From performative to professional accountability: re-imagining ‘the field of judgment’ through teacher professional development

ABSTRACT

The rise of performative culture in education and intensifying forms of test-based accountability have subjected teachers to a ubiquitous ‘field of judgment’ through which they are held to account. Within this context, professional development is consistently deployed as a key solution to stagnant or declining student outcomes. In this paper, we examine how accountability might be reimagined through one approach to professional development known as Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR). We draw on Foucault’s notion of panopticism and Ball’s influential writings on performativity to analyse interviews with 21 educators from 14 schools in New South Wales, Australia, conducted during a 2014–2015 randomised controlled trial. Participants highlighted the pervasiveness of testing and test results in shaping their experience of teaching in a system of perpetual surveillance where numbers bite deep into practice. By contrast, participation in QTR afforded teachers rare spaces of freedom within the structure of performativity to collaboratively focus on pedagogy. We argue meaningful professional development can alter the field of judgment and enable teachers to reclaim accountability on their own terms, while maintaining a clear focus on student outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Performativity
• accountability
• panopticism
• professional development
• quality teaching

Introduction

Over recent decades, a neoliberal agenda of economic and social transformation has duly re-shaped most areas of public life, with education particularly troubled by the impact (Connell 2013). To raise standards and increase accountability, governments have established benchmarks, instituted measurement regimes, and applied a multitude of strategies in relation to high-stakes testing of literacy and numeracy, competition between schools and market mechanisms targeting improvement (Burnard and White 2008; Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti 2013; Lupton and Hayes 2021). Of particular note is the degree to which the quality of school teachers has become a focus of intense policy debate (Connell 2009) and education itself publicly scrutinised for its ‘failings’ (Scott and Dinham 2002; Connell 2013).

Critics of neoliberalism in education contend that test-based accountability simply encourages ‘performativity’ (Ball 2003; Baroutsis 2016; Connell 2013; Lingard 2010, 2011), whereby teachers are rendered objects of a regime of visibility (Rose 1988). Bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic bodies not only keep ‘a constant gaze’ (Holloway and Brass 2018, 363) on local schooling, but effectively steer educational practice (Thompson and Cook 2017) from a distance (Ball 2003; Lingard, Creagh, and Vass 2012). In the neoliberal world, performances of individuals or organisations serve as measures of productivity, output or displays of quality, representing their relative worth, quality or value within what Ball (2003) terms ‘the field of judgment’. This field is governed by those who determine what counts as effective or satisfactory performance and which measures or indicators are considered valid. As Ball (2003) argues, the question of who controls this field of judgment is crucial and at the heart of education reform.

Although schools have always been sites of surveillance (Foucault 1977) and teaching has always involved being watched, the monitoring of teachers through a performative, or test based accountability apparatus is an altogether more recent activity (Page 2017; Lingard, Sellar, and Lewis 2017). A panoptic technology of power, predicated on conscious visibility (Bentham 1787), has been deployed in most conceptualisations of accountability and performativity in education. However, some scholars (for example Courtney 2016; Perryman 2009, 2006; Skerritt 2020) suggest we have recently entered a post-panoptic era, in that teachers are now scrutinised constantly, subject to examination by myriad stakeholders, including school staff, students, parents (Groundwater-Smith and Sachs 2002; Skerritt 2020) and the media (Bahr et al. 2018; Dinham and Scott 2000; Mockler 2020, 2016). Teachers now work within environments of normalised visibility, arguably intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic when school systems globally moved rapidly to a period of learning from home, simultaneously driving speculation about effects on student achievement and exponentially increasing teachers’ workloads (Dabrowski 2020; Gore et al. 2021a; L. Phillips and Cain 2020; Psacharopoulos et al. 2020).

In the current era, it would be remiss not to acknowledge how increasing datafication, at all levels of the education system, ‘undermine[s] teacher expertise, autonomy and professional discretion’ (Holloway 2020, 3). The relentless collection and use of data in schools is central to new forms of accountability, surveillance and control (Jarke and Breiter 2019). For the analytical purposes of this paper we treat ‘accountability’ as the requirement for schools and teachers to evaluate and measure performance in relation to standards (Loeb & Figlio 2011). In this way, teacher accountability systems are underpinned by incentives, evaluative practices and testing as mechanisms to shape teacher practice and determine teacher ‘quality’ (Holloway 2020). We define ‘performativity’ as the effects of accountability on teachers borne of judgment, comparison and control (Ball 2003). Where the promotion of a teacher quality agenda accentuates performativity (Sullivan et al. 2020), teachers become technicians and deprofessionalisation abounds (Perryman and Calvert 2020). ‘Panoptic performativity’ is defined in our work as a particular manifestation of the latter whereby teachers are acutely aware of being surveilled (Perryman 2006).

