The false choice between teaching consistency and teacher autonomy
Education is caught in a debate over autonomy and cohesion. On one side, teachers are demanding professional autonomy: the right to discretion over their lessons. Others are demanding “consistency” through rigid structures and scripts. Neither is fully right.
Professional autonomy is vital, but too much can result in the “siloed teacher”. The potential to create something greater through cohesive teaching and curricula is lost. But to understand the issue with “teaching consistency,” we must move past the binary of autonomy versus control. It’s more fruitful to look at a teacher’s autonomy versus collectively gained capacity.
A teacher’s autonomy versus collectively gained capacity
A graph will help, and through its analysis, I’ll show how some “teaching consistency” arguments don’t add up.
On the y-axis, you’ll find the teacher’s retained autonomy: the capacity to decide how to coordinate with their students. Specifically, it’s the discretion that has been retained (the variety of options still decidable by them) while working within a school (a collective). These may be options for how to teach:
- Can you slow the lesson down and not complete the summary activity?
- Can you decide to use your own resources?
- Can you dedicate more lessons to a topic?
- Can you choose a different text or demonstration, or write a different assessment?
On the x-axis, you’ll find the extra capacity that teachers gain when coordinating with other teachers or systems. When, for example, we enter a department and decide on a curriculum, we suddenly gain extra capacity to act through the collective designing and sharing of resources.
