Taking a stand against the Pedagogy of Professional Decline

Last week I coined a new phrase: The ‘Pedagogy of Professional Decline’.

That day I tweeted it and used the following description:

‘It describes both classroom practices and CPD (Continuing Professional Development) which reduce agency, neglect expertise, drive conformity, narrow opportunities, damage relationships. It is the opposite of helping learners flourish.’ (@DrRLofthouse 16/09/23)

This week I saw a new twitter thread written by Warwick Mansell and felt compelled to use the phrase again in response to his account of what teachers at a Multi-Academy Trust (MAT) have been directed to do. He reported that the teachers have been told to remove all ‘furniture, artwork and even rubbish bins’ from the front of their classrooms, display a large branded MAT poster in every classroom and to read to students (up to Year 11) with a set of instructions which script the words that a teacher must use and regulate that students will follow the lines of the text with their rulers.

These actions are couched in the alluring conditions of reducing students’ cognitive load (@warwickmansell 20/09/23). They also seem to me designed in line with a creeping narrative that we must also reduce teachers’ cognitive load.

In my response tweet I stated that ‘Creating a sterile, formulaic, monolithic classroom and lesson instructions … some MAT leaders really need to take a long step away from their desks and start finding out how rich, fertile, impactful learning really happens. This is the pedagogy of professional decline in action.’ (@DrRLofthouse 20/09/23).

So, why am I coining this new term ‘pedagogy of professional decline’? Here are my initial thoughts.

• We need a language which helps us to label what we experience directly and notice around us.

• We need an organising concept which can be used as a frame to help us recognise patterns and trends in what might seem unconnected developments in education.

• We need to recognise the inherent relationship between the pedagogies that we deploy in classrooms, the limits that these might place on teachers’ accepted repertoire and the restricted opportunities that might result for teacher reflection and professional development.

• We need to call out teachers’ CPD which assumes teachers cannot ‘cope’ with complexity or nuance, and that the only effective professional learning is convergent and never divergent.

• We need to problematise and critique what starts to feel familiar or is normalised in our schools.

• We need to reclaim the professional and pedagogic space in which we can articulate concerns rather than acquiesce to reductive claims about teaching and learning.

The coining of the phrase ‘pedagogy of professional decline’ may seem provocative, but to me it feels an entirely accurate and legitimate reaction to what is happening around us and to us.

As educators we must speak truth to power when we see the need. And we must not rest until all educators feel able to do so.