Teachers’ constant exposure to public inspection explains, to some extent, a troubling slippage between teachers and teaching (Gore 2021). Whether the focus is the person or the practice matters a great deal, especially when contentions about the ‘dreadful state’ of education lead assuredly to misgivings about the competence, quality and professionalism of teachers (Scott and Dinham 2002). It follows that when student and/or school performance fails to meet (often unrealistic) expectations, all eyes turn to teachers as in need of ‘fixing’. As a result, we are witnessing unprecedented global investment and interference from outside the profession in teacher education and teacher development (Gore 2020) with the goal of improving the quality of teachers and teaching. In this context, professional development (PD) has been increasingly regulated in terms of hours and compliance requirements to be completed – something to be done. Despite such technical concerns, how PD is done or what specifically is done remains open, creating room for teachers, and those who deliver PD, to manoeuvre.

Our paper adds to the growing body of empirical research on how teachers and principals make sense of their work under such relentless political pressure for improvement in standardised test results. This includes recent work from Australia (Hardy 2015; Hardy 2019), the United States (Holloway and Brass 2018), and the United Kingdom (Ball, Maguire, and Braun 2011; Perryman and Calvert 2019). Furthermore, while professional development (PD) is often deployed as a key strategy to address the ‘quality problem’, even less analytical attention has focussed on how performativity impacts PD or, indeed, how PD might be reconceptualised within the neoliberal social imaginary. We take up the challenge by closely examining the lived experience of Australian teachers as they contend with the constraints of testing and accountability regimes. Importantly, we explore how one form of professional development opens up ‘spaces of freedom’ (Foucault 1988, 36) to experience accountability more productively, still with a focus on student outcomes.

The paper is structured as follows. First, we outline key components of the broader performativity and accountability apparatus functioning in Australia. Second, we present our underpinning theoretical framework. Third, we describe the research context and study methods. Fourth, we present our analysis grounded in teachers’ experience of Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR), a form of collaborative professional development which has been found to positively impact teaching quality, teacher morale (Gore et al. 2017) and student outcomes (Gore et al. 2021b). This analysis illustrates not only how teachers have been negatively impacted by performativity practices; but also how their experiences of QTR professional development mitigate some of the constraints of performativity and enable greater agency. We make the critical distinction between teachers being ‘held to account’ externally (Baroutsis 2016; Lingard 2009; Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti 2013) and enabled to reclaim accountability on their own terms through meaningful PD.

The ‘teacher quality and accountability’ agenda in Australia

While the concept of good teaching remains widely contested (Gore 2021; Lampert et al. 2018; Sullivan et al. 2020), an enduring focus on quality stems, according to Ball (2006, 28), from ‘imagery of crisis and chaos,’ which in turn feeds a loss of faith in the efficacy of schooling and calls for teachers to be more closely monitored and controlled. The ‘crisis’ discourse in Australia, which emphasises stagnant rankings on international testing, has settled on teacher quality as the policy problem (Sullivan et al. 2020, emphasis added). As a result, a meta-narrative of reform to ‘improve teacher quality’ and ‘stay competitive’ prevails (Lambert and Gray 2019; Tudge 2021).

Technologies of accountability that intensify performativity are now the norm across Australian school systems (Gobby, Keddie, and Blackmore 2018). These include professional standards implemented by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) (Thompson and Cook 2017); a mandated national curriculum and a national testing programme, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN); an online platform for reporting test results (MySchool), facilitating comparisons between schools (Singh, Heimans, and Glasswell 2014); and a statutory authority, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), to monitor the entire system.

Undertaken in Years 3, 5, 7, and 9 in nearly all Australian schools, NAPLAN enables pervasive monitoring of students, teachers and schools. While not as immediately high-stakes as ‘No Child Left Behind’ or ‘Race to the Top’ legislation in the United States, nonetheless the way NAPLAN data are made public through the MySchool website ensures intense scrutiny of the test results (Hardy 2018) by politicians, policy-makers, the media, schools and the general public (Lingard and Sellar 2013). Moreover, intentionally or not, these mechanisms have encouraged ‘teaching to the test’, narrowed the curriculum, and increased accountability for teaching outputs at the cost of reduced autonomy for teachers (Gavin 2019; Piccoli and Sahlberg 2019).

This situation raises a number of concerning questions. When it comes to the quality of education as measured by national testing systems, have we come to value what is being measured, rather than measuring what we value about education (Biesta 2015; Hardy 2019)? If so, how are teachers and their practice being affected and, crucially for this analysis, how is teacher professional development (PD) positioned in this policy context? We do not dispute the need for mechanisms to assess schooling outcomes, or the view that schools should be accountable (Reid 2018) or, indeed, the impulse to improve the quality of teaching (Gore 2020). Rather, our concern in this paper, is to make visible the impact of performative regimes at the school level and explore the extent to which the language and logic of accountability might be reimagined and enacted in more agentic, educative ways (Lingard 2009; Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti 2013).

