when I read of his fate in the newspaper. He received a payout following a court case in which he detailed his breakdown after many years of teaching the school’s toughest classes, despite his pleas to be transferred, backed up with medical advice of his ill health. The court was told he would never work again.
Just as my self-increased load in year 9 English was beginning to bear fruit, the school and the state told me I also had to teach Picnic at Hanging Rock and the other set material for year 9, substantially increasing the pressure I was already placing on myself.
I found my hands shaking on the steering wheel as I drove to school. I was not relaxed when at home with my own young children. My thoughts turned to just walking out, like the teacher in the story I had been told. I saw a doctor; he referred me to a psychologist who gave me reading material designed to help me focus on being ‘in the present’ when not at school.
A position for a part-time music teacher at Belmont Primary was advertised. It was a small school which just a few years prior had faced closure and, after reinventing itself, had managed to reverse this decision. The student population was perhaps 200, many housed in portable classrooms outside of the main brick building. The mood there was positive—exactly what I needed—and I could remain at Portvale three days per week with my year 9s to whom I was committed, for reasons I could not logically explain. Portvale was destroying me, causing me to question everything I knew about teaching, even my capacity and will to keep doing it. Belmont could not have come at a better time.
It was blessed with an excellent principal, yet another Mark, who greeted every student and parent as they entered school in the morning. He knew the names of every staff member’s partners and children. He wanted to know who you were. The mood in the staffroom lifted when he entered. There was a genuine sense of everyone being part of a team. He also made a point of teaching every class in the school at least once a term, when the classroom teacher really needed a break for professional or personal reasons. In short, he made everyone feel that they were important and their opinion mattered.
It was refreshing to feel a part of a positive team again. In the long term it probably saved my career, and possibly a good deal of my sanity. The contrast between the two schools I spent my week at couldn’t have been greater. There was the usual lack of male teachers, meaning that some classes were excited to see me for that reason alone, but that also gave me a greater sense of purpose, knowing that for some of these young men and women you were one of the few male role models in their lives. And I took this role of introducing music as a healthy outlet and influence in their lives very seriously.
Mark asked me to organise a Christmas celebration Mass for the school students in the church across the road. When I realised that the date was not one of my Belmont workdays, he offered me an entire day’s pay for just a morning of work. After the Mass I held extra music classes in the afternoon rather than take the rest of the day off, simply to repay and in some way replicate the goodwill Mark had generated throughout the school. It was truly infectious. Everything in teaching is about goodwill. It is the things that a teacher, or principal, doesn’t have to do but does anyway, that make a real difference. Anybody who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves or lacks the skills and dedication to make it happen.
The next decade and a half saw a return to the private-school system and I witnessed the accelerated tempo of the standardisation push, an experience shared by almost all schools in the country, and in many other countries. As a teacher who liked to tailor lessons to individual classes, watching schools focus everything on an ATAR score at the expense of all else, and of those students not in the market for a particular ATAR, posed a towering challenge, even at a time when I had little idea of the real consequences this change would usher in.
Judging a school, a teacher, a book, or a test on the basis of whether it’s sufficiently ‘rigorous’ is like judging an opera based on whether it contains enough notes that are really hard for the singers to hit.
— Alfie Kohn
THE SMELL OF NAPLAN IN THE MORNING
Testing ‘is a good servant but a bad master’.
— Pasi Sahlberg, Finnish Lessons 2.0, 2015
The headlines are hard to miss: ‘Why up to half of all Australian teachers are quitting within the first five years’, ‘Naplan writing test is ‘bizarre’…’, ‘The world’s best teacher doesn’t care about test scores’, ‘ATARs losing relevance for university admissions but students still hooked’, ‘Teachers are more depressed and anxious than the average Australian’.
These are all real headlines. They point to recognition that what we are doing in our schools at present is not working and has not done so for some time.
It was in the midst of this that I visited schools in Finland, speaking with students, teachers and the teachers’ teachers in Helsinki and Tampere (a couple of hours north of Helsinki) where I found that all of the above trends were virtually unknown to them.
When I explained how frequently NAPLAN1 tests are administered in Australian schools, they asked incredulously, ‘So your students have five lots of matriculation-type exams by the time they finish school?… Starting at EIGHT YEARS OLD?!’
They stared at me as though I were a child molester. In Finland children don’t start school until the age of seven. They do not do any form of standardised testing until they are in their late teens.
In a recent discussion with one of my year 8 classes about growth mindset thinking—the premise that learning can help make us smarter—a third of students admitted that the experience of taking the grade 3 NAPLAN test (as eight-or nine-year-olds) had made them decide that they were ‘no good’ at mathematics. Some said they could actually remember making that decision. I couldn’t help but wonder, ‘How many of you have experienced similar moments with English and science (the other subjects tested in NAPLAN)?’
The nature of the NAPLAN test is that it presents progressively more difficult problems for the child to solve, until they eventually can go no further with that particular activity.
Children of this age naturally assume that if the problem is on the test, then there is an expectation that they will be able to do it. And they certainly want to please the adults, don’t they? Those who raised their hands were not the rebellious students, they were mainly girls—good students who are (and certainly were at the time of sitting the test) very keen to please their parents and teachers.2
They trust, or at least trusted, adults and teachers unconditionally.
Finnish teachers asked me why Australian teachers let this happen to our students. It is a major discussion. How to explain why so much autonomy has been taken away from teachers (and also from administrators)? However, thinking about the obvious damage done to many young children forced to sit NAPLAN examinations, it is clear that if teachers do not speak up for the children, no-one else will. The companies that prepare the tests make many millions of dollars from them; we won’t be hearing much criticism from that corner. The states themselves and school principals are reluctant to be seen as unsupportive, hence they are called out as trying to hide ‘poor performance’ and end up losing students and funding.
So who is looking at the tests and asking if they are in the best interests of the students?
In defence of teachers, when NAPLAN was first introduced it was not deemed a ‘high stakes test’. Phrases such as ‘a snapshot’ and ‘an indicator’ were bandied about, the point being that teachers were not aware that what they were introducing could become a stress-inducing test which could alter for the rest of their lives students’ attitudes to vitally important school subjects.
One does not have to be in Finnish schools for long to understand that educators there are true professionals. They are trusted to devise the required curriculum; national curriculum guidelines are minimal and there is no ‘inspection’ associated with this. Teachers are expected to devise all forms of assessment; there is no standardised testing whatsoever.
The education union is the professional body and membership is around 95 percent. It is involved in all aspects of education.