A few years on, we have two of the country’s largest systems, serving a huge number of students, moving towards explicit teaching as the main mode of instruction.
Several Dioceses are on the bus, even the stalwarts, and universities, where needed, are hiring experts in the learning sciences, to comply with mandates. Things are looking good. Or are they?
As part of my work, I talk to teachers and leaders from all over the world. I hear their stories of school and system-wide lethal mutations, and I talk to policy leaders about their struggles to support and sustain change.
The risk is that all this effort and reform fails to produce the desired learning outcomes, and the pendulum swings back to blind groping and shiny fads, which to be fair may work equally well as far as poorly implemented reform efforts go.
In no particular order, here are five risks that, if not addressed, will upend the entire reform agenda.
1. The rush to scale – lots of talk, few resources
You might remember a big announcement way back in 2024 that the Department of Education was to mandate explicit teaching in the schools which serve most of the students of NSW.
I heard the secretary of the Department Murat Dizdar speak at Sharing Best Practice shortly after. He gave up his Saturday morning to speak to a bunch of switched-on and committed teachers. He was engaging; he spoke like a real teacher.
The next professional learning day after Dizdar’s original announcement was to be on explicit teaching and, well, achievement unlocked. A source tells me that the professional learning rolled out was mostly existing material, rebadged.
A notable example was materials for mathematics teachers on productive struggle with a shiny new “explicit instruction” label tacked on.
It was “one and done,” and from that point, the Department seemed to assume that explicit teaching was a going concern.
NSW Department teachers now have more professional learning days, but 50 per cent of this time must be teacher-directed. On top of this, meetings have been capped at one hour per week.
I can see this as a potential boon for workload, but it raises the question about how time could be carved out for moving teacher knowledge beyond that which was developed after the initial announcement.
I hear that now the Department has ostensibly nailed explicit teaching, the new area of focus is high-potential and gifted learning, which promotes inquiry over the teaching of more complex or advanced knowledge and skills.
Of course, there is a role for both, but the research shows gifted students also need explicit teaching, just in lower doses. I fear water will be muddied before any changes can take hold.
But it’s not too late to turn the inertia around. We can look to other states and systems for models of supported implementation. Take for example the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model (VTLM) 2.0. Victoria knows how to create brand excitement.
You know a model is gaining traction when stalwart critics do an about-face to jump on the bandwagon. VTLM 2.0 sounds like the new iPhone but also signals a culture of continual improvement; just like the science of learning, when new research emerges, we adapt and adopt.
Resources are based on the work of AERO, Deans for Impact, Sweller, and Rosenshine.
The support sites are polished and easy to navigate, and crucially, old resources will be retired by 2028.
Victoria is an example of implementation done right.
I also hear great things about the Department in Tasmania. The Canberra-Goulburn Diocese Catalyst program is a shining light, but it’s easy to forget that it has taken four years to arrive at this point, and the work is ongoing.
What’s needed in NSW is a resourced, sustained and sustainable approach to ensure that students (and teachers) get what they need to thrive.
2. Mixed messages – you’re already doing this
Another potential risk is messaging. Can teachers be “already doing this” and at the same time need mandates? Are there pockets of great practice but too much variance? Are some practices prevalent, but others in need of development? Is there any data on student experience that would give this information, beyond test scores?
In the corporate world (or really, most workplaces), accountability is normal and expected. But in education, teacher autonomy rules. A colleague runs a network of schools where it’s made clear to teachers that they are not self-employed.
Oh, and their staff retention is fine, perhaps because those teachers are well-resourced to do the job they are asked to do.
The business world can provide a model for the way we approach teaching improvement. We know who our weakest teachers are, and we know the high fliers.
Situational leadership models suggest that we leave the high fliers alone, refine the middle and deal directly and swiftly with underperformance. For sure, some teachers are “already doing this,” and can be leveraged to influence and coach others.
But it’s time to either call a spade a spade, and resource our teachers with professional learning, or drop the mandates.
3. The tick-box exercise
I know of one university that can hand-on-heart say they have always taught core content. They haven’t needed to do a hard pivot, and their Educational Psychology department is the OG.
People talk to me about their undergraduate and post-graduate education, and I get the impression it’s a mixed bag; the enacted curriculum doesn’t always resemble the compliance curriculum.
UDL and learning styles still abound. Melbourne University, for example, is hiring a Science of Learning lecturer, someone who will presumably tick the entire compliance box in one course.
Meanwhile, New Metrics promotes measuring dispositions over learning. The only thing that will mitigate this risk is student surveys on whether they did indeed learn the core content.
4. The quick and dirty route to lesson planning
High-quality instructional materials have the power to uplift teacher professional knowledge. They don’t work so well if they stand in for teacher professional knowledge.
While it’s not the norm, I hear of teachers taking shortcuts and blindly clicking through slides, even when it’s patently obvious students have not understood the content.
A risk with all high-quality instructional materials (or any pre-prepared materials) is that teachers skip the intellectual preparation. If the slides don’t improve the learning, then there’s no real point.
Yes, they reduce workload, but they still require work to be effective.
5. The Standards for Teachers fail to meet a standard
One of the problems that has come out of Strong Beginnings and the mandated core content is that the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers have not been updated in about 14 years.
Sure, we can do some post-hoc mapping, but unless the Standards are going to be aligned in a way that supports new teachers in schools, the mandated changes will take about 28 years to filter through to the profession.
I wrote about this in 2024 and the needle has not moved.
Often the first bit of mentoring advice preservice teachers hear is, “forget everything you learned at university.” If universities are making good on mandates, then we should hope this is not the advice preservice teachers should be hearing.
Instead, there’s an opportunity to provide training in the core content to supervising teachers, so we can say, “remember everything you learned at university.”
Aligning standards, sustaining teacher development, and learning from systems that have implemented change with patience and care can help us avoid repeating history.
If we race ahead without the necessary resources, without slow and reflective thinking, and without transparent messaging, we risk another swing of the pendulum.
This article first appeared on the author's Substack. Read the original post here.
