Dairn Alexandre (a pseudonym) is a regular BILD guest blogger; for more information about Dairn, and to read his earlier posts, click here. Dairn has taught in Quebec and now works as a teacher in Alberta, where he lives with his wife, two kids, and dog.
Humour me for a minute.
Imagine yourself going out for dinner with a large group of friends on a Friday night. As people within your entourage suggest different restaurants, each member begins to reject the others’ proposed ideas for a variety of reasons.
“I just ate there,” one might complain.
“My friend at work went there the other night,” highlights another. “And she said that the food and service weren’t very good.”
One by one, each proposal is rejected until none are left. With each passing moment the task becomes exponentially more challenging, bordering on impossible. And while the objective of finding a restaurant started off as a simple one, it has now stretched out to a nearly hour-long exercise.
No real progress has been made. None of your friends wants to concede to anybody else’s suggestion. Nobody has offered up any other solutions. People are starting to become visibly frustrated with each other. Everyone is becoming restless and irritated.
Nobody in the group knows what the next steps should be.
The group is in a collective stalemate.
Now imagine that you and your entourage not only need to agree on where to eat, but also on what dish you will all be sharing. The entire exercise now seems impossible to accomplish. Everyone in the group feels defeated. And now, you just want the evening to end.
This is what it feels like to be a teacher in my school board right now.
* * *
With an increase in instructional days starting this upcoming September and the recent removal of all organizational days, teachers in my school board are increasingly asked to instruct, assess, and supervise more and more with every passing year. Except, they are given less and less time to accomplish any of this work. Each successive September seems to be worse than the one before, as teachers’ mental, physical, and psychological health are taxed to the point of burning out. With nothing seemingly being taken off their plates, how might school systems go about restoring a greater balance to the day-to-day lives of their employees?
The answer seems to be by promoting collaboration between colleagues. While this may sound academically and instructionally beneficial in theory, the reality is honestly very different. My board’s most recent initiative has been to mandate that all teaching staff commonly plan, commonly assess, and commonly pace the delivery of their courses’ respective content with that of their colleagues—not only across grade-levels and individual schools, but now across the entire system. This is ill-advised and short-sighted. Personalized learning—that is designed to meet the needs of unique classroom configurations and ability levels of each student—is no longer prioritized. Instead, teachers are pushed to regularly construct week-long collaborative teaching plans that are submitted to their superiors; gradebooks are increasingly forced to look identical from one classroom to another, from one school to another; and educators are pushed to perform and deliver simplified curricular content that unspecialized teachers are increasingly required to present.
Due to this, innovation and ingenuity within our school systems are being impacted. Standardization across the school board is now in vogue while new ideas are increasingly dismissed because they are not easily reproducible and have not been proven to be effective. This is in part because teachers are not only in a persistent state of exhaustion and at risk of burning out, but also because novel ideas can be scary and may provide uncertainty for educators whose teaching has been heavily reliant on the same photocopied material. As a result, it is simpler, more convenient, and safer for schools to maintain the status quo than it is to push the boundaries of what good teaching can and should look like.
Let me be clear: Contrived congeniality should not be confused with teachers’ genuine desire to collaborate meaningfully with their colleagues, which is, of course, a good thing. However, forcing the standardization of all things within school boards through common planning, common pacing, and common assessment discourages potential creativity, individuality, personalization, and innovation in the classroom—all of which, ultimately, disadvantages our students. In the past few years, teachers’ individual identities have become melded together into one heaping homogenous clump of mediocrity. The desire for individual identity and autonomy in the classroom seems to be increasingly at odds with the system’s ever-growing hunger to standardize all aspects of education, for all its employees to deliver the exact same content at the exact same time in the exact same way.
From an outsider’s perspective, all of this may come across as a petty grievance. That is until you realize how stifling the sameness of standardization actually is for teachers. I wonder, then, why we are expected to make such significant compromises in our teaching practice, and discouraged from trying out new ideas, teaching strategies, and assessment practices in our classrooms simply because others do not share the same tastes or visions as we do. When did teachers devolve into the burger flippers from McDonald’s, producing the same standardized product regardless of the space at which it is being prepared from across the city? Pardon my metaphor-heavy analogy, but why are we asking gifted chefs to produce prepackaged meals in lieu of nutritional food that feeds the mind and nourishes the soul?
Uniformity is the bane of creativity and teacher autonomy in our profession. By encouraging this sort of forced collaboration between teachers, it does not guarantee success for either the educators or students involved. In fact, from what I have experienced thus far, the opposite appears to be true. Teachers are increasingly pushed to provide generic depersonalized content designed for the masses, while students—already facing delays in their learning due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—are given worksheets and other easily reproducible materials that are oftentimes devoid of creativity, critical thinking, and personalization. This is all done to ensure that the content being provided in classrooms can also be printed off as easily as possible at home, specifically when students become sick and need to isolate. But the magic of authentic, meaningful learning in the classroom cannot be replicated in this way.
Given that each teacher and each class have their own unique features and needs, having to agree on a common plan is verging on the impossible. As my earlier analogy highlights, the futility of reaching consensus only increases with each additional group member whose feedback is being considered. The dissonance and difficulty in reaching consensus as teachers attempt to work together towards standardizing content, assessment methods, and pacing is further taxing our already overburdened educational systems. As a result, many of these teachers are moving ahead with the most basic and simplistic of tasks for students, which is not addressing the significant learning gaps that have been caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, I am compelled to provoke the community—whichever community that may be—to step in to disrupt what is happening in their school boards. Teachers need to be encouraged to find creative, novel, and individualized solutions for themselves that best fit the needs of their respective school communities. They need to see themselves as researchers, not technicians—lifelong educators that seek to deepen their knowledge in their respective disciplines and pedagogies, not simply workers searching for easy tips, tricks, and gimmicks to improve classroom management and student performance on achievement exams. But most importantly, teachers need to reclaim their agency and begin to develop inspiring content that educates and motivates again, to capture the collective attention and imagination of the children under their care.
And all this needs to happen quickly. Before schools push out the last of us who don’t want to end up as a short-order cook for a middling fast-food chain.
