21st of October, 2022, upon acceptance of the Dr Paul Brock Memorial Medal.

I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the unceded land we’re gathered on tonight, the Burramattagal clan of the Dharug people, and pay respect to elders past and present.

I had the good fortune to meet Dr Paul Brock only a couple of times before his death in 2016, but to a secondary English teacher, who graduated in the early 1990s, he was a luminary – a household name. As a school leader in the late 1990s, grappling with the advent of professional teaching standards, his was a rare voice of reason in an often polarised debate.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve revisited a lot of Dr Brock’s work from the last two decades of his life. He was a fierce advocate for the teaching profession, immensely respectful and protective of the complexity of teachers’ work; and deeply critical of much of the way they were represented in the public space, particularly in the mainstream media. I feel like we’d have quite a bit to talk about today.

One of those pieces of work, published in 2011 in The Australian Educational Leader called upon educational leaders to “learn from the paths we have trodden to get to where we are now” (Brock, 2011, p. 9) , and in the spirit of this, I want to take a small detour back to the early 2000s, to think a little about teacher professionalism and advocacy for the profession in the light of where we are in 2022.

In 2000, Paul Brock was commissioned by the Australian College of Education (ACE) (as it was known then), the Australian Curriculum Studies Association (ACSA) and the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) to produce a national discussion paper on Standards of Professional Practice for Accomplished Teaching in Australian Classrooms (Brock, 2000). This was hot on the heels of the 1998 Senate Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession, that produced A Class Act(Commonwealth of Australia, 1998), the report that called for a national approach to professional standards as a means of raising the status of the profession. Of course, the Government of the day agreed with the spirit of the report but delegated the responsibility of acting upon it back to the states and territories on the basis that such things were “the primary responsibility of State and Territory authorities and teacher employers in the States and Territories” (Commonwealth of Australia Senate, 1999, p. 11056). How times have changed! It feels strange now to read of a federal government arguing against its own power in the federal education policy space. But I digress...

The national discussion paper of 2000 is a super interesting read, especially given the territory we’ve traversed over the past 20 years. Reading it this month with that territory in mind, two things really stood out to me. One is the conviction that professional standards, if they were to truly contribute to raising the status of the teaching profession, needed to be created for the profession by the profession, and governed by its members. To quote from the conclusion of the discussion paper,

Authentic professional teaching standards of accomplishment must be true to, and celebrate, the understanding of what is meant by the term 'accomplished teacher' that emerges from the collective wisdom of all educators who have a commitment to education in schools.

Ultimately, the profession ought not merely rely on the actions of any external bodies, government or regulations that might be established to oversee or regulate professional behaviour. The imperative to establish and abide by accomplished teaching standards ought to come from within the profession itself. (Brock, 2000, p. 12)

The aspiration here was for us to become a genuinely self-governing profession, and for the benchmark of accomplished teaching to be steeped in the “lore” and narrative of the profession. Brock (1999) wrote that “teachers have often been pretty good at recognizing who are the accomplished practitioners” (p. 9) and advocated for the development of robust, rigorous processes that would honour the depth and breadth of teachers’ professional knowledge. This was a call for developmental rather than managerial professional standards (Sachs, 2016) as a catalyst for enhanced teacher professionalism, writ large and proud.

The second thing that struck me is the built-in warning that Brock issued in the Discussion Paper. This was a warning essentially about the difference between standards and standardisation, and the need to guard against the potential standardising force inherent in standards. He warned that “the application of standards must not be about reducing teachers to some kind of conformist clones” (Brock, 2002, p. 13), writing (ever the English teacher):

In the language of Gerard Manley Hopkins' lovely little poem, “Pied Beauty,” we should always rejoice in the dappledness of the teaching profession and never seek to reduce its couple-colouredness to a dull grey conformity. Most in the teaching profession have worked with or have known real, individualist “characters”' who were accomplished teachers. We must always celebrate the rich and diverse ways in which identifiable professional teaching standards are individually manifested by effective school teachers in their own individual ways.

