Even people who know a lot about schooling frequently disagree over (i) what is
important in terms of students’learning; (ii) the extent to which teachers are
responsible for students’learning; and (iii) how to optimise the quality of teaching
and learning in classrooms. At heart, these can be reduced to a basic difference of
policy priority: should teachers be held accountable for their actions as teachers (the
quality of learning relations) or students’success in national credential assessments
(the quality of learning outcomes). From each basic position, quite different
teaching workforce policy solutionsflow. A primary emphasis on the quality of
teachingprocessesnecessarily requires pro-active attention to the material condi-
tions in which teachers work. It suggests the key question: To what extent do the
conditions of teachers’workfacilitategood pedagogical judgments to be made?
Conversely, a primary emphasis on the quality of learningoutcomes requires
reactive attention to relative levels of educational success and failure, overall and
between various groups of students. It suggests the key question: What is wrong
with teachers and teaching thatproduceeducational failure? Integral to thefirst
position are practical considerations of the classroom and workgroup environments
in which teachers actually attempt to meet the needs of learners on a daily basis (an
ideology of feasibility as it were). Integral to the second position are abstract
considerations of how teachers are exhorted to behave to ensure all students achieve
desired outcomes.
Thefinal report from the secondary teacher union’s (NZPPTA) Quality Teaching
Taskforce (QTT) ( 2012 ) rightly identified the iterative nature of productive rela-
tionships between teaching“quality”,“development”and“performance”. However,
in seeking to shape popular debate, NZPPTA and other teacher unions need to be
wary of following the same path as official policy discourse and, in doing so,
unquestioningly to adopt the concepts, language and the assumptions that underpin
it. QTD is based on a normative model of teacher learning and practice that depicts
these productive relationships, wrongly and misleadingly, as linear. According to
this model, if the desirable characteristics of quality teaching can be specified in
sufficient detail, and teachers educated or re-educated so that they adopt these,
teacher and student performance outcomes will inevitably improve. This is both
wrong and unhelpful for the simple reason that the normative and pathological QTD
model of occupational behaviour fails to account for the material conditions of
teaching: the classroom environment in which teachers have to work each day.
Indeed, the normative model of teaching quality asks us to ignore the material
conditions in which teachers work and focus instead on what is presented as a
generic, decontextualised“recipe”for teaching success.
In New Zealand’s case, the quality teaching recipe has been energetically
proselytised by the MoE, EC and ERO by drawing on the work of a limited number
of preferred academics who are contracted periodically to contribute to the edu-
cation policy development cycle: Adrienne Alton-Lee’s“ten characteristics of
quality teaching”; Russell Bishop and colleagues’ Effective Teaching Profile
(comprising“two understandings” and“six ways”in which“effective teachers
relate and interact with Māori students on a daily basis”); Helen Timperley and
colleagues’“effective contexts”for teacher professional learning“opportunities”;
500 J. O’Neill