Help teachers improve, says reformer

INSTEAD of sacking underperforming teachers, they should be helped to improve, according to a leading education reformer.

IMPROVING teaching is the key to lifting student performance across the school system but a leading education reformer says the focus is often too narrowly set on raising entry standards into the profession and sacking bad teachers.

The director of education at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Vicki Phillips, said measures to help the existing workforce of teachers to improve their practice while holding them accountable for their students' results would lead to system-wide improvement.

Dr Phillips said her first experience as a superintendent for a struggling school district showed her teachers could make big improvements in their teaching practices in a relatively short time.

"I don't believe you can fire your way to effective teaching, or great teaching. A big chunk of our teachers will not be the lowest 10 per cent, or the highest 10 per cent, but need feedback to develop," she said.

Dr Phillips, who was in Sydney this week for the education dialogue organised by Social Ventures Australia, is a respected former official who has served as secretary of education in three US states and worked with the national Office of Education in Washington DC. Her belief in the capacity of teachers to improve was borne out by the results of a research project, Measuring Effective Teaching, funded by the Gates Foundation, that identified a system for evaluating and improving teachers.

Dr Phillips said the main finding of the study was that effective teaching could be reliably and fairly identified by using student results, observing teachers giving lessons, and surveying students on their perceptions of teachers.

The results are being used by the Australian Institute of Teaching and School Leadership for the development of a framework for evaluating teaching performance.

Dr Phillips said the key was combining evaluation of performance with the development of teachers, that teachers should be given feedback on what was good about their practice and what areas needed work, and then given the support and programs to improve the target areas.

"This is a way of holding a profession accountable for its performance but honouring that the development, the improvement, is the first line of what we ought to be doing for teachers," she said.

In Australia, the teacher quality debate has focused on lifting entry standards into the profession to recruit the top 30 per cent of school-leavers, and to remove ineffective teachers from the profession.

Dr Phillips said the MET research had prompted the development of five tactics for improving teacher effectiveness designed to spread great practice from individual schools to systemic improvement in all schools. As well as improving the effectiveness of new teachers and removing the less effective from the profession, the tactics included helping teachers to improve their practice, keeping the highly effective in the profession, and a better distribution of talent so the most disadvantaged students got the best teachers.