Theoretical framework

Beyond the language of performativity: metaphors of visibility and power

When it comes to conceptualising surveillance through performative accountability, few tropes have been applied or invoked as frequently as the panopticon (Courtney 2016). Foucault (1977, 205) urges us to understand the panopticon not as the ‘dream/horror’ building of Bentham’s (1787) architectural model of prison surveillance but, instead, as a ‘diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form’. The panopticon becomes a metaphor for modes of social control or ‘discipline,’ whereby intrusive surveillance automatizes power through a particular distribution of bodies, lights and gazes. Foucauldian thought has been advanced by several education scholars (e.g. Page 2013; Poulson 1996; Selwyn 2020; Shore and Wright 1999) to account for the current normalisation of surveillance and visibility in teaching. While teachers no longer endure the suspense associated with never knowing precisely if they are being observed (panopticism), in a post-panoptic era, teachers are utterly aware they are always surveilled, compared and exposed to external judgment (Page 2017).

Our analysis is further shaped by Ball’s (2016) ominous evocation of the ‘rough and slouching beast’ from W.B. Yeats’ (1919) poem, ‘The Second Coming’. In Ball’s hands, the beast becomes the incarnation of performativity as a ‘system of terror’ (Ball 2000, 1), a creature neither servile nor benign whose hour has certainly come. Ball favours ‘slouching’ when conceiving his beast, to convey the inconspicuous, if harmful, changes to the subjective experience of education as a ‘slow burn’ (Ball 2016, 1046). With neoliberalism radically undermining the professionalism of teachers, it could be argued the beast no longer approaches by stealth.

Nonetheless, the metaphors used by Ball and Foucault express the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism (Foucault 1977). The ‘beast’ with its lumbering thighs and searing gaze could be the ‘machine’ of Foucault’s panoptic arrangement brought to life, like something off the page of a Gothic novel. Certainly, Ball is not alone in detecting its stealthy tread on education terrain. Foucault (Foucault 1977, 176) foregrounded the beast when he wrote of ‘the insidious extension of hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance’ (emphasis added); while Connell (2013) alludes to the agenda of economic and social transformation being installed, step by step, in every society under neoliberal control. While policy changes have been introduced by different governments, Connell (2013) observes that these ‘all move in the same direction’, increasing the grip of market logic on schools and constraints on teacher agency and professionalism.

While the idea of teachers as active agents at the school level has long been central to educational research, policy and practice (Toom, Pyhältö, and O’Connell Rust 2015), Burnham (1993) points out that ‘agency’ is often considered in relation to a subject working against, rather than within, the structure. We join Burnham in arguing instead for a conception of agency effectively relocated in the juncture between the subject and the structure, in sites that elude the gaze, not because they are outside the structure but precisely because they are clearly and centrally a part of it. This stance comprehends Foucault’s notion of freedom not as the reversal of power relations, but rather as the uncertain point of reversibility (K. R. Phillips 2002, 336). That is, as Phillips posits, Foucault’s (, 36) ‘spaces of freedom’ exist in the fractures within existing relations of power and are experienced as points of uncertainty and possibility – productive points for the creation of something new. Centrally located within teachers’ work, PD is one such space of freedom where teachers can work together within the structure of performativity.

Methods and methodology

This paper draws on data collected as part of a randomised controlled trial into the effects of a form of professional development known as Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR). The trial was conducted in government schools in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, from mid-2014 to mid-2015, and involved 192 teachers from 24 schools. The data derive from a subset of 21 primary and secondary teachers and school leaders from 14 schools who participated in QTR, ranging in experience from early-career (1–6 years’ experience, n = 13), to mid-career (7–18 years, n = 5) and late-career (19–30+, n = 3). The interviews, held before and after participation in QTR, focused on teacher perceptions of PD in general and QTR in particular, the professional learning culture of their school, their personal philosophy of teaching, their aspirations for their students and their career plans. All interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and coded with the assistance of NVivo software version 12.

The research context: Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR) professional development

QTR involves teachers collaborating in professional learning communities of four or more to observe and analyse each other’s teaching using the comprehensive Quality Teaching (QT) model of pedagogy (NSW Department of Education 2003). Derived from work on Authentic Pedagogy (Newmann, Marks, and Gamoran 1996) and Productive Pedagogy (Gore, Griffiths and Ludwig 2004; Gore 2007; Lingard et al. 2001; Mills et al. 2009), the Quality Teaching Model has been widely implemented within Australia and utilised by other researchers, who have reported its transformative capacity in terms of teachers’ practice (Aubusson et al. 2007; Hammond 2008; Penney et al. 2009; Plummer and Nyholm 2010; Rushton 2008; Treble 2009; Whalan 2012; Ewing et al. 2010; Liberante 2012).

