Reflections on a failed Physics Beginner Teacher Mentor Group

[This is adapted from one of the papers I wrote for my Masters in Education. I am sharing this as I think it might be beneficial for teachers within the MOE system to read, particularly middle managers. I would like the reader to note that the circumstances described in this essay is only one school and is also quite dated, and may not accurately reflect the situation on the ground today. This is also only one perspective of the story. Other individuals involved may have a different perspective.]

Context

Several years ago, in my first posting as a middle manager, I was selected to be the Subject Head of Physics in a local secondary school. Administratively I was in charge of the running of the entire Physics team of eight teachers, and three of them were beginning teachers (with two years or less of experience). Out of the three, two of them were directly reporting to me, and the third would also report to me from the second year onwards. I spent the first year observing and understanding the school culture, as well as building relationships with members of my team. The Physics O level results have been underperforming (determined by MOE’s PRISM algorithm, which projected expected results based on the students’ PSLE aggregate scores) in this school for the previous few years. The first year was also an eye-opening experience since that was the year the school underwent an external validation (EV), during which we received some criticism from the evaluators regarding several school processes.

After one year, I reached the following conclusions regarding the state of the school:

1. There is an unhealthy amount of teaching to the test, and even extra-curricular programmes (e.g. motivational camps) were explicitly for the purpose of improving academic results

2. Teachers lack support from middle management, and are often not organized as a team, each teacher is left up to his/her own devices.

3. Teacher workload appears to be too heavy. In addition to lesson preparation, there is a fair amount of administrative work, ad-hoc work involving pastoral care of students, duties and obligations related to CCAs, committees and school events. Most middle management does not seem aware or share the view that teachers are overworked.

Intended Curriculum Change

At the start of my second year, I decided to embark on a series of changes for my Physics teaching team, focusing on the three beginning teachers teaching the Secondary three level. I asked the three beginning teachers to do the following:

1. I would prepare all curriculum materials for the Sec 3 cohort. This includes lesson slides, assigned homework (which would be from a workbook), class tests and some formative assessment materials (SIO checklist exit cards, etc.)

2. Schedule peer lesson observation into their time-table, once per week. During this time, they will observe the lesson of one of the other two teachers together with me. After each peer observed lesson, I will facilitate a short discussion with the teachers involved.

3. Have a combined discussion session every week, about the enactment of the lessons the previous week, and reflections on what could be improved on, including feedback on improving curricular materials.

4. In addition, one teacher was co-teaching with me in the same class. I asked her to teach the class, while I took notes and gave her feedback after each lesson.

These were my primary motivations and inspirations behind each of these proposed changes:

1. I had recently read Professional Capital (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). Even though I struggled to understand some concepts, I went away convinced in the idea of “social capital” of teachers, and that teaching practices improve when we create conditions conducive for teachers to improve.

2. I was influenced by the maxim that “quality of teachers” is the most important determinant factor in improving school outcomes. Although I cannot exactly remember when or where I was introduced to such a maxim, it was widespread at that point in time, and I accepted it as a truism. An unspoken assumption is that better “teacher quality” would result in more “genuine learning” of Physics, instead of exam-oriented teaching practices. This maxim significantly influenced my personal philosophy as a Subject Head – that my most important role is not “curriculum development” but rather “teacher development” and investing in my teachers to improve their “quality”.

3. I was also influenced by another maxim “you cannot change the whole system, but you can change those within your sphere of influence”. As a Subject Head and a middle manager, it appeared to me that my sphere was influence was considerably large. I had full reign over most curricular decisions, and my three beginning teachers were enthusiastic and receptive to my ideas, and by and large keen to learn from me.

4. Another influence was the desirability of the concept of “teacher reflective practice”. Again, I could not remember when or where I was introduced to such a concept, but I was very convinced that this was an important part of improving “teacher quality”, perhaps even possibly a “silver bullet” solution for our languishing O level results. I felt that two obstacles to such a desirable practice of teacher reflection were (i) lack of time and space for the teachers and (ii) lack of social capital. This was the impetus behind be taking over all the curricular planning (to free up time from my teachers, while at the same time ensuring a certain quality of the curriculum materials) and having scheduled peer observations and discussions (to foster social capital).

5. At that point in time, I was of the view that certain pedagogical practices would be universally beneficial to all students in the cohort, thus I believed standardised curriculum materials and pedagogical practices are desirable. While I would encourage teachers to make improvements to my curricular materials or certain pedagogical practices, they ought to be shared with the whole team, so that all members of the team can implement the improved practice (i.e. still standardised) to maximally benefit all students in the cohort. Thus, I required my beginning teachers to used the materials I developed, although there was some initial discomfort with one of the beginning teachers.

