From Surveillance to Formation? A Generative Approach to Teacher ‘Performance and Development’ in Australian Schools

This paper explores the possibilities and limitations of the AITSL Performance and Development Framework (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012b) as a vehicle for authentic teacher professional learning. It suggests that the Framework offers a range of implementation possibilities, from surveillance of teaching practice at one end of the spectrum to ongoing and generative formation of teachers at the other, and argues that at its best, the Framework will be interpreted and implemented as a catalyst for school-developed, inquiry-based professional learning that builds collegial professional practice and supports teachers to develop and take an inquiring stance toward their practice. Recent years have seen a growing policy focus on professional learning on a national level in Australia. The production in 2012 by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) of both the Australian Charter for the Professional Development of Teachers and School Leaders (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012a) and the Australian Teacher Peformance and Development Framework (PDF) (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012b) were part of a broader focus on ‘teacher quality’ by the previous Labor government (Mockler, 2013, 2014) that have had an ongoing impact on federal and state education policy. In NSW, for example, the Great Teaching Inspired Learning Blueprint (NSW Government, 2013) makes explicit use of the PDF alongside the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers in framing an intention regarding annual teacher performance management processes. Similar processes are currently being developed and implemented in other states. This paper considers the Performance and Development Framework as a vehicle for teacher professional learning. It acknowledges both the possibilities and threats to teacher professionalism and learning embedded in the document and seeks to question the possible ways in which the Framework might be implemented for a range of purposes. It suggests that the best and most generative implementation of the PDF might draw on principles of inquirybased professional learning to become a catalyst for collegial professional practice and the development of ‘inquiry as stance’ (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). The paper is presented in three parts. After a brief overview of the Performance and Development Framework and the context within which it has been developed, I explore four possible implementations of the performance and development cycle, building on earlier work around teacher appraisal (Groundwater-Smith & Mockler, 2009). I then return to the framework itself to explore the possible overlap between the performance and development cycle and inquiry-based teacher professional learning, suggesting ways in which schools and school systems might leverage this confluence to use the Framework as a catalyst for new forms of professional learning that has embedded within it the capacity to transform teaching practice. Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 40, 9, September 2015 118 Background Appraisal, ‘teacher evaluation or ‘performance review’ for teachers has a relatively long history, emerging from the ‘neoliberal turn’ in education in the 1970s and 80s (Bartlett, 1996). As Stephen Ball wrote in 1990 of the growth of teacher appraisal in the United Kingdom ove the previous decade: Appraisal has become one of the prime features of the political reconstruction and disciplining of teachers as ethical subjects in the 1980s. It extends the logics of quality control and performance indicators into the pedagogical heart of teaching. It brings the tutelary gaze to bear, making the teacher calculable, describable and comparable. (Ball, 1990, p. 159) The development of professional teaching standards has been a key dimension of the creation of the ‘calculable, describable and comparable’ teacher, often linked to the process of teacher appraisal, along with other mechanisms for achieving increased accountability for teachers. A range of contrasting and sometimes competing purposes and aims of teacher appraisal processes are reflected in the literature, sometimes expressed as continua, including increased accountability and professional development (Bartlett, 1996), collaborative professionalism, quality enhancement and surveillance (Brix, Grainger, & Hill, 2014), development-oriented as opposed to performance management oriented (Gunter, 2001) and the ensuring of ‘teacher effectiveness’ (Campbell, Kyriakides, Muijs, & Robinson, 2003; Jensen, 2011). Furthermore, appraisal processes have often been seen as tools of accountability within regimes of audit and performativity, resonating with Ball’s original assessment above (Ball, 2003; Gerrard & Farrell, 2013; Grundy & Robison, 2004; Gunter, 2001; Larsen, 2010). Collinson et al. (2009) chart what they see as a shift at the end of the 20th century from appraisal as a tool of accountability to more formative approaches to appraisal that aim to support ‘teacher development and instructional improvement’ (p. 6). Gunter (2001) identified from the research literature three broad positions on the purpose of teacher appraisal, underlining that these different approaches are informed by different values and beliefs in relation to teachers’ work and schooling more broadly:  instrumental performance appraisal is about the tasks and behaviours required to enable organisational outcomes to be achieved and measured;  humanist appraisal is developmental through a focus on teacher targets and by enabling teacher participation in the design and operation of the process;  critical appraisal focuses on teaching and learning as the means through which teachers and pupils can recognise and overcome social injustices. (p. 245) These three approaches relate not only to the purposes of teacher appraisal, but hold some clues as to where the control of the process lies: how far teachers themselves have agency to shape and guide it. Some years ago, Susan Groundwater-Smith and I developed a heuristic for thinking about teacher appraisal or review, developed around two axes, one representing the agency continuum and the other a continuum of purpose. The heuristic is adapted below as Figure 1. Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 40, 9, September 2015 119 Figure 1: A heuristic for considering teacher appraisal (adapted from Groundwater-Smith & Mockler, 2009) Teacher appraisal as compliance finds a level of agency lying with individual teachers but an overriding desire on the part of the school or system to ensure compliance through the inspection of practice, leaving the broader developmental possibilities largely unaddressed. Teacher appraisal as performance management sees teachers required to submit to processes and procedures administered as ‘one size fits all’, often for the purposes of accountability and audit. Where teacher appraisal is constituted as ‘professional development’, teachers are afforded little agency in the shaping of processes or the tailoring of these processes to their professional learning needs, despite a developmental intent. In the final quadrant, where teacher appraisal approaches professional formation and renewal, a developmental focus is supplemented by high levels of teacher agency, resulting in opportunities for teachers to engage in learning and development relevant to their circumstances. While this heuristic is undoubtedly a crude depiction of a complex concept, along with the various scales, dichotomies and taxonomies offered in the literature, this thinking about different configurations of, or appraches to, teacher appraisal informs the backdrop to this discussion of performance and development in Australia. While teacher appraisal has been mandated in the United Kingdom and parts of the United States for some time now, until recently this kind of evaluation of teaching practice was left to the discretion of individual schools and school systems in Australia. In recent years, however, support for the concept of mandated appraisal has gathered momentum. The Productivity Commission Schools Workforce report (2012), published four months before the appearance of the Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework asserted that “for teachers to continue to develop professionally, they need high quality performance appraisal” (p.168). Within the productivity commission report, teacher appraisal is located within the realm of ‘performance management’ (p.168-182), while at the same time discusison of appraisal is couched in the language of ‘feedback and support’ (p.168). Much use is made within the report of then-recent reports from the OECD (Santiago & Benavides, 2009) and the Grattan Institute (Jensen, 2011), each of which aim to establish a mandate for teacher appraisal and all of which are, to echo the words of Bartlett (1996), “written from a managerial view assuming the worth of appraisal” (p.7). Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 40, 9, September 2015 120 It is against this local and international backdrop that the AITSL Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework was developed, perhaps unsurprisingly rising to the challenge set by the Productivity Commission in attempting to mandate appraisal systems for the purpose of ‘improving’ teaching practice. Like the Productivity Commission report and also those from the Grattan Institute and the OECD before it, contrasting and conflicting positions on the role, purpose and enactment of appraisal processes for teachers can be observed embedded in the document. This paper holds that these contrasts and ambiguities give rise to a variety of implementation options for schools and school systems, arguing that systems and processes that integrate inquiry-based professional learning hold the best hope for teacher appraisal to truly embrace the developmental intent in Australian schools. The Australian Teacher Performance and Development Framework The Performance and Development Framework posits that a strong culture of teacher performance and development is required in Australian schools in order for the goals of the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (Ministerial Council on Education Employment Training and Youth Affairs, 2008) to be met. While the Framework nominates the five key factors of a focus on student outcomes; a clear understanding of effective teaching; leadership; flexibility; and coherence as central to the establishment of this culture, it also encourages schools and school systems to adapt and engage these factors in locally relevant ways, noting that “formal performance and development procedures are important, but excessive attention to process is a common feature of less successful approaches” (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012b, p. 3). The ‘performance and development cycle’, which is said to sit within these five factors is then seen to consist the three phases of reflection and goal setting; professional practice and learning; and feedback and review. Table 1 below highlights the essential elements of these three phases. Component Essential Element/s Reflection and goal setting All teachers have a set of documented and regularly reviewed goals related