Over a period of weeks, each teacher takes a turn to host a lesson (typically 30–80 minutes) observed by their peers. Coding and discussion follow immediately after. First, all the teachers (including the host) code the lesson, using the 18 descriptors of quality specified in the QT Model (Table 1). Next, they engage in deep discussion (typically one to two hours) as each teacher justifies their codes, drawing on evidence gathered during the lesson. The goal is to reach consensus, a process that generates lively interaction, critical insights and goes well beyond providing feedback to the host teacher. Importantly, the coding remains confidential to the participants thus creating a safe space for analytical work.

Table 1. Dimensions and elements of the Quality Teaching Model.

Intellectual Quality	Quality Learning Environment	Significance
Deep knowledge	Explicit quality criteria	Background knowledge
Deep understanding	Engagement	Cultural knowledge
Problematic knowledge	High expectations	Knowledge integration
Higher-order thinking	Social support	Inclusivity
Metalanguage	Students’ self-regulation	Connectedness
Substantive communication	Student direction	Narrative

Peer observation, professional learning communities, and collaborative conversations happen as a part of PD in many parts of the world. However, QTR differs from many such approaches in at least three important ways. First, QTR emphasises pedagogy, rather than content. While content is valorised as critical to effective PD (Desimone 2009), QTR’s resolute focus on pedagogy makes it applicable across subject areas and, therefore, applicable to all teaching contexts. This focus reframes the ‘quality problem’ as related to teaching, rather than teachers (Gore 2021), thereby recognising that what teachers actually do in their interactions with students is what matters most. Because QTR starts with theorised principles of pedagogy (Gore 2020) rather than instructional materials or classroom techniques, it helps teachers reconceptualise what good teaching is and carry out deep analytical work on their practice, always with the aim of improving student learning.

Second, QTR is founded on a rigorously developed pedagogical model. Created by Ladwig and Gore (NSW Department of Education 2003), the QT model was derived from a comprehensive review of empirical studies providing scientific evidence on which aspects of classroom practice make a difference for students. It was subsequently refined using hours of classroom observational data and sophisticated statistical analysis, involving multi-level modelling and factor analysis (Ladwig 2007). This tested conceptual lens on good teaching assists teachers to articulate, share, assess and refine their individual and collective practice. The model honours the complexity of teaching, rather than reducing it to its component parts.

Third, the processes of QTR, akin to the conduct of rounds in medicine, build collaboration and professionalism among teachers. Unlike medicine, however, where hierarchies are the norm, QTR deliberately flattens school power hierarchies through reciprocity, turn-taking and shared facilitation of lesson analysis (Gore 2020; Gore and Bowe 2015). QTR deliberately brings together early, mid and late career teachers with diverse experiences from different curriculum areas of the school to encourage multiple perspectives on their diagnostic work. Engagement in QTR provides teachers with a common language and set of conceptual tools to interrogate classroom practice, regardless of experience or status in the school.

One of the authors of this paper (Gore) was instrumental in development of the QTR approach to PD. While this could introduce some bias, the other authors have not been involved in any of the earlier research on QTR or its antecedents which counterbalances this risk.

Approach to analysis

The findings reported in this paper surfaced incidentally, during coding and analysis of the primary dataset for other papers. As the use of open-ended methods like semi-structured interviews and focus groups generate both anticipated and unanticipated results (Nastasi and Schensul 2005), it is incumbent upon researchers to respond to surprises and explore the unexpected insights provoked during the analytic process (Weaver-Hightower 2019). Somewhat surprisingly we found that teacher talk centred on issues of performativity, whereas the primary analysis focused on the impact of QTR on early-career (Gore and Bowe 2015) and experienced teachers (Gore and Rickards 2020), and on the quality of teaching (Gore et al. 2017). The unsolicited talk about performativity prompted us to conduct a secondary analysis in this paper using new theoretical perspectives that add depth to and embellish the original research (Heaton 2012).

Analysis was undertaken iteratively and cyclically with constant back-and-forth movement between interview transcripts and the literature (Suter 2012). In this process, the ideas of panopticism and performative accountability offered lenses through which to analyse these data. While we asked no questions explicitly designed to inquire about the impact of performativity on teachers and teaching, it is notable that it emerged nevertheless, signalling the pervasive impact on teachers’ working lives. The extracts we have selected in this paper are representative of most teachers’ views. Pseudonyms were allocated to each teacher when transcripts were de-identified. We include years of teaching experience (early/mid/late career) in parentheses and participant role (school leader/teacher) after each quote.

