On high quality instructional materials
They do what they say on the tin.
In its latest report, the Productivity Commission decided that Australia’s economic fortunes partly depend on whether teachers have access to quality-assured lesson materials. They’re not the first organisation to suggest this; the Grattan Institute foregrounded the teacher hours lost due to poorly resourced schools several years ago.
Initially, I didn’t understand why the Productivity Commission would be interested. I couldn’t see how a well-crafted unit plan could change Australia’s economic prospects. But it does make sense. The Productivity Commission is concerned with unproductive hours and inequitable student learning outcomes, which all ladder up to national levels of education. And education is the soil in which productivity thrives.
But one thing the Productivity Commission hasn’t thought through is the way that the teachers are deprofessionalised by their generalist status. Many teachers have a minimum of five years of tertiary education, but are still responsible for collecting permission notes, wiping noses and planning lessons. Workers in the well-paid knowledge economy are specialists. I know that a runny nose must be dealt with in the moment, but has anyone considered that the ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ tag devalues teaching as a profession? Not just in the community but as a prospective career.
Organisations like Ochre Education help with issues like this, providing a free bank of high-quality resources for anyone to use. But of course, not everyone is happy. Critics claim that materials oppress teachers, stifle their creativity, rob them of identity. In their view, it is lesson planning that is fundamental to being a teaching professional. Not just this, high-quality materials are a gateway for neoliberal standardisation of everything, or so the argument goes.
Something about the ongoing critique of high-quality instructional materials doesn’t quite add up. On the one hand, it’s argued that teachers derive their identity from lesson planning and that our expertise must be honoured by allowing us to individually spend our time this way, rather than drawing upon a bank of materials created by others.
Let’s put aside the fact that relatively few schools require all their teachers to use the same materials, and then let’s put aside the fact that even if they did, teachers could choose with their feet and work elsewhere in this low-supply, high-demand jobs market. And let’s put aside that virtually none of the critics have recent memory of teaching a full-time load.
What I really don’t get is the argument that teachers are at once so very skilled at creating lesson resources, but that we might walk blindly into unthinking reliance on a PowerPoint, or worse, be brainwashed into teaching explicitly. Apparently, teachers are brilliant curriculum designers one moment and passive automatons the minute a pre-prepared PowerPoint appears. Both cannot be true. The contradiction says more about our “advocates” than it does about us.
I will admit that I surround myself with like-minded people, but I have never met a teacher who has worked from high-quality instructional materials, but opted to return to daily lesson creation from scratch. Good teachers use these materials and focus their energy on delivery, sometimes curating sections of lessons to incorporate with their own lesson content, or cutting, supplementing and adapting materials to suit their classes.
For anyone who is truly interested in teacher workload, I’m going to provide a detailed account of the time, energy and collective teacher expertise that goes into creating high-quality instructional materials. I am going to start big picture and work my way down, so if you get bored or overwhelmed by my very long list, feel free to scroll. You’ll get the picture.
Disclosure: I work for Ochre Education. Unit plans for Australian secondary English teachers can vary from non-existent to onerous. When I did my first practicum in a public school about 10 years ago, teachers taught whatever was in the bookroom. Run out of copies of King Lear? Ok, you’re teaching Othello next week. Where’s the unit plan? Pffft.
First, one high-quality lesson takes roughly 15 man-hours. This is time teachers don’t have, but happily, Ochre has real teachers on the job to make sure that this work is done and of the highest quality. At the initial stages, texts are chosen in collaboration with a group of teacher experts, and carefully sequenced so that students receive appropriate challenge, literary knowledge, and opportunities to read and write. At least three curricula are taken into consideration, a carefully curated selection of knowledge-rich texts are included, and choices are at the right level of ambition to drive student learning.
Teaching principles are defined, aligned with research into how students learn, how we learn to read, and how we learn to write. The basic structure of the units is negotiated and yes, somewhat standardised based on how students learn, in other words, through retrieval, explicit teaching of vocabulary, the development of schemas, gradual release and finally, independence and transfer. An additional bonus of a somewhat standardised sequence is that teachers and students know what’s coming, allowing teachers to focus on instruction.
Writing is sequenced from Year 7 to 10, including consideration of the demands of particular genres. Assessment is mapped in line with three state and one national curriculum. This is all documented for heads of department, in several readily accessible forms, meaning that the compliance work is done.
Ochre teachers draft unit plans, which are reviewed and checked by teachers working in quality assurance, before being sent to teacher-creators who bring the slides and student workbook to life. In all, a unit plan is about 16,000 words long (my Masters thesis was shorter), and is supported by about 400 slides. It takes me about 40 hours just to write a unit plan. There is a team of between six and eight people working on the secondary units at any one time, and I’m pretty sure there are extra quality assurance people I have never even met.
Do I derive my sense of identity from creating lesson materials? No, because teaching and learning, to me, isn’t about entertaining students or indulging my own creative urges. When I create a lesson, I think about what needs to be learned, what is likely to go wrong, and how this learning ladders up to a life outcome.
Teachers using the materials I have created can be assured that this thinking has happened and can focus on bringing their professional knowledge, teacher-judgement and personality to the base materials. End-user teachers bring materials to life for the specific group of students in front of them. The materials themselves won’t rob them of this opportunity.
I hope these materials bring workload relief to colleagues all across Australia: teachers working out of field, teachers who might be the single subject expert in a small school, teachers who just want to spend those hours with family instead.
I hope you enjoy adapting these units to suit your own students. When you’re reading to your kid, picnicking in the sun or enjoying a beer with friends instead of writing a unit from scratch, think of me. You’re why I do it.
You can access the full unit plans and lesson resources for the following units below.
The Year the Maps Changed. Danielle Binks. Year 8 English
War Poetry. Various World War I and II poets. Year 10 English
More to follow!
From time to time, I share events that I believe in and that I know from experience will be of outstanding quality. Here’s a fantastic event for those of you on a school improvement journey and can make it to Sydney on 29th October.
The Australian School Improvement Summit is a one-day event bringing together leaders from across the country who are making evidence-based practice real in Australia’s school systems and classrooms. It underscores what is required at the system and school level to achieve high quality and equitable education for all Australian students.
The overarching theme is Knowledge Matters: How to lift learning outcomes through leadership development, curriculum renewal and better classroom instruction. In the face of workforce shortages and workload increases, disruptive behaviour in classrooms, the unfolding youth mental health crisis as well as ever larger numbers of students with complex needs, schools need clear guidance and support.
The program will unpack what schools need to do to reset the ambition of the knowledge we teach, as well as the best ways to teach and to create the conditions for the deepest possible attention and engagement in a distracted world. There's a great line up of speakers and it's going to be a wonderful day.