Teachers not superhuman
By Winged Rodent
So according to professor John Hattie’s holy grail of teaching research, teachers are solely responsible for student achievement. It’s got nothing to do with class sizes. Poverty and student health certainly have no impact – it seems it is all up to the person in front of the class.
While many teachers would appreciate Hattie’s faith in their superhuman powers, I feel it is my sad duty to burst his bubble. Most New Zealand teachers are talented, passionate people who put their all into their jobs, but they simply can’t be everywhere at once.
They cannot provide support and feedback to 30 students simultaneously; they cannot follow each child home and make sure they have a good night’s sleep and a decent breakfast. They cannot stop the cycle of poverty while leaping tall buildings in a single bound. They may certainly want to but, I am afraid, they are only human.
Every teacher wants the best for their students and none would argue with the importance of quality interaction and feedback, but Hattie needs to take a reality check if he can’t recognise the obstacles teachers face to achieve this.
When teachers are seeing classes of up to 30 students at a time that can mount up to 100 plus students a day going through their classrooms. Even the most motivated and talented teacher in the world would be unable to provide each student with the time and attention they deserve.
Hattie’s assertions also ignore the wider social context of students’ lives. By refusing to properly consider issues such as poverty as a major cause for student underachievement, he is asking teachers to take the responsibility – and therefore the blame – for its impact. Over-emphasising the power of quality teaching essentially turns teachers into scapegoats for wider problems.
And there certainly are wider problems. According to research released by the Child Poverty Action Group last April, New Zealand’s child poverty rate is among the worst in the OECD and our children have higher rates of preventable illness and deaths from injuries than children in almost any other OECD country. This is what our teachers have to contend with before they even set foot in the classroom.
All of which makes Hattie’s support for performance pay laughable. How do you measure it? If you look at it through student performance then does this mean the teacher of an affluent school whose students are likely to do well anyway will be paid less than a teacher in a poorer area who has to put serious effort into helping their students learn? One may be working much harder than the other, but that is not what the results will show.
Inequality in wages will also breed a culture that can only have a negative impact on staff and students. I would be very interested to see what Hattie has to say to the parents of students being taught by teachers who are being paid less and feel resentful about it.
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To say as Hattie does that the quality of interaction is critical to student learning is obvious to the point of banality. Where he crosses the line into rank stupidity is when he starts saying that it’s THE critical factor and that everything else should be treated as subservient to that – even going so far as to say teachers’ pay should somehow be connected to that factor. At least in respect of the latter, and in a rare moment of self-awareness, he concedes that it would be extremely difficult to do. (Read: “impossible”.) In other words, millions of dollars of taxpayer money gifted to John Hattie Inc. for the foreseeable future so he can develop a bureaucratic behemoth that pretends to measure classroom interactions with a an appearance of objectivity to facilitate the link to pay. It seems as if Hattie is bent on becoming the Frederic Taylor of education – and I don’t mean that in a nice way. Taylor was an engineer with a cold and clinical personality that today would surely be diagnosed as autistic. Consistent with that, he had an obsession with measurement. He developed a set of principles known as “scientific management” famously put into practice by Henry Ford in his car factories. The process involves splitting tasks into their smallest possible elements, determining the most “efficient” way of doing them and then standardising that approach throughout the workplace. Those highly inconvenient human traits such as individuality, originality and agency must be eliminated in order to guarantee the purity of the finished product. This approach may be all well and good when it comes to manufacturing industrial products (if we can set aside, for the moment, the fact that it is soul-destroying for workers and actually discourages commitment and engagement)but it is surely ironic in the extreme to be to be advocating it in education – moreover in respect of the most idiosyncratic of educational activities – communication. I doubt that even Frederick Taylor himself would have gone so far.
I disagree vehemently, Bronwyn. Teachers should be subject to performance management measures and performance-related pay just like a range of other professions. Your characterisation of Hattie’s research is more akin to caricature. Measuring the impact of the teacher is relatively straightforward. You measure the change in learning outcomes with the same cohort of students over an academic year. Reward outstanding and creative teachers and have mechanisms to ensure those not performing get support to make improvements to their praxis. Hattie’s meta-research needs informed debate not stupendously simplistic knee-jerk reactions. Where for example, does Hattie advocate Taylorism, except in your imagination?
Of course Hattie doesn’t advocate Taylorism – he is probably unaware that his research sits directly in that unlovely philosophy. I was once at a seminar where to the amazement of everyone present Hattie presented “data” purporting to measure passion in the classroom. Niue may believe otherwise but no one in that audience was convinced that there could be a reliable way of measuring passion. I doubt you could even get common agreement on a definition of passion far less measure it credibly. And anyway passion isn’t automatically a positive characteristic – at one extreme, it can be obsession.
As to Niue’s proposal about how performance could be measured, I see s/he knows nothing about research but it doesn’t stop him/her making daft suggestions! The problem with such a delightfully simple (simplistic?) idea is that you couldn’t guarantee that both classes were identical to start with so any results would be completely dodgy. It’s not like medicine where you screen the samples to avoid confounding the measurements PLUS have a control group. Also you can’t control external influences – these are real people after all, not there to provide fodder for experimentation by mad scientists! We know that kids’ achievement is affected by an enormous range of factors outside the classroom (and so does Hattie but there’s no fame and money in talking about that) IQ, homework, level of family support, drug use, divorce, death in the family and so on. There is no mathematical formula that could equalise the classes in your experiment to give a credible result. GIGO