Results

Held to account: teaching within the field of judgment

Our data demonstrate that the beast’s hour has indeed come, and it is hungry – looking to feed on measures, targets, benchmarks, tests, tables and audits in the name of improvement (Ball 2016). Embedded as it is in Australian education, performativity brings with it significant tensions for teachers as they grapple with a fixation on metrics, which assumes institutions can only truly be responsible by counting (Hardy 2019).

Jasmine, a teacher new to the profession, clearly wrestles with this emphasis on testing, given her relative inexperience:

I’ve seen how it really is and what teaching is really about … I’ve realised there’s a heavy focus on testing and a lot of my job is around setting tests, checking tests, marking tests, reporting on those tests, you know, and I just feel like there’s a better way to do it, I just haven’t figured it out yet. (Jasmine, early-career, secondary)

Repetition of the word ‘test’ (five times) signals Jasmine’s anxiety, and how profoundly testing shapes her experience as a new teacher. Several teachers articulated other performative challenges that vividly invoke the systematic, mechanistic onward tread of Foucault’s panoptic apparatus. A first example involves Dylan, who references a dystopian technology of power, whereby students are reduced to outputs of the production line and teachers to mere cogs in the machine.

I think when I started out teaching, I just thought it was a job, I thought I get to move my kids on. It’s like a process, it’s like a chain. I thought of it as a kind of chain factory, you just put the kids on to the next conveyor belt and they go along. (Dylan, early-career, primary)

This extraordinary admission echoes strongly the ‘terrors of performativity’ brought to light by Ball (2003) where children are treated as ‘mere nuts and bolts on some distant production line’. Dylan’s initial ideas about teaching become a bleak reality for mid-career Kaylah, a yoke she chafes against day after day.

The longer I teach, the more I realise that the HSC¹ standardised exams and box ticking is a complete waste of everybody’s time and it’s quite soul-destroying … the structures of the [system], the way that success or failure is measured from your exams, the way that we report, the way that we teach. We often expect our students to come in and sit down … learn this, spit it back out at us, not very contextual, not very connected to life, the universe and anything. (Kaylah, mid-career, secondary)

Kaylah’s critique is stated in the strongest terms (soul-destroying, complete waste, spit it back); as is her concern about the disconnect to students’ lives. Jack, who teaches at an academically selective high school with a reputation for prestigious performance, also highlights negative effects for students.

This place in some ways is a bit of an ATAR² [grade] factory. They’re driven by results, and if the teacher feels whatever strategies or techniques they’re using, if they’re getting the results, they’re not going to change. (Jack, early-career, secondary)

Again we see the factory metaphor emerge as Jack alludes to the mechanistic drive for academic results. It is the results that count; any teaching techniques are justified if they produce the desired academic outcomes. Sam also emphasises the consequences of being driven by results, as he articulates the crippling clash between his personal philosophy of teaching and his students’ expectations.

Once you get to the senior years, they kind of expect you to just spoon feed them. So even if you tried to do something different, you kind of get a backlash with them because they always say ‘Just tell us what we need to know’ and ‘Tell us what we need to do for the end year exam to get the marks’. And I think that’s very counterproductive to what I’m trying to do. (Sam, early-career, secondary)

In Sam’s account it is students who exercise power, not the teacher. They demand to be spoonfed and when they are not, there is backlash, pressuring Sam to operate in ways he disdains. Veteran teacher Tony teaches at an academically selective high school with a long history of providing education for ‘gifted’ students. And yet negotiating the pressures of performativity is not straightforward for him either, even as a more experienced teacher.

I was just thinking that since I’ve come to this school, you know, kids here tend to try to drag you down to the bland, just drag you down to, like, the spoon feed. So if you try and engage them through other ways they’re less responsive than if you just say ‘This is the test’ or just write it on the board and they love it, you know. They don’t actually have to think or whatever. I kind of thought, you know, my teaching strategies have changed more to the bland. Not because of me but because of the kids. Drag you down to the bland. Does that make sense? (Tony, late-career, secondary)

Tony’s damning phrase ‘drag you down to the bland’ (repeated three times) is a devastating critique of how students, shaped by testing regimes, are pressuring teachers to yield to their demands and ‘spoon feed’ them. With so much of students’ futures riding on how they perform in high-stakes exams like the HSC, teachers like Kaylah, Jack, Sam, and Tony pinpoint the worrying challenges teachers now face. Their remarks invoke Foucault, for whom the distribution of students according to grades constitutes a ‘hierarchizing penalty’ that exercises over them a constant pressure to conform to the same model, so that ‘they might all be like one another’ (Foucault 1977, 182). We also find echoes of McNeil’s notion of ‘defensive teaching’ (McNeil 2000, 11). Here a ‘vicious cycle’ is set off when teachers and students fall into a ritual that tends towards minimal standards and minimal effort, or just enough to obtain the required marks. Such conditions, now common in many classrooms, reveal how ‘numbers bite deep into practice, into subjectivity and how they do the work of governing us’ (Ball 2015, 300).

