What I present here is the third, AI inspired (Thanks for the push, Laura, again!!)  draft of an idea I have been working on for a while. Please do give me even feedback. Super grateful to those who took the time to talk about the idea further (Thanks, Laura!)

Having space to express our ideas and see them in action is a critical if we are to take satisfaction and meaning from our roles. Knowing we have helped play a critical role in the process feels good – the sensation of “I did that, that was me” would appear to be a critical part of workload satisfaction for teachers, which repeatedly points to the need to experience autonomy and some form of intellectual expression.

I would argue that the main route for teachers to achieve these goals has been through lesson planning. Lesson planning is a core responsibility, etched into the identity of teaching. What do teachers do if it is not the plan and teach lessons? Critically, part of why it is so crucial to the identity of a teacher is its provide the core way in which they can act and express. Through the planning of the lesson, teachers can express their ideas on learning a subject through their actions. They see the output of these actions directly in the classes they teach. They get to express their ideas – deciding what and how to teach and then seeing the outcome is intellectually stimulating, hugely satisfying and fits with the need for autonomy within their role.

However, achieving autonomy and intellectual expression through lesson planning has its flaws. For a start, its inefficient. It doesn’t make sense to build 5000 lessons on diffusion across a system, just as much as it doesn’t make sense for surgeons to create individual pools of techniques which aren’t shared and standardised. In an era of substantive workload challenges, only giving teachers this route to express themselves means that individual teachers are asked to sacrifice their time so that they can experience the intellectual curiosity and autonomy so critical to their enjoyment of the job.

How do we square this circle? How do we help teachers embrace the workload benefits of shared resources whilst experience intellectual stimulation and autonomy. Indeed. Is there a way that could make teachers even more impactful?

I suggest we relegate the skill of lesson planning as the act of intellectual expression and, instead, we proactively promote adaptation as the real art and science of teaching. That the real intellectual challenge is not in the creation of PowerPoints or lesson activities, but in the evaluation of that lesson according to the needs of a group, the license to adapt within a framework, the responsibility and credit for the lessons enactment and the capacity to collate the evidence and feedback. We haven’t articulated that this to teachers, and the time has come to do so.

Two main gains:

A) We are fuelling intellectual curiosity, autonomy, and efficacy within a secure framework so that teachers can be successful and feel successful. Equally, we aren’t just leaving the room for random rebellion either.

B) Inclusion at the core. Supporting teachers to adapt to need is inclusion. Therefore, by enabling teachers primary activity on adapting to meet need and collating evidence on their success, we are giving time and space to inclusion as the primary act of teaching, rather than expecting teachers to build a lesson from the ground up and adapt as a bolt on.

What do we need to do?

We need to do three things.

1) Build buy in. At the moment, we are only communicating the benefit of prepared lessons on the basis of workload alone. I don’t think that’s enough. Lets actively show how the focusing on lesson plans and PowerPoints get in the way of you thinking about the harder components of teaching. Let’s work hard to show teachers this is the true art and science of teaching Build awareness of how this approach models the decision making process of other graduate level, frontline professions (e.g. how frontline doctors, lawyers and social workers all are expected to work in a similar way). This final part is critical if we are to give reassurance that we are upgrading the challenge, not downgrading or removing intellectual stimulation.

2) Enable teachers to make decisions. This doesn’t mean asking teachers to follow the lesson as prescribed nor does it mean giving full free license. Instead, seeking to provide a framework that enables teachers to evaluate, adapt and monitor. Such capacity should be built up over time – frameworks built, training provided and coaching. The focus becomes on supporting the decision making capacity in how to adapt and a recognition of the tools and guidelines to make such decisions within.

3) Build adaptation as the goal all the way through professional development – we conceptualise the mental model of teaching as the art and science of how we take a foundation and make it something responsive and adaptive to the trainee needs. We introduce and scaffold at the start of their career, we expose trainees to teachers who do this week and reward systems that enable this to happen.

4) We should recognise that adapting resources is in of itself a time demanding task. In providing a set of resources and asking teachers to adapt, there is still a considerable time ask. First, understanding a lesson you have not designed yourself is hard – you need time to get into the thought patterns of another person, their design choices, what they did and why. This is not easy at all. This is why some teachers still prefer designing their own resources, regardless of system level inefficiency, there is an efficiency at the individual level by of understanding the narrative of the designer through being the designer themselves. Second, the act of adaption is where real thinking begins – the merger of different forms of knowledge –  of the pedagogy, of the individuals in the room and the context you serve. This act of engineering – taking a foundational platform and helping it meet contextual need, as well as the time to understand what the design is trying to accomplish,  should have time made for it.

The argument for the use of resources to ‘save time’ should be cautiously held and critically examined for how much time they are truly expecting to gain, on light of the need to comprehend someone else’s design and the time required to adapt.. Instead, we should be thinking about how we can help our expert engineers spend time engineering as the key efficiency, rather than the net gain of time.

What about AI?

The arguments of AI in this domain should be no different to that of any form of creative expression. AI shouldn’t replace the artist, but provide a tool to provide foundational resource or support expression.  AI could way of providing the foundational resources in a timely and contextually relevant fashion. What if AI could be a useful thought coach – a source of ideas which are linked to the need or support the process of thinking through adaptation, or a critical friend to augment thinking?  However, AI cannot replace the vast contextual and historical knowledge the teacher will hold – which, in such a context dependent discipline, will always be in the eyes and mind of the individual teacher. Finally, as alluded to earlier, we will swap out the time a teacher spend  teacher creating resources for the time required for teachers to absorb someone/something else’s mental model of design – both to adapt to need, and ultimately to deliver it with fidelity. We are talking about removing unnecessary tasks, but we also need to remind ourselves that the time gained in not curating resources will be lost in the time the teacher will need to adapt and understand the mental model of design within the session/s.

The point of this blog was as follows – to recognise that teachers deserve to feel intellectual stimulation, responsible levels of autonomy and efficacy as well as a managed workload. Central or shared lessons can afford the opportunity for teachers if they are used to refocus their wonderful minds on the hard, more complex task of adapting to meet need IF we enable them to do so through the systems and structures within an institution and provide the development for this to happen.

Thoughts, as always, are welcome as I continue to shape this narrative.