Actual Outcomes

All three beginning teachers were initially enthusiastic with my proposed plan, and we carried out the plan to some success for the first three weeks of Term 1. However, the practice became inconsistent after that. Teachers started to lapse in their attendance for peer observations, and this became worse despite me reprimanding them once about it. Our weekly discussions were also hijacked by other administrative issues that required discussion (e.g. the implementation of SPA, common test and exam marking, etc.) By the time the Term 1 common test came about, our peer observations have all but ceased. In the middle of Term 2, I experienced a massive case of burnout, and even though I was still preparing the curriculum materials for the entire secondary 3 cohort, the amount of effort I was putting into them dropped considerably, and the quality of the materials also suffered. I did manage to continue the feedback sessions for the teacher I was co-teaching with, although that became more sporadic over time as well.

After this failed attempt in my second year, I abandoned all attempts at building social capital or fostering reflective practitioning in my subsequent years in the school. Instead I focus my efforts on ways to reduce teacher workload, including the consolidating and organizing of curricular resources, and mooting the idea of having fixed exam papers rotated over time instead of setting new ones every year (this idea was never fully explored and later abandoned). As a middle manager, I focused my attention that my teachers apportion enough time for rest and family, and to urged them to prioritise some school responsibilities lower, but they struggled to take up my advice.

In my third year, I approached my principal to request for a reduction in workload for myself and other middle managers. I was rebuffed with the response that my workload was “comparable” to other Subject Heads in other Singapore schools.

Analysis and Discussion

Looking back at my failed attempt at creating and sustaining this mentoring group for beginning Physics teachers, I identified three themes underlying what happened:

Underestimation of Workload issues

By far the easiest culprit to blame on the failure of the curriculum change was that the teachers (and myself) were too overloaded to successfully enact these changes. This is despite my teachers all being initially very willing to participate and them seeing value in what I was proposing. Although I did attempt to free up time from my teachers by taking away one segment of their lesson planning, this was actually not a significant amount of off-loading. They still had to plan their lessons for the other streams they are teaching (each of my teachers teach at least 3 different streams of Physics / Lower Secondary Science), and it was not uncommon to hear of teachers who neglect lesson planning altogether due to lack of time, and instead enacted a classroom lesson based on resources from previous years, and sheer improvisation.

Another factor I which did not realized was that time freed up would be quickly filled up by other things. Some aspects of a teacher’s responsibility, particularly the pastoral care of students, had no limit to the amount of time and energy it can potentially consume from the teacher. My teachers also took on new responsibilities as the year progressed, often without my knowledge or endorsement. In the case of one particular teacher, she was approached by a HOD to chaperon students on an overseas hiking trip, and I was not notified even though I was her reporting officer. This disturbed me greatly as the teacher did not feel like she was in a position to refuse given the HOD’s senior position (and how such a refusal would impact her teacher appraisal during ranking), but also as her reporting officer I was the best person to decide whether or not she was capable of taking up such a time-intensive responsibility, given her other existing obligations.

The issue with workload I also realised was not just due to how much time a teacher has per se. Even if teaching did not consume up all their time, overloading a teacher also created teacher stress and emotional turmoil which impacted not just teacher well-being, but all other aspects of their teaching work and efficacy (Kyriacou, 2001; Klassen & Chiu, 2010), including their own willingness to be retained as teachers (Sass, Seal & Martin, 2011). If so, perhaps the question for middle managers to ask is not “does the teacher have sufficient time to cope with his/her load?” but rather “how well are we supporting the teacher’s mental and emotional well-being?” (Saunders, 2013). An additional insight I’ve gained from this process was why we value “efficiency” in our teaching so much. Given the sheer emotional burden of the teaching job, we have little choice but we enact teaching practices as efficiently as possible, for little reason other than self-preservation.

I was also guilty of underestimating how much time and energy it takes to do a peer lesson observation and participate in a post-lesson discussion. The richer the discussion, the more mental resources it took up from my teachers, and since this discussion is often during a break period in between lessons on a weekday morning, the teachers have other curricular concerns at the back of their minds during these discussion sessions.

Finally, I was guilty of overestimating my own ability to juggle my own workload. Reflecting on this, I wonder if I was implicitly buying into a cultural narrative which states “if something is important enough to you, you will work hard and sacrifice what’s necessary to obtain it”. The fact that I was not able to put in sufficient effort into crafting the necessary curricular materials or ensuring that my teachers “kept with the plan” therefore reflects that either the curricular reform “did not mean that much to me” or that I was “too lazy” to ensure its success. This kind of simplistic internalization of factors as character deficit is probably part of our macro-culture of meritocracy, and how success is equated with diligence, and failure with laziness (Koh, 2014). I also suffered from an incomplete understanding of vocational burnout (Brotheridge & Gradey, 2002; Gonzalez-Roma & Schaufeli, 2006), which was something I studied more carefully after this episode.

Lack of appreciation of Complexity

Even though workload related issues were an easy culprit, the real root problem for my failure in curriculum implementation was probably due to my lack of appreciation of complexity in curriculum reform and having an overly mechanistic mental model of thinking (Hoban, 2002). This manifested in my inability to recognize that teacher workload was connected to a whole host of other factors beyond my control (such as micropolitics between my teacher and other middle managers), but also the link between teacher emotional work and teacher efficacy.

