Teaching inside the glass cage

Becoming formalised only in 2000 (Mahoney and Hextall, 2001), the performance management of teachers has intensified dramatically. Where once teacher effectiveness was judged upon classroom observations during internal inspection weeks and exam results, now the means by which teachers are judged have multiplied. But performance management in schools has not developed in isolation, it has become embedded within architecture, culture and organisational design. The contemporary teacher has become perpetually visible, both physically and figuratively, allowing senior leaders to collect evaluative data continually to feed into performance reviews. There are the up-close-and-personal strategies, the scheduled classroom observation and the improvisational learning walk with senior leaders ‘popping in’ to classrooms via the increasingly open (and often doorless) doors. Then there is the growth of open plan teaching spaces and glass-walled rooms rendering lessons observable to managers, peers and even the casual visitor strolling past. There is the increase in small team organisational design, especially the schools-within-schools approach popularised in the US, a means of making individual performance more visible within small teams of subject teachers. There is also the constant collection of data on every aspect of pupil performance that equally reveals teacher performance. Finally there is student-voice, the most hard to place on the official-unofficial continuum, a means of children feeding back on their educational experience that is inseparable from the discussion of individual teacher effectiveness.

Where once schools were places of professional autonomy and closed doors, now schools have become increasingly glass organisations, both physically and figuratively. Visibility is normalised, performance is open, constant and offered in judgement to whoever is there to see it (Page, 2015). Teachers’ performance resides in an individual book that might be picked up during a learning walk; it resides in classroom management observed by a peer or from a senior manager’s office adjacent to an open-plan learning space; it resides in the student voice activity that talks about which lessons are boring. The glass school facilitates continual collection of data on performance and continual performance management. In this regard, it is a product of the tyranny of accountability, particularly embodied within Ofsted. With a bad inspection result risking the survival of a school (not to mention the career of the headteacher) and the inspectorate arriving with hardly any notice, schools are required to become constantly Ofsted-ready. Glass is key to this status, replicating inspection at any moment, along any corridor, in any classroom, in any database. Glass reduces the element of surprise, it allows headteachers to more accurately judge the current level of performance to predict future inspection outcomes. Glass means that every day is an Ofsted day.

Yet, as Gabriel (2005) highlights, the glass organisation is a neoliberal product, a means of reifying the consumer, a means of offering products and services to the ‘critical gaze of the customer’, raising transparency to a ‘supreme value’. As such, the glass cage of school does not function only to manage the performance of teachers; glass also acts as a window for the consumers of education, it frames the spectacle of Good and Outstanding. Like educational tourists, prospective parents, Ofsted inspectors and researchers can be escorted through the glass corridors, taking in the busily engaged classes, the teachers expertly using the latest online technology, the learning objectives proudly displayed. They can survey the open plan learning zones with brand new PCs and tablets on every desk, teachers facilitating exploratory learning next to a lesson where children are building simulation models. They can pore over the exam results, the league tables, the testimonials, the Ofsted inspection reports and the myriad other data that offers a spectacle of performance and a window to the future success of children. Glass, then, frames the spectacle of excellence as much as the spectacle of incompetence.

Transparency, we are told, is a good thing. It allows us to see the truth. The glass cage – it would follow – allows us to see the real quality of teaching, to see what really goes on in classrooms. It allows us to spot the bad apples before they can damage children’s learning. Yet the glass cage may also mirror the effects of reality TV, it may amplify the emptiness of performance for its own sake. Teachers – more than anyone else – know that learning is not always a spectacle, it is not always entertaining to watch. Sometimes it can be still, and quiet and resistant to observation. The danger of the Ofsted-ready glass school is that this might be forgotten.

References

Gabriel, Y. (2005) Glass cages and glass palaces: Images of organization in image-conscious time. Organization 21 (1): 9-27

Mahony, P. & Hextall, I. (2001) Performing and conforming, in: D. Gleeson & C. Husbands (Eds) The performing school: Managing teaching and learning in a performance culture (London, Routledge Falmer).

Page, D. (2015) The visibility and invisibility of performance management in schools. British Educational Research Journal 41 (6): 1031-1049.

Author: Damien page

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