Implementing professional teaching standards: A two-way obligation

During the course of last week the Ministry of Education issued a public statement to the effect that it would shortly be hosting consultations on “professional standards for teachers.”

In a nutshell, professional standards set the bar for official expectations of competency in a particular profession. In the case of teaching, professional standards in other countries serve as a foundation for designing training and certification systems for teachers, creating relevant and  ongoing education programmes for teachers and more professional development programmes. In some countries there are ongoing professional examinations aimed at determining whether teachers are progressively staying abreast of the set standards.

The ministry’s statement would have come as a surprise to many people since, up until last week, it had not, it appears, been particularly widely known that the introduction of such standards was imminent, though the disclosure in the ministry’s statement that a draft standards document already exists suggests that work on the project has been going on for some time.

The ministry says that the aim of the introduction of professional standards is to ensure the “professionalising of the teaching body” which, as we have already mentioned is generally what standards are about. Indeed, the statement lists specific criteria for measuring standards all of which have to do with teachers being able to provide evidence of skills and aptitudes that provide proof of their competence to deliver education.

The first thing to be said about these professional standards as far as the teaching profession is concerned is that they are long overdue. The mind boggles as to why only now, and whether or not the teaching profession might not, today, have been in a far healthier state if those standards had been put in place long ago. On the other hand it has to be said that any initiative designed to arrest what by the admission of teachers themselves has been a sustained slide in levels of professionalism, has to be commended.

The statement issued by the Ministry of Education makes reference to the proposed standards as “a tool to monitor and evaluate teachers’ performance in classroom knowledge of the subject (s) they teach, techniques used and level of commitment to learners.” It says as well that the standards will “help teachers sharpen their professional skills and help them interact with parents and the community.” No one can reasonably quarrel with those objectives and again, we give the ministry full marks for setting out with some measure of clarity the purposes which the standards seek to serve, though we await the actualization of the undertakings given in the statement.

It appears that the primary purpose of last week’s public statement was to announce that, beginning shortly, the ministry will be embarking on widespread consultations on the issue of the proposed new standards. One assumes that those consultations will involve the ministry’s audiences – “teachers (practising and retired), Members of School Improvement Action Committees, Members of Parent-Teachers Associations, Members of Boards of Governors, Members of Regional Education Committees, Members of Regional Democratic Councils and Members of Neighbourhood Democratic Councils” – by way of explaining what exactly those “standards” are and the purpose (s) that they are intended to serve and, crucially, engage them in a genuine two-way communication so that, where necessary, some of the salient points of view of the stakeholders can be infused into the existing draft document.

Here, we digress to make two points. The first is that the presence of a minister of government at public fora is usually an indication that audiences will be required to listen to lectures rather than to participate in dialogue. One can only hope that given the clear and seemingly deliberate pronouncement in the ministry’s statement about Minister Manickchand’s central and direct involvement in the consultations, that she listens much more than she speaks. What we hope too is that her presence at these fora does not have the effect of inhibiting teacher contributions in a matter of such importance to the profession.

We note too – again according to the ministry’s public document – the consultations comprise meetings of a few hours each between Ministry of Education officials and the various stakeholders, a circumstance which raises the issue as to whether those fora which are being advertised as consultations do not, in fact, turn out to be brief exercises that simply go through carefully stage-managed motions, the  results of which could well be the materialization of a final document which takes little if any account of the views of the vast majority of the stakeholders.

Not that we are wishing such outcomes on the Ministry’s consultation process though one wonders whether a few hours of discourse with stakeholders at a few schools across the country on an issue of such profound importance actually constitutes “consultations” or whether there may not be more productive ways of pursuing the consultation process.

Assuming that the ministry’s draft has already been circulated fairly widely (and we really cannot say whether that is a reasonable assumption to make) might it be helpful for the ministry to seek a measured and informed  response to its draft from a modest but experienced and informed representative group of professionals (serving and retired teachers) whose deliberate and contemplative examination of the ministry’s draft attended by extensive comments of their own would surely add considerable value to the consultative process.

Here, the Guyana Teachers Union (GTU), the leadership of which includes several experienced professionals, can perhaps be more than a little helpful. Again, we are not in a position to pronounce further on this particular issue since the ministry’s statement – unhelpfully in our view – does not pronounce on the procedures that led to the realization of the existing draft document in the first place.

Here, we will be bold enough to caution the Ministry of Education about the danger of making the mistake frequently committed by state agencies of staging “public consultations” that are seriously limited in the sense of either being ‘public’ in the realistic sense of the word or ‘consultative’ in the sense of having embraced as wide a swathe of public opinion as possible  outside of that of the government. Put differently, the term public consultations in the context in which it is officially used conjures up exercises in window dressing, a luxury which the Ministry of Education can ill-afford given the current far from satisfactory condition of the teaching profession, so that any process that is less than consultative and which runs the risk of having state edicts rather professional standards put in place could turn out to be an unmitigated disaster for the education system.

Our biggest concern is with the ministry’s recognition (or lack thereof) of the Government of Guyana’s own considerable role in the creation of an ‘enabling’ environment in which professional standards can thrive. Here, and disturbingly in our view, the ministry’s statement makes no reference to the obligation of the government to contribute to the enabling environment that would allow for a fair and effective implementation of professional standards. The Ministry of Education can rest assured that any attempt that seeks to implement exalted professional standards that are not matched by commensurate attention to long festering sores like teachers’ salaries and other emoluments and benefits, classroom conditions, standards at training institutions, ongoing professional training opportunities, teacher-parent compacts and significantly enhanced public and official recognition of the role that teachers play in national development,  will fail.  Professional standards cannot be imposed in a vacuum; they can only be effectively implemented on a foundation that provides the best possible conditions for the professionals whom they target. So that while we wish the Ministry of Education well in pursuit of its implementation of what are important requisites for the enhancement of the teaching profession, we believe that the standards that it seeks will succeed only if they emerge from a crucible of genuine consultation that recognises and respects the views of those various other stakeholders in the consultative process, particularly the nation’s teachers, and if it understands that it is the state, as much as the teachers, state as much as the teachers, that has obligations to meet in the quest for the realization of professional standards for teachers.