Every action undertaken by a teacher constitutes an implicit or explicit manifestation of human values. Put another way, it is through our behaviour that we give expression to our professional values: to our very being.

Teachers teach according to their “being:” who teachers are is absolutely the foundation of how they teach. (Brock, 2000, p. 10)

There is a resonance between this and what Raewyn Connell (2013) would write over a decade later, reflecting on what she called the “neoliberal cascade” in education and its impact on teachers’ work. She wrote:

Education involves encounter between persons, and that encounter involves care... It is care that is the basis of the creativity in teaching, at all levels from Kindergarten to PhD supervision, as the teacher’s practice evolves in response to the learner’s development and needs. (p. 104)

Educational practice as a manifestation of human values. Education as encounter. Who we are as the foundation of how we teach. Care as the basis of creativity in education. These are powerful ideas that speak to the human edge of education.

They starkly remind us that attempts to neatly clip and standardise teachers’ work, to remove the messy humanity from the equation, or to “teacher proof” the classroom, aren’t only undermining of teacher professionalism, but also of education itself.

If the job of the teacher within this encounter is to create the conditions for learning for the young people in their care, the job of the educational leader is to create the conditions for teaching for the teachers within our communities. This is what good advocacy and leadership for the profession looks like.

In one of his later writings, Paul Brock (2013a) pointed out that in education, “what is necessary is not always sufficient” (p. 3). He was referring here particularly to the fixation on literacy and numeracy that drove so much education policy in the first decade of the 21st century, and also to the ongoing cries of “evidence-based practice” and “back to basics.” Necessary but not sufficient. He argued that too often in education policy we turn the baseline into the aspiration, lowering our expectations, of teachers, of students, of the process of education itself.

Part of creating the conditions for teaching lies in recognising that the professional standards that we have may be necessary but they’re not sufficient. Paul Brock’s great friend and fellow Australian education luminary, Garth Boomer, was fond of saying we should never mistake the map for the territory (in Brock, 2013b), and this applies as much to teacher professionalism as to anything else. The map we have, the professional standards we ended up with, may be our current map but the territory is much greater. The stakes have perhaps never been higher because the expectations have never been lower. The way teachers are discussed in political and media discourse send a message to the public that low expectations are all we can have of our teaching profession. We saw a “blip” of appreciation in 2020 when the world got a glimpse of teachers’ work through the window of Zoom, but really it was just a “blip.”

The task of educational leadership has always been at least partly about advocacy, and I would say that teachers have perhaps never needed advocates, both within and beyond their school communities more than they do today. The legacy of Paul Brock reminds us that there is potential to hold both a commitment to high standards and accountability on the one hand and a rich appreciation of the complexity and humanity of teachers’ work on the other. It’s perhaps not an easy path but one that the teaching profession and the children of today and tomorrow need us to walk.

Thank you.

References
Brock, P. (2000). Standards of professional practice for accomplished teaching in Australian classrooms. ACSA, ACE, AARE.

Brock, P. (2002). Towards establishing and implementing a standards framework in the NSW quality teaching awards process: A personal perspective. Unicorn, 28(1), 10-15.

Brock, P. (2011). Learning from the paths we have trodden to get to where we are now. The Australian Educational Leader, 33(1), 9-13.

Brock, P. (2013a). What is necessary is not always sufficient. The Australian Educational Leader, 35(1), 3.

Brock, P. (2013b). In memory of Garth Boomer: May he not "rust unburnished" but "shine in use." English in Australia, 48(3), 12-20.

Commonwealth of Australia. (1998). A class act: Inquiry into the status of the teaching profession. Canberra, Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee.

Commonwealth of Australia Senate. (1999). Parliamentary debates (Hansard). Canberra, Parliament of Australia.

Connell, R. (2013). The neoliberal cascade and education: An essay on the market agenda and its consequences. Critical Studies in Education, 54(2).

Sachs, J. (2016). Teacher professionalism: Why are we still talking about it? Teachers and Teaching, 22(4), 413-25.