Nowhere are these effects of performativity more apparent than in relation to test results. While teachers in our study often spoke negatively about the standardized testing climate in their schools, they also consistently reported feeling professionally validated when their students were successful on measures of assessment like NAPLAN and the HSC. Certainly, having comparative data at their fingertips drives practice for many teachers, like Pamela:

We have good results. There is no motivation [to change]. No-one will come into our school and question our results and that’s the bottom line. If it’s not broke, why change it? … Why change your practice when we see kids year in, year out getting the Band 6s,³ getting the Band 5s, getting the high 90s in the ATAR. Where’s the motivation? (Pamela, school leader, secondary)

And yet, the threat of under-performance paces ever near the school gates. Just three months later, the time between her initial and post-QTR interviews, Pamela changed her position as the school’s NAPLAN results declined:

I did an analysis of NAPLAN and HSC and particularly around writing. We didn’t do very well in NAPLAN writing for Year 9 this year and the question that my Principal posed was ‘Do we have a crisis in writing?’ So we will need to spend quite a bit of professional development time and money next year on looking at extended writing and upskilling our teachers around extended writing … But we absolutely need to spend money around professional development on that next year. (Pamela, school leader, secondary)

According to the numbers, something is now ‘broke’ at Pamela’s school, given poor results in NAPLAN writing for Year 9. This is a problem which needs fixing; PD is seen by Pamela as the natural remedy. Suddenly, with data to drive change, she is now persuaded to spend time and money on professional development to improve student outcomes. The hard logic of performance culture demands that organisations are obligated to spend money where measurable returns are likely to be achieved and, with an eye to competition, improvement cannot be left to chance (Ball 2003). From this standpoint, Pamela has little choice but to divert a significant proportion of her PD budget to upskilling her teachers in writing. Certainly, her additional comment ‘teachers have been shown the data and the data is very powerful’ conveys reverence for the omnipotence of the hungry beast.

On their own terms: re-imagining teacher accountability

Despite the ascendancy of performativity, several scholars have challenged dominant accountability models in education, arguing for more ‘intelligent’ (Lingard 2009, 15), ‘productive and educative’ accountabilities (Lingard, Martino, and Rezai-Rashti 2013), or what Cochran-Smith (2021) refers to as ‘intelligent professional responsibility’. The common ground is a call to reclaim or reimagine accountability in education through alternative paradigms. How might we shift the locus of control from an externally imposed surveillance apparatus to a more productive set of criteria controlled by teachers to improve practice? In the analysis which follows, we explore teachers’ initial impressions of QTR professional development and the effects of their participation; in particular, how they were enabled to enact accountability differently.

Although QTR professional development offers the opportunity for collaborative analysis of practice without authoritarian or punitive external surveillance, teachers like Jade and Jodi were initially wary. Lesson observation by peers caused particular concern. Mid-career primary teacher Jodi, for example, imagined a barrage of negative judgment: ‘Nobody really knew what we were getting ourselves in for, because initially we thought we’d have people descending on the school to come and watch us teach’. Similarly, Jade (early-career, primary) voiced concerns that ‘people are going to be looking over what I do with a fine-toothed comb and picking out everything that I’m doing wrong’.

Notably, both Jodi and Jade reference nameless faceless ‘people’ looking over what I do, invoking the all-seeing panoptic gaze probing the sanctity of their classrooms. Yet, as Jade explains, closed door teaching, the last line of defence against performative accountability, can produce feelings of isolation and reduce opportunities for meaningful appraisal to enhance practice.

Some schools you go into you’re very insular. You’re in your own classroom. You’re in your own world. Nobody comes in. Nobody checks what you’re doing. You’ve got nobody to kind of validate that what you’re doing is right, is wrong, could be done better or that you are doing something fantastic, let’s share it with somebody else … So, I’ve really enjoyed that [in QTR] and benefitted from that. (Jade, early-career, primary).

There is sad irony in the fact that, despite her teaching performance being perpetually surveilled through student outcomes, nobody, as Jade emphasises three times, was there to support her professional growth until she participated in QTR. The oppressive climate of control and critique in the classrooms in which teachers labour each day is also highlighted by Kaylah (mid-career, secondary) who emphasises insecurity and fear of being judged: ‘one of the biggest things that people are scared of’ is ‘open doors. Scared of people coming into their rooms, scared of criticism’.

