By Chris Wheat
Simplistic recipes for making better teachers ignore the reality in class.
I DON'T think I am a very good teacher, but I try. Some of my students think I am but I don't trust their small experience. Some adults think I am but they've never been in my classes. Frankly, I'm not absolutely sure what a good teacher is. The descriptors are vague anyway: ''has empathy'', ''knows the subject'', ''inspires'' - the more you think about such things the faster they turn to quicksand.
Much of the public debate about national student achievement concerns this question of good teachers. Good teachers seem to be those in good schools; bad teachers are those in bad schools. We are all the dumber for this simplicity. The discussion implies that a good teacher is someone who is able to overcome student disadvantage brought about by parent poverty, parent attitude and education, and who is also able to defeat adolescent ennui and abolish the isolating label ''nerd''.
At the end of last year, the worldwide PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) results were released. The tests placed Australian students well up the ladder but countries such as Korea, Finland, Canada and Singapore beat us. Shanghai students scored top of the world.
Using some of the ideas being discussed in Australia to improve schools and their teachers, we might infer that Shanghai has much better teacher training, smaller classes, well-paid teachers, parents passionate about their children's education, better school halls, and laptop computers for everyone - and that Shanghai students are taught by brilliant university graduates in a ''Teach for Shanghai'' program.
I'm sure four things have helped Shanghai students come out on top: the passion of Shanghai parents to see their children achieve; an optimistic and studious atmosphere in Shanghai schools; a culture of staff support and mentoring; and Shanghai itself - a city abuzz with optimism and material glitter. When all around you is possibility, you can be infected, too.
Close to the end of my career, I wonder what could have made me a better teacher and have three regrets.
My generation was given one year of training and then released into schools to sink or swim. Asking for help had the smell of incompetence, something it still seems to carry. What would undoubtedly be of great value to all teachers is a mandated mentoring process available throughout our careers.
The medical profession would see that as perfectly normal and their patients wouldn't want it any other way. The extended, often daily, mentoring that trade apprentices experience is unknown to teachers.
My second regret is that good research on pedagogical process (how do you teach a group of year 8 students, half of whom are illiterate?) was never provided - and one wonders how much research into pedagogical practice in Victorian schools is done now. I have never seen a video of a Victorian teacher working with students such as my own.
Where research is provided it often doesn't suit; such research appears to come out of primary schools, or secondary schools in middle-class suburbs. I want to read about and see successful teachers working with large groups of disengaged and illiterate students. What I have had instead is curriculum innovation, usually coming with sample lessons, but without advice on how to make those lessons work. That is left entirely to my ''professional expertise''. If so many teachers are underperforming, despite curriculum innovation, then it seems that something more than reworked curriculums is needed.
I was once invited into the city to review a series of lessons designed for students such as my own. People had spent months devising them. I read them and grew disheartened - all that creative excitement but how were we to actually teach this to classes like mine? That was up to us - a tidy answer to cover the yawning problem.
The last regret is that our political elite has not been able to recognise that a good school is an organism with an atmosphere, an ethos, a sense of itself. A new school hall doesn't elevate a school and its teachers from bad to good, and nor will a national curriculum.
The publication of statistics on every school ranking is now rife and so a school community develops its sense of self in relation to local and distant competitors. For decades of my life I have worked in a school with no effective school oval. At lunchtime, in winter, students play kick-to-kick over the top of other students trying to practise basketball. They do this with good humour but they know students in other schools get a better deal. They know the adult community knows this, too, and does little about it.
Of course, it is naive to believe that there will ever be equality between schools. But what Australia must face is that the educational apartheid that the nation practises has allowed the gap between rich and poor schools to grow so vast that it signals to students in disadvantaged schools that they are second-class people. That signal promotes loss of will in the majority. It is hard to feel confidence in your ability when your students feel like this, and when mentoring is not taken seriously.
We may need to humbly learn from Shanghai.
Chris Wheat is a teacher at Sunshine College. His latest novel for young adults is Screw Loose.
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