10 minute read
COVER STORY
Facing education’s state of emergency
Etched – quite urgently - into the opening pages of his raw and straighttalking new book Restoring Teaching, Adam Voigt plucks those startling words first uttered by teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg and thrusts them onto the teaching profession: “I need you to act as though the house is on fire – because it is”.
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BY SARAH DUGGAN
“THIS shit has to stop.”
Adam Voigt is deliberately and unapologetically alarmist in his call to arms. Teaching in this country has reached a state of emergency, he says, and w e must now collectively work to restore our educators to their former (and rightful) glory. This is not about upskilling. The restoration job Voigt wants is one that involves a deep un-conditioning – to the systems, measures and top-down direc tives that he says are sucking the soul from the pr ofession. It’s about repairing faith, reclaiming expertise, and pushing back against the wholes cale derision, scorn and abuse that’s now thrown at our educators from parents, the media and even policymakers. “I think the biggest emergency that we face is the status and the reputation of our teachers,” Voigt begins.
“You know, when I ask people ‘what was dif ferent about schools 30 years ago, compared to t oday?’ the most common answer I get is that ‘30 years ago if you got into trouble at school, you got into trouble twice’.
“And that was evidence that teachers and parents were on the same page – because if a teacher said something had to be so, parents went ‘well, that’s the way it is’.
“But we’ve been conditioned over a really long period of time, and its often through the media; through the publication of conflict and negative
stories about education, to have less regard for teachers, and it’s left us in a position of conflict or competition, of being adversarial against each other, where one’s trying to be right or one’s try ing to win.”
An y situation that pits winners against losers is simply “not the way it should be” when we’re working to improve the education of our kids, Voigt maintains.
A face of the profession
As the director at Real Schools, and the resident ‘education expert’ for Channel 10’s The Project, Voigt’s expertise in leading educational change is regularly called upon – but during the year of a global pandemic, his insights into the state of play in our schools have been repeatedly beamed across the nation.
“I can’t get up and say that I want teachers to be seen as respected professionals in the community, and then not advocate for them,” Voigt says.
“So I’m really determined, and I do it whole heartedly because I get to watch our teachers and they ’re incredible. Some of the stuff they do … and the amazing ideas that they’ve had for how to make online learning work in Victoria the second time around, it’s been extraordinary.
“I just figured that there’s a lot of stories out there about things that go wrong in schools, because conflict gets eyeballs and eyeballs bring ratings. So wherever I get the chance, I’m going to stand up for teachers. I’m going to stand up for our school principals. I’m going to speak on their behalf.”
Charting a course
Voigt’s clear argument around the apparent demise of the teaching profession has been sharpened over the course of his career. It’s been a trajectory that’s spanned a poignant first teaching placement in the Northern Territory, a principalship, and now as director of Real Schools – an academy that offers a range of pro fessional learning opportunities for educators – it seems Voigt has “genuinely been there and done that”, as his bio notes.
“I’d love to have a better, sort of inspired story for you about growing up and knowing I want ed to be a teacher, but it was really just that the c ourse at Monash Uni down the road in Frankston offered it, and it seemed like I could do that OK…” Voigt laughs.
Fresh out of his teaching course, he got a phone call from the NT. A teaching job was going in a small Aboriginal community, around 400 kilo metres north of Alice Springs.
“Middle of nowhere,” Voigt reflects.
“I think that’s probably the year that I started to really see that education matters so much in those kinds of places. And so that genuinely sort of lit a fire under me in terms of my career,” Voigt says.
From this professional baptism of sorts, the edu cator worked in settings spanning primary and special education in Melbourne, before doubling back to the NT, this time in a school leadership position. But the moment his “life’s work came to fruition” was the day he opened the gates at Rosebery Primary School in Darwin as the inau gural principal. Voigt was 35.
“It was really thinking about ‘how you can pull a culture together when everybody’s the new kid?’ So that’s probably where … the inspiration to kick off Real Schools came from.”
School culture: drilling down to the core
Voigt believes powerful school transformations really hinge on one thing: a school’s culture.
“Whenever I speak to a roomful of teachers, I often ask the question, ‘would you mind put ting your hand up if you think that the culture of the school is important?’ and everybody does . And then I say, ‘would you mind just keeping your hands up for a minute, because, randomly, I’m going to select one of you to come up the front and tell everyone what the correct definition of school culture is’. A lot of hands go down.