As teachers engaged with QTR, however, we saw a profound turnaround in their willingness to embrace open-door teaching in a profession (in)famous for teachers’ apparent preference for working alone. William, for example, is not only comfortable with others watching, but he also now seeks it out:

At this school we’re firm believers that leaders in the school should be great classroom teachers. I’ve always believed that. Now because of doing the QTR I’m always asking my principal to come in, ‘Do you want to come in and watch a writing lesson?’. A lot of people are scared to have their principal in. I want to have my principal in there. I want her or him to come in and to watch what my kids are doing and I want them to give me feedback. So I’m not scared about that. I’m not scared to have people come in. (William, early-career teacher, primary)

Given the extraordinary responsibility teachers like William face for facilitating strong student outcomes, opening their classroom doors to colleagues is just a first step. Clearly, they also require evidence and a rigorous pedagogical/professional basis from which to act. For Sarah, QTR arms teachers with the conceptual tools to support a viable, alternative form of accountability that speaks to the issue of quality teaching.

It’s a criteria-based judgment, it’s got a professional language associated with it, it’s got the support of research and evidence base so I think that’s the benefit to it … it was so nice to be able to just come back to, “What did you see? What did you observe? How is that measured and reflected in the [Quality Teaching Classroom Practice] Guide? Can you support your statements with evidence from the guide?” … This is not about being right or wrong. It’s about what did you see, what did you hear, what did you observe, how does that measure up against the framework?” (Sarah, mid-career, primary)

Sarah’s repetition of concrete action verbs (see, hear, observe) signals her internalisation of key concepts in the QT model. However, the attendant numerical coding of lessons,⁴ with a 1-to-5 scale for each of the 18 elements, presented a significant challenge. Indeed, teachers like Tilly had difficulty imagining observation through coding in a less judgmental manner.

I’ve got a real issue with there being numbers attached to it. I know that you need to be able to qualify whether it [the lesson] has achieved an element well or not, but ‘good’, ‘medium’, ‘bad’, I don’t know of another way to do it apart from numbers and I guess my concern is then if they roll this out just like anything else, it just becomes about the numbers. (Tilly, early-career, primary)

In performative regimes that constrain teachers’ work, Tilly’s concerns are not without foundation. Her account conveys a sense of powerlessness in the face of departmental policies and a reluctance to quantify practice – it just becomes about the numbers. It is notable, then, that teachers like Kate are able to develop a different understanding of what ‘the numbers’ mean after participation in QTR.

When we were initially doing [QTR], it was a bit like everyone was nervous to be coded and I think they thought the wrong thing of what the coding meant. … It’s not that –‘five’ you’re a good teacher and ‘one’ you’re a bad teacher. It’s not like that. … The teachers know now that that’s not what it is, so they’re not so scared and fearful of that judgment. (Kate, early-career, secondary)

When performative regimes promote conformity and aversion to pedagogical risk-taking, what Lo (2012, 15) refers to as ‘the spirit of experimentation’, PD arguably has a critical role to play in ameliorating Kate’s fear of judgment. The tacit message of performativity is that to stray ‘off-lesson’ is to imperil student outcomes, a directive that some teachers, like Jenny, did not have the authority to challenge, prior to participating in QTR:

Being younger you’re always, like, ‘Oh, my God’, you really freak out that the kids aren’t going to know something. They’re going to miss something for assessment time. But I think with this, [QTR has] given me [permission] to take more risks for myself in the classroom to try something completely different and say, ‘Okay, does this work better than trying to bombard them with information?’ … [Now] it’s like ‘Okay, are they really understanding everything?’. I want them to be able to show me now by doing, rather than just regurgitating what I say. (Jenny, early-career, secondary)

Jenny’s emphasis on students demonstrating their understanding by doing rather than regurgitating marks a shift in risk taking and taking control of her pedagogy. Somewhat paradoxically, although creative flexible thinking is promoted by governments as an asset, mechanistic performativity practices stifle this kind of thinking (Appel 2020). By contrast, QTR enabled teachers in our study to act in new and creative ways, further elaborated in Ella’s account:

I like the energy in a room when things are working well, when they’re engaged, when they’re focussed, when they’re on topic and they’re on task and they’re enjoying what they’re doing, they have that flow going. Those are always highlights for me. When you’re teaching like that, it feels like weaving, like you’re taking different parts from different sides of the room and you’re joining them together to present a picture to them of what it is that they’re learning. (Ella, early-career, secondary)

Ella’s powerful metaphor of weaving shows a teacher in control, a teacher who has rediscovered the joy of teaching and is aware of her students’ strengths. This valuing of creativity generates energy and engagement in her classroom. Precisely because teaching is not a narrowly technicist job, it follows that teachers reject the reduction of their work to its measurable elements (Cribb and Gewirtz 2007). And yet, Wendy highlights the inescapability of performativity, with her language of value add[ing] to students.