 to both performance and development, and ways
 of measuring progress towards them, that are agreed with the principal or delegate Professional practice and learning All teachers are supported in working towards their goals, including through access to high quality professional learning. Evidence used to reflect on and evaluate teacher performance, including through the full review described below, should come from multiple sources and include as a minimum: data showing impact on student outcomes; information based on direct observation of teaching; and evidence of collaboration with colleagues. Feedback and review All teachers receive regular formal and informal feedback on their performance. This includes a formal review against their performance and development goals at least annually, with verbal and written feedback being provided to the teacher. Table 1: ‘Essential elements’ of the performance and development cycle (developed from Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, 2012b, pp. 5-7) Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 40, 9, September 2015 121 The framework, then, requires each teacher to engage in an annual process involving goal setting, engagement in professional learning, gathering of evidence of professional practice, and formal feedback and review. The structures and processes to support this annual cycle, however, are unspecified, and open to being built and adapted to local needs on the part of schools and systems. While steeped in the language of ‘improvement’ and ‘teacher quality’, themselves highly contestable terms, the Framework document itself contains the somewhat unfashionable observations that ‘Australia has a high performing education system that fares well on international comparisons. This has been achieved in large part through the efforts of highly skilled and motivated teachers and school leaders over generations’ (p. 2), encouraging school leaders to see the building of a generative professional culture as a key part of maintaining this level of performance into the future. The Framework was developed in the context of increasing attention to ‘teacher quality’ and indeed the ongoing shift from discourses around teaching quality to those focused on teacher quality. Elsewhere (Mockler, 2013), I have discussed at some length this shift and its consequences for teacher professional learning, arguing that the rise of ‘teacher quality’ has consequently narrowed the definition of generative teacher professional learning, increasingly linking professional learning to teaching standards that promote narrow technical definitions of ‘good teaching’. Marilyn Cochran-Smith reminds us of the ‘unforgiving complexity’ of teaching, which renders these narrow definitions redundant and underpins the need for professional development responsive to the demands of the role. Teaching is unforgivingly complex. It is not simply good or bad, right or wrong, working or failing. Although absolutes and dichotomies such as these are popular in the headlines and in campaign slogans, they are limited in their usefulness...They ignore almost completely the nuances of “good” (or “bad”) teaching of real students collected in actual classrooms in the context of particular times and places. They mistake reductionism for clarity, myopia for insight. (Cochran-Smith, 2003, p. 4, emphasis in the original) The evaluation of professional practice for teachers is a fraught area, not least because of the ideas encapsulated in Eliot Eisner’s observation that “how we teach is ultimately a reflection of why we teach” (Eisner, 2006, p. 44). Teaching is an intensely personal business as well as a professional one, and the enactment of professional practice within the educational field is in many ways an expression of purpose: ‘good teaching involves the head and the heart’ (Day, 2004, p. 105, emphasis in original). The tension between this enactment of professional purpose and the need for teachers to be accountable to their students, schools and indeed each other makes the negotiation of processes of evaluation, appraisal or professional review complex and intricate. These observations about the PDF are offered to contextualise those offered below on possible enactments of the Framework in schools. The discussion that follows is not intended to leave untroubled the issue of professional standards and their politics, but rather to build on earlier work (Sachs & Mockler, 2012) that acknowledges (a) the pervasiveness of cultures of performance in teaching, (b) the need to resist these cultures in the name of building and supporting teacher professionalism, and (c) the elements of these regimes that might be successfully ‘hijacked’ or put to use in the name of building rather than breaking down teacher professionalism. 1 ‘Unfashionable’ because the rhetoric surrounding Australia’s decline on these international measures is generally the narrative favoured by politicians and the mass media. Australian Journal of Teacher Education Vol 40, 9, September 2015 122 Enacting the Performance and Development Framework in Schools Returning to the heuristic presented in Figure 1 above and the two axes of purpose and agency, it is clear that the enactment of the Performance and Development Framework could potentially be located in any of the four quadrants, depending on how the issues of purpose and the issues of agency implicit in the document are read and understood.