Intelligent Accountability: Creating the conditions for teachers to thrive

by David Didau

In order for teachers to be ‘good enough’ we need to create environments where trust, accountability and fairness are held in balance. All are individually important, but each runs the risk of dominating the others. If any one of these matters overshadows the others, accountability is prone to being unintelligent; schools will not be led as effectively as they might be and teachers are less likely to thrive.

This is because equality – treating everyone in the same way – can be fundamentally unfair.

Some teachers deserve more trust and require less scrutiny than others, but in order to satisfy the demands of equality we end up treating all teachers as equally untrustworthy. The more we trust teachers, the more autonomy they should be given; but if all teachers were treated equally autonomously, some would struggle and others may betray our trust. One of the most important tenets of fair inequality is that autonomy must be earned.

the primary purpose of school leaders is to clear the ground in order that teachers can best teach their students. If school leaders stay focused on this purpose, then we are much more likely to create the conditions for teachers to thrive.

However knowledgeable we are as individuals, we’ll never know enough. Although, collectively, we stand a chance of knowing just enough to lead a school humanely as well as effectively, it’s terribly easy to fall into the trap of justifying our actions by pointing out that everyone else is doing the same thing. School leaders have to be knowledgeable enough to know when not to follow the herd.

If you restrict your collective knowledge to only those in senior leadership positions, your decisions will always be less intelligent than they could have been had you tapped the collective knowledge of the entire school community.

Division. The structure of schools increases the risk that knowledge and expertise will be divided into silos. To avoid this there need to be systems in place to break down the walls between subjects and year teams, as well as those between middle and senior leaders.

We are predisposed to seek out only that which confirms what we already believe and to ignore that which contradicts these beliefs. If we find evidence that confirms what we already believe – and we usually can – we will probably accept it as true.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell observed: If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence.10

Learning to love uncertainty doesn’t mean that we should endlessly prevaricate, instead it means accepting that decisions are always imperfect, made with incomplete understanding and should be subject to change when additional information comes along.

When observing teachers, we see what we expect. If we approve of them and expect them to be effective, we’ll interpret whatever occurs in a positive light; if we disapprove of them or expect to see poor performance, we will tend to interpret events more negatively. The more we can view people and events with an open mind and a sense that we have something to learn, the more likely we are to see things we weren’t anticipating. And the more convinced we are that every problem is familiar, the more likely we are to be convinced by our own expertise.

One of the most useful and important concepts for teachers to understand is the distinction between learning and performance. Performance is what students can do in the moment. It is all that we can ever observe. Learning takes place inside a student’s mind and as such cannot be observed directly. We can make inferences about learning based on the performances we see, but performances at the point of instruction are a particularly poor predictor of learning. What students can do in a lesson – or in response to feedback – tells us very little about what they might be able to do at another time and in another context.

Unlike behaviour management, where we get instant and highly effective feedback on our mistakes (students either do or don’t comply with our expectations), we rarely, if ever, discover the effects of our teaching on learning.

The more confident we become in our abilities, the harder it can be for us to learn.

Just because you have been successful does not mean that others will benefit from imitating you; often, we can learn more from examining failures and thinking about what didn’t work. Where there’s compelling evidence that an approach might have merit, don’t discount it because it’s different from your current practice.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman advocates the use of ‘premortems’, where decision-makers are asked to imagine they are one year down the line from introducing a new policy or project and it has gone spectacularly and horribly wrong. They then detail all the things that contributed to the project’s failure. Kahneman says, “in general, doing a premortem on a plan that is about to be adopted won’t cause it to be abandoned. But it will probably be tweaked in ways that everybody will recognize as beneficial.”

The Dunning–Kruger effect is the finding that almost everyone overestimates their own competence, and the poorest performers are the least aware of their own incompetence. This is because we have no way to account for what we don’t know we don’t know.

Teachers become exhausted and demoralised by constant switches in direction. Instead of changing direction in the belief that a new policy or strategy might provide miraculous results, it’s a better bet to focus on improving the implementation of what you’ve previously committed to.