“So I think that’s really fascinating in itself; that we have rooms full of educators who unanimous ly agree that school culture is important, but can’t t ell me what it is.”
In his work with Real Schools, the educator rolls with a particular working definition.
“We say that culture is a behavioural set, it’s the total of all the behaviours that are contrib uted by all of the stakeholders. So all of the students, all the parents, all of your staff rolled up int o one big ball.
“And we say that within that there are two types of behaviours. There are the behaviours that we encourage that we like, and are the behaviours that we tolerate; they exist in our school.
“Whether it’s parents complaining or kids’ (prob lem) behaviour or staff bickering, they’re behaviours that exist and we haven’t yet (got) the skills or the time to tackle them.”
Great school cultures are by no means ones that are devoid of all ‘tolerated’ behaviours, however.
“We’re always going to have [these]” Voigt says.
“You know, institutions are built for hundreds of young people whose brains aren’t finished. We’re gonna have problems. So the schools with the strongest cultures are the ones that have gone ‘what we’ve done is chosen our methodology for being able to move those behaviours from tolerate to encourage’.
“And we advocate to a lot of schools that restora tive practices done well, is a really, really sound methodolo gy for being able to do that.”
Grassroots action
For too long teachers and school leaders have been waiting on somebody else to realise the scale of their worth as professionals, Voigt sug gests. Restoring teaching might be seen as an att empt to blow the whistle on this futile waiting game.
Essentially, time’s up.
“I think far too much as a profession of teachers, we’re waiting for someone else to bestow a higher level of respect upon us. We’re waiting for someone else to say that it’s OK to respect our teachers, and that’s not coming down to the school and scream ing and yelling at them if they keep their kid in at r ecess – [that respect] is not coming from somewhere else. It’s coming from positioning ourselves as experts and standing incredibly strongly in that expertise,” Voigt says.
As individuals, we have an important part to play in this larger restoration process. It’s at the grass roots level that educators can really start to turn the w heels of change, Voigt suggests.
We must go beyond compliance. We must listen to our intuition. We must be guided by the evidence at our disposal.
“I think every teacher has a responsibility to speak loudly about what matters in a great education, about what we’re actually trying to do with our young people. Now, are we trying to squeeze better test scores out of them? Or are we trying to put them on a pathway for life success? And what are the strategies? What are the techniques that we use that would allow us to focus on that, to be intentional about that, and to be able to measure our success in that regard?
“So I think that every teacher has a responsibility to focus on that big deep imperative and to reject, wherever possible, the notion that they need to spend all their time complying to things that don’t achieve any of that. “So I do think that while one teacher can’t change it, I think all of us can.”
We’re better than empty value statements
A glaring mistake many schools make, Voigt says, is they use their value statements as empty marketing tools to project an image of their culture – an image which is often far from the reality. The kids just don’t buy it.
“I do believe that we’ve got values education completely wrong in that regard,” he begins.
“[Value statements] go up on walls, they go at the top of letterheads, we make posters out of them. But the truth is that all of that work
doesn’t make our kids more of those values. So you don’t become respectful by making a poster about it, or by having a mini lesson about it.
“You can be become respectful [if] you’ve been immersed in a culture that just models respect for you over and over and over again, until it just becomes you. So schools that say ‘we’re seri -
ous about our values, and this is how we demonstrate it. This is how we live out. This is what w e’ve changed in our conduct’, they’re the ones [where] their value statements mean something.”
The most commonly touted value in Australian schools is respect, Voigt notes. And yet, some thing is deeply amiss here.
“When I ask a roomful of educators ‘put your hand up if you think we’ve got an issue with respect in Australian schools’, they say yes, they put their hands up.
“So the idea of labelling it as a value for our schools isn’t working, and because we’re not doing it at a behavioural, granular level, we’re trying to formalise something that’s a really informal thing to learn.”
A s for his ‘expert’ tag, Voigt says he’ll continue to grin and bear it on national television.
“It’s funny, I cringe every time I see it on the screen, because in so many ways, I don’t feel like an expert. But I’m pleased to have that moniker there if it helps people listen to the message about what great schools are about and what those great schools are doing.
“And if it gives them a little bit of inspiration to put their school on a path to do some of that stuff, then I’ll wear the embarrassment and keep going to try and play my part in it all.”
