I am not surprised by attempts to standardise teaching. There’s so much going on in a classroom and it’s a cognitively complex activity. I know from my own experience and years of supporting and developing new staff that the classroom can be a difficult space to occupy.

But while tasks are complex, expectations are high. When I first joined teaching 20 years ago, there was not the pressure to be graded and perform as soon as I set foot into my first classroom. It wasn’t a perfect experience, but I was given space to develop. I made some howling mistakes but I also learned a lot and slowly developed my craft.

A few weeks ago, I lurked in the Chartered College of Teachers NQT talk by Doug Lemov. I have heard a lot about his approach, most of it fairly dismissive, so I thought I’d hang about to see what I could learn. Apart from learning that I have been mispronouncing his surname, I did actually get a lot out of the experience. As a teacher educator, I could really see the draw that his techniques would have for new teachers who are looking to control a classroom. It felt a bit like a pair of inflatable armbands, practical and confidence-building. But arm bands are only there to get you to doggy paddle, to keep your head above water. They won’t develop the techniques and strokes you need to gain mastery.

Background: Doug Lemov on routines for learning

Long read: Can Doug Lemov’s pedagogy fix coastal schools?

More by Sam Jones: ‘We’re the experts - and we should be paid as such’

Herein lies the rub for standardised models of teaching: they ask for the exact opposite of what mastery entails. Standardisation asks for compliance with the rules when mastery relies on rule-breaking (or bending) and intuition.

A good model to consider this through is Dreyfus’ Five Levels of Skill Acquisition. This describes competence as a point at which understanding what is important is still missing, and, as a result, performance is exhausting. Moreover, it restricts the cues students look for and respond to, as responding to them all would be gruelling.

Limiting teacher development

Conversely, experts are described as situationally discriminatory, subtle and intuitive, which they do without reference to the rules. It appears to me to be potentially problematic for teachers in these situations to move past the level of competence; that these standardised models either deliberately or inadvertently prevent development of the expert by insisting on compliance with the rules.

Moreover, by standardising the way teaching takes place in an educational institution, schools and colleges are presenting one possible approach as the approach. That is not to say that the ideas presented aren’t sound, but I look at things in the way Basil Bernstein did: he claimed what was left out of the curriculum was as important as what was included. So, while schools and colleges are advocating research-based ideas such as Rosenshine’s principles, by standardising their approach, effectively restricting their curriculum, they are missing out on other great work, say the work on inclusive learning spaces by Luis Moll, which has connected homes and classrooms.  

I think the attraction of standardisation is that it makes teaching more measurable. It is easy to go into a session to observe with a checklist of expectations, to check that you have the right “outputs” in a process. However, teaching is about (long-term) outcomes, not short-term outputs, and it is easy to create either in a way that can deform the end result you are truly looking for, and I am guessing those schools and colleges that introduce these standardised approaches to teaching do this to improve learning and outcomes for their students. And surely one element of that is being taught by an expert teacher?

My final concern is that standardisation may inhibit the development of pedagogy itself. By limiting the theoretical engagement of a teacher or lecturer, you limit their development. If everyone in an institution is compelled to follow one approach, it doesn’t matter how good it is, you will need to transgress in order to become the expert. This potentially puts staff who do transgress and begin to leave the rules behind at risk of ending up on the wrong side of performance management. 

All of this limits how teachers and lecturers can develop pedagogically, and the only place that pedagogy can realistically develop is in the classroom. The whole point of evidence-based practice is that it is based on an evidence base of classroom practice. Stymie that practice and you risk damaging its development.

Sam Jones is a lecturer at Bedford College, founder of FE Research Meet and was FE Teacher of the Year at the Tes FE Awards 2019