Behind Closed Doors

Educational reformists have been talking for a while now of the need and importance of making teaching less private. For far too long teachers have ruled the roost in their classroom behind closed doors. Now, to be fair to many of my colleagues, I do know that many teachers are willing to share. And I know that the reasons for teaching behind closed doors are not sinister. Indeed the vast majority of these teachers are reluctant to open up their doors as they are afraid of being judged. Nontheless though it is still important that we continue to teach in a more public manner. We need to let our practice be guided (and judged) by Professional research.

The notion of professional research is much different than simple "professional judgement." I have heard colleagues defend poor practice using the battle cry of "it was my professional judgement". As Khym Goslin has written we (teachers) need to act more like the law profession (no, not that side of the law!.), but rather that we must, like court judges, act within a certain boundary. The teaching profession has changed and we can not continue to insist that we teach like we were taught, it is simply not enough. Our actions need to be guided by current widespread knowledge guided by research.

The doors of our schools also need to be open. This openness needs to be within the practice of schools and make this more public. Certainly recent guidelines for Cycle 4 AISI projects point to this need. This call was suggested by critical friends of the AISI project (i.e. Hargreaves) who suggest that more "networking" needs to be done between schools. They even calls for this networking to increase to include more consistent dialogue between school districts.

We need to make Public Education, public!