Noel Pearson and the problem with rockstar teachers
Why a verb beats a noun
Last weekend, The Australian published a thought-provoking article by Noel Pearson. Pearson is a prominent figure in Australian public life—he is a lawyer, a long-time advocate for First Nations Australians, and a respected Aboriginal leader. He is also the founder of Good to Great Schools Australia, an initiative whose name reflects a central theme of his article. He asks and then attempts to answer the question of what it would take to move Australia from a good education system to a great one.
Pearson played a pivotal role in establishing the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA) in 2010. Cape York is in a remote part of Australia. This makes Pearson’s comments on teachers and teaching poignant. I work at a regional independent school in Victoria just 70 minutes from Melbourne and we are continually involved in the process of recruiting (and it would be remiss of me, at this point, not to highlight our current vacancies). I can only imagine the difficulties that CYAAA face in staffing their schools in the present teacher shortage.
One of the reasons we need to be proactive in recruitment is that for an Australian school, we are a little different. Teachers who define their professionalism as the ability to close the classroom door and make all their own decisions would not be happy working at our school. That’s no good for them and no good for us. So, as part of the interview process, we are crystal clear about who we are and how we operate.
We are also clear in our minds that we are not looking for ‘rockstar’ teachers. What does that mean?
Imagine you have a Latin department that isn’t going as well as you would wish. You might hire a charismatic rockstar Latin teacher to move it forward—a ‘gun’ in Australian parlance. They turn up, make the kids love them and all of a sudden, the number of students studying Latin increases. So, what’s not to like about this?
It is too dependent on the individual. Once the rockstar teacher leaves, they take their magic with them. Worse, this dynamic can be maladaptive and even potentially dangerous. Think of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. The movie is about him. His teaching and the relationships he forges with his students are about meeting his needs. He is there to play the heroic figure. That is not right. Schools should be about the students.
This is why Pearson’s point about teachers versus teaching so resonated with me. After discussing attempts to improve teacher quality, such as by improving initial teacher education, Pearson notes:
“As obvious as teacher quality is to student outcomes, my view was and still is that we can’t and do not need to wait for the perfect teacher.
The initiatives coming out of these useless inquiries were never going to result in any changes in the near term. We have the teachers who can produce the changes. We must instead focus on the verb, teaching, and not the noun, teachers. We can’t change the quality of the noun but we can change the quality of the verb. And when the quality of the verb changes, the quality of the noun does too. Instead Tudge and Pyne diverted to something that won’t produce results for decades, if at all.”
With some notable exceptions, teacher education in Australia is generally poor and needs to improve, but Pearson is right that this won’t fix our schools any time soon. He also hits on a critical point.
One of the reasons that performance related pay for teachers has never taken off at scale, despite being proposed many times by economists, is that when you try to measure the effect of teaching at the individual class level, it is highly variable. Like most teachers, I can recall classes that flew, where the students performed exceptionally, and classes where I beat myself up over the results. I didn’t move gradually from the latter to the former as I gained experience. Both kinds of results have both appeared almost at random throughout my career, despite me being very much the same person and same kind of teacher. This happens because teaching is about human beings and so performance measured at the level of a class will be noisy. It only makes sense to look at results in the aggregate and so it is capricious and fundamentally unjust to pay teachers by this year’s results.
However, over time, my school has reduced this variance, not by focusing on making individual teachers better, but by focusing on rolling out evidence-informed approaches at scale and sharing our lesson planning across teams. Noisy performances in subject areas are now a sign that the strategy has not yet been fully implemented, usually through a lack of resource—it is far easier to do this in large departments with lots of teachers than in smaller ones. Lesson observations are no longer about watching a teacher and making some sort of judgement of how good they are based on our own prejudices, but about observing whether our shared agreements are in place.
Perhaps controversially, I now believe the successes of programs such as the specific form of Direct Instruction pioneered by Zig Engelmann are as much about this standardisation as they are about the method itself. Once teaching is defined, we can talk about it, analyse it and improve it. When it’s left woolly and up to individual teachers who all interpret abstract terms like ‘differentiation’ and ‘feedback’ in idiosyncratic ways, there is no wheel to grab hold of and turn. This realisation gives me a sense of foreboding about the future because romantic pushback against standardisation is strong in the education sector, even among those with otherwise sound instincts.
Another romantic blockage is the persistent idea that teachers being knowledgeable and authoritative is somehow bad. As Pearson states:
“My friend and education policy wonk, Ben Jensen, called his schools organisation Learning First. I say to him: Ben, it should be Teaching First because learning follows teaching. As the founder of Direct Instruction, Siegfried Engelmann, always said: if the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught. This aphorism is at the heart of the ideological impasse on pedagogy. Can you believe we still don’t agree whether the knowledgeable teacher should first teach the as-yet not knowledgeable learner?”
I respect students and this respect can coexist with me accepting that I know and can do things they do not yet know and cannot yet do. In fact, teaching is an act of respect. By teaching a student a concept, I am tacitly saying they are worthy of this knowledge, capable of applying it and have the agency to decide what they want to do with it. Respecting students into a state of ongoing ignorance is no respect at all.
I hope Pearson’s argument cuts through in a way I have never managed. As I prepare to head to MultiLit’s Advancing Effective Education Summit, I feel hopeful that we are at last turning a corner. However, this hope is still tempered by concern about the way ahead.
And one final concern is this: Why is Pearson writing in The Australian, a centre-right paper, rather than The Age or maybe The Guardian? For some weird reason, powerful ideas about empowering young people through education are still persistently right coded.
We will know we are reaching the home strait when that baggage is finally dropped.
Pearson's remarks call to mind my initial teacher education. Without a hint of irony, our 'teachers' would tell us that teaching doesn't necessarily induce learning, an idea that took root in many of the callow, impressionable minds before them. That's what we were taught! This mantra became almost gospel - a convenient absolution for pedagogical failure in the guise of progressive wisdom. If students failed to grasp concepts, well, that was simply the natural order of things. The teacher had 'taught'; whether learning occurred was apparently beyond their remit. Such thinking ushered in a widespread abandonment of direct instruction in favour of inquiry and discovery-based approaches that often left students to flounder in carefully orchestrated confusion, all in the name of constructivist orthodoxy (in this vein, read Robert Peal's 'Progressively Worse: The Burden of Bad Ideas in British Schools'). What began as a reasonable observation about the complexity of learning transformed into a puerile, feckless defence of constructivist teaching. The hero teacher narrative, which Pearson critiques, plays into this abdication of responsibility by casting the teacher as a noble facilitator, an inspiring Mr. Keating figure, rather than an instructional expert - someone who guides students toward their own discoveries rather than systematically building their knowledge, and in so doing, perpetuates the romantic fiction that learning is something that happens naturally when we are brave enough to simply get out of the way.
Another good one, Mr-Dr Ashman. Thanks.
It is great for schools to have wonderful people (caring, smart, compassionate, engaged, well-rounded, honest, etc.) as teachers...but, it is their *teaching* that matters.