I’ve always liked [the QT Model] because I think it articulates very well teachers’ work which is not easily measurable or quantifiable, like creating widgets in a factory. We don’t produce little sausages. We value add to students and that is such a year-by-year prospect, because it’s [about] the kids, who they are when they come in, [where] we can take them, and what you can do with them. (Wendy, mid-career, secondary)

Enabling teachers to manoeuvre within the constraints of performative regimes is where professional development, such as QTR, comes into its own. As Jade points out, participating in QTR, while liberating for teachers, does not come at the expense of attending to student outcomes.

[Before QTR] I kind of felt that I had to conform to what was expected in the school even though it was not necessarily me and it’s not what I had experienced elsewhere. But I didn’t necessarily feel I had a lot of freedom in my classroom to do things the way I wanted to do, that I kind of had to do them the way I was told to do them … So I guess [QTR has] given me a bit more confidence to kind of think well as long as I’m meeting these objectives and I’m addressing these criteria and I’m helping my children to achieve their outcomes … it doesn’t have to be rigid. (Jade, early-career, primary)

In essence, QTR legitimises Jade’s decision to do things differently, less rigidly, with less prescription. It fosters what Priestley et al. (2012, 211) call ‘repertoires for manoeuvre’, that is, greater teacher agency to take alternative forms of action that serve their students well.

The emancipatory impact of QTR was especially apparent when teachers spoke of their readiness – either new or renewed – to take chances, to take more risks, after engaging in the PD. This would not normally be safe ground for relatively inexperienced teachers like Paul, who have become more confident to let learning evolve, rather than always tightly directing it.

If you look at the Quality Teaching Rounds, some people have been able to let go of the reins a little bit and let the class sort of go. As long as it’s within the parameters of what they need to get done at the end of the lesson, you can see where it goes and sometimes it does really build into something that you go ‘Wow, I couldn’t have planned that lesson even if I tried’. (Paul, early-career, secondary)

Paul’s emphasis on permission to ‘let go of the reins’ suggests how tightly controlled and oppressive performative environments can be for inexperienced teachers. His Wow signals a pleasure and excitement in teaching he had previously lost, even at this early stage of his career.

In sum, our interviews convey how teachers wrestle with the demands of performativity that reduce teaching to a concern with mechanistic outputs. The narrow emphasis on testing and accountability profoundly shapes their practice with negative consequences for both teachers and students. On the other hand, the interviews demonstrate that PD can equip teachers with powerful conceptual tools, leading to more authentic accountabilities (Hardy, 2021) and enabling them to manoeuvre within the constraints of performative regimes without negatively impacting student outcomes.

Discussion and conclusion

In this paper, we have examined how dominant regimes of accountability can be reconceptualised within the neoliberal social imaginary and how meaningful PD (such as QTR) can open up ‘spaces of freedom’ (Foucault 1988, 36) and enable teachers to reclaim accountability on their own terms. Many scholars have noted that technologies of performativity are the norm across Australia (e.g. Gobby, Keddie, and Blackmore 2018); fewer have documented teachers’ experiences within this context. Our interviews revealed performativity’s deep discursive hold on educators, regardless of their school context or years of teaching. Indeed, the taken for granted ways teachers talk about testing in their schools, especially Jack’s quip, ‘this place is a bit of an ATAR factory,’ reveals how deeply standardised assessment measures are driving classroom instruction, and shaping thinking about teaching and learning (Buchanan 2015). Indeed, school leaders disclosed how performance data shapes motivation for change and guides their investment in PD as a fundamental tactic for lifting teacher performance and student outcomes.

In the context of contemporary accountability regimes, it could be argued that the drive to improve the quality of teaching through PD is, itself, another manifestation of performativity. Indeed, QTR, the PD approach used as an exemplar for this analysis, shares markings of performativity’s signature apparatus, including surveillance (lesson observation) and numerical ratings of quality (coding). As the interviews indicate, the lesson observations and coding process were powerful triggers for some teachers’ performance anxieties. Their concerns about the numerical coding system in QTR as risky, potentially used for performative purposes, not only make sense but are crucial to heed. Moreover, without proper acknowledgement of the conceptual foundations of QTR, the PD could hypothetically be applied in performative ways. We demonstrate the reverse was the case – the reciprocal lesson observations and confidential approach to coding offered protection from performativity and provided productive support for teachers wanting to teach well. Reconfigured through QTR, the accountability apparatus of ‘surveillance’ did not become the threatening beast. Rather, QTR enabled a re-imagining of accountability, shifting the locus of control from externally imposed surveillance to teacher judgment and collaborative engagement with relevant criteria. QTR created opportunities – spaces of freedom