and John Hattie’s league table of effective teaching characteristic“effect sizes”.
Unfortunately, these“characteristics”,“understandings”,“ways”and“effect sizes”
are merely lists of ingredients, not recipes. There is no indication (by any of their
respective proponents) of how much of each is required, nor in what order they
should be combined in order to secure“quality”or“effective”teaching, nor how
their relative weighting might need to be altered to suit the diverse material con-
ditions of work that secondary teachers encounter both within a day, and from day
to day, week to week or term to term. It is more than a little illogical that generic,
decontextualised“teaching”solutions are proposed to meet the contextually specific
“diversity”challenges posed by socio-economically and culturally located learners.
Thisflawed logic has major implications for teacher education.
33.4 Performativity
From the early 1940s until the late 1980s, there existed a broad and productive
accord between the teachers’ professional associations, the Department of
Education and the government of the day. The key premise of the accord was that
the three“partners”would jointly develop manifestos around the quality of teaching
and agree how best to promote these. Decisions around teacher quality, develop-
ment and performance were, for the most part, matters of consensus arrived at
through careful trial and error. Since 1989, in particular, the post-WWII partnership
accord approach has been superseded by a NPM ideology. In this, an external audit
and compliance culture (i.e. ERO, EC) has displaced one of apprenticeship and
socialisation within the school (syndicate or subject department) and occupation
(union, subject association). To borrow Roger Dale’s terms, since the 1980s,
teachers have moved from“licensed”to“regulated”autonomy. Regulated auton-
omy has resulted in specification of idealised performance “standards”, the
requirement for teachers to demonstrate performance against these standards, and to
have that performance regularly evaluated and attested by the teacher’s manager.
Since the mid-1990s, the official criteria of teacher quality have increasingly been
based on quantitative student outcomes (aggregate and specific“at-risk”or“un-
derserved”groups) as opposed to the qualitative wisdom of occupational judgments
made by teachers. Teachers now regularly engage in various rituals of performance:
national assessment moderation, annual appraisal and periodic school inspections.
Increasingly, hand-picked researchers have been co-opted to provide a veneer of
scientific “evidence-based” certainty for pre-determined policy choices. Or, as
Alexander ( 2012 ) aptly put it recently, we are living through an era ofpolicy-based
evidencerather thanevidence-based policy.
When rituals contribute materially and beneficially to the quality of teaching,
development and performance of teachers, they may be justifiable in terms of the
opportunity cost to learners, teachers and their line managers. When they do not,
they are merely displays of performance, or“performativity”—performance for the
sole purpose of being seen to have performed. Requiring teachers to engage in more
33 Teacher Educators’Responsibility to Prepare Candidates... 501