On retrospect, I realized I was guilty of lumping all the intuitively attractive concepts together under a singular category of “good teaching”, where individually these concepts may have very little to do with each other and had been developed independently under different contexts. In particular, the concepts of “reflective practioner” (Schon, 1987), “professional capital” (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012), “teacher quality” (Darling-Hammond, 2000), “formative assessment” for “genuine learning” (Black & Wiliam, 2005) and “professional learning communities” (DuFour, 2004), while all intuitively attractive, were developed from different contexts using different paradigms, and need not necessarily be complementary with each other. This was perhaps reflective of how Singapore has been importing attractive western educational concepts and implementing them rather uncritically into our own context (Mardiana & Lim, 2012). This lumping of “good teaching” into a singular concept also led me to believe in “silver bullet” strategies – that good outcomes will mechanistically and causally happen if we forcefully enact “good teaching”; a gross oversimplification of the complicated process of curricular change (Hoban, 2002).

Another area which I was guilty of oversimplifying was how much I needed external support, least of all from my own superiors, in ensuring that curriculum change was sustainable. It was simply not true that I can enact change “within the sphere of my own influence”. Not only did my teachers need to be “protected” from being over-loaded, my own workload and emotional welfare needed to be suitably catered to in order for me to maintain the emotional energy I need for the necessary curricular leadership. To do so, some structural changes may even be necessary. However, this appears to be the issue with “innovation” in Singapore schools (Ellis, 2014), where my innovation was encouraged only insofar that all other school processes are not hampered and can carry on “as usual”. Given the myriad responsibilities that my teachers and myself carry outside of the Physics classroom, this was simply not feasible, which was why I abandoned the attempt for curricular change from the second year onwards.

Not Critical Enough of Key Curriculum Questions

In retrospect, several years after this attempt, I realized that as much as I disdained “exam-oriented instruction”, my attempt at curriculum reform was not sufficiently critical in asking questions about “what kind of education” was truly desirable or necessary, given my context. While I was motivated by western conceptions of “good teaching”, the desired outcome of my attempted curricular reform was still ultimately about performance for the O Level Physics exams, the issue which I was under pressure to address (and particularly why I was brought in to the school to address). This was what fuelled my belief in standardised instruction of specific pedagogical practices – ostensibly these are practices which would most likely result in better O Level results. Now, several years removed, I would question my initial assumption that standardised instruction was actually best for the students, given how much the students profile varied across classes, and also given how varied my teachers were, each with different strengths and weaknesses as professional pedagogues.

If I could revisit that time again, I would have approached the situation differently. In particular, I would work with my teachers for them to think critically of key curriculum questions, including Tyler’s Rationale (Tyler, 1949) and Schwab’s commonplaces (Schwab, 1969, found in Mardiana & Lim, 2012), to discover their own agency as curriculum designers (Priestly et. al., 2012), and to give them the freedom to decide how best to enact their own lessons given their own teacher beliefs and shaped by their own classroom contexts. In other words, I would foster a kind of teacher inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) which did not converge upon my own conceptions of “good education” but was something the teacher was given the autonomy to investigate, reflect and iterate within their own context.

The worry I have is perhaps after all that inquiry and reflection, the conclusion is that exam-oriented status quo is best – because it is the most efficient. It was precisely such contemplations of mine over the next few years which led me to eventually resign to enter a period of soul-searching. Given the culturally accepted paradigm of what “good education” was (i.e. to score well for O level exams), I was unsure if there was anything better than status quo – we had near perfected the art of teaching-to-the-test after all. On the other hand, reflecting on my own practice (good as it may in producing O level results) revealed that in terms of what I personally valued, I was giving very little value to my students, and I was unable to see how an alternative was possible given the constrains and contexts I’m under (in particular, the need to remain efficient).

Conclusion

The story of my failed attempt of curriculum change is a story primarily of hubris. I overestimated my ability to protect my teachers from the necessarily workload and emotional toil required to enact curriculum change, I overestimated my ability to be productive under my own workload and emotional toil, and I was intellectually arrogant in how well I understood the necessary and sufficient factors required for curriculum change. In reality, my mechanistic worldview of educational change revealed how truly clueless I was. Nevertheless, this was not just a valuable learning experience for me, but it also resulted in some positive culture changes (e.g. an increased emphasis on teacher self-care) which I hope had remained even after I have left the school.

My story is pessimistic, but I am not without hope that similar curriculum changes are impossible in the Singaporean context. However, what it does require is long-term work in articulating a different vision of Singaporean teaching culture, and a system-wide consensus (instead of just small pockets) that not only is educational change necessary, but it is complex and uncomfortable. However, the discomforts entailed with change are not just inevitable, but they are necessary, and ultimately worth it.

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