Fair enough if we decide that a previous decision was mistaken, but we should have the courage to say and tell teachers explicitly they should stop doing this in order to focus on that. Instead, the expectation is often that more and more is piled onto teachers’ plates.

Questions to ask before implementing new policies

Can we define the problem we are trying to solve?

What evidence is there to suggest the intervention will work as expected?

How will we know if things are working sufficiently well?

When should we expect the improvement to occur?

What will happen if our goals are not met?

Will this cause extra work? If so, what should teachers do less of?

Are we acknowledging teachers’ experience and expertise?

A framework for sensible decision-making

If teachers feel you are ‘looking for’ something, they will often do their best to make sure you see it.

If teachers have changed their practice but it’s having no measurable impact on student performance, then it may be that the intervention is ineffective.

you should be clear about how you will evaluate students’ outcomes before you decide on a new intervention: decide what you want to improve, work out how to measure the improvement, obtain a baseline measure before the intervention is implemented, and then decide on the interval between baseline and evaluation in advance.

learning is invisible. We cannot see in the here and now what students will be able to do elsewhere and later; all we can observe is current performance.

This is important because, as Rob Coe and colleagues put it, “what teachers do, know and believe matters more to the achievement of students than anything else we can influence”.

Do you believe all teachers can improve? Do you know how to get the best out of all teachers?

teachers working in more supportive professional environments tend to become more effective over time than colleagues working in less supportive environments.

We know from research into a variety of domains that three facts consistently predict the working environments in which workers are most likely to thrive: supportive learning environments, concrete learning processes and leadership that reinforces learning.44 Additionally, teachers who work in schools where they are encouraged to collaborate frequently, receive meaningful feedback about their teaching and are recognised for their efforts will on average improve at faster rates.45

No matter how talented an individual may be, whether teachers continue to improve depends, to a large extent, on the culture of the school in which they work.

The kind of appraisal meetings where teachers or middle leaders are held to account for the failure of their students to have achieved higher grades are absurd.

To act in this way, school leaders have to believe that teachers know how to teach better but, for some reason, are choosing not to do so.

when teachers are told to teach in ways they disagree with, the very best we can expect is compliance. One of three outcomes is probable. Teachers will either: Comply in the belief that they are unfit to have their own professional opinions. Play the game but do so resentfully and without real engagement. Struggle to comply with impossible demands, be perceived as failures and ‘supported’ out of the profession.

The more trust and responsibility teachers are given, the more they are empowered to find out what might be more effective, and the more likely they are to achieve mastery.

Pareto’s ‘law of the valuable few’ suggests that in most fields of endeavour, we spend most of our time on those activities that produce the least impact.

a surplus model will assume that student behaviour problems are more probably a cause of ineffective teaching than a consequence.

A deficit model designs policy with the expectation that teachers can – or should – work harder. Such an approach is doomed to fail because, for the most part, teachers are at capacity. Their fingers are worked to bloody stumps, so expecting them to pile something else onto their already teetering workloads is not just unreasonable – it’s stupid.

In a surplus model, there is an understanding of the effects of workload and stress. Time is spent working out what kinds of expectations are reasonable and then stripping out competing demands to ensure that those things deemed most essential can be prioritised. New initiatives will tend to focus on doing less better rather than doing more.

Without great systems, successful teachers are like warlords in a failed state: through force of personality they maintain order in their classroom or department but are forced to tolerate chaotic corridors and dysfunctional behaviour elsewhere. The key is to design systems that do not provide perverse incentives for teachers to do the wrong things.

if schools are going to be truly great, everyone requires improvement. We all need to be better because we can be.

Schools differ from other organisations in that they need systems to ensure three specific purposes: (1) maintaining high standards of student behaviour, (2) focusing on learning rather than performance and (3) planning, implementing and evaluating a broad curriculum.

Systems in schools operating under a surplus model are designed to seek out all sources of expertise and incentivise teachers to contribute their critique of new ideas. If teachers feel their voices are not valued – or, worse, if they think they may be punished for offering a contrary opinion – then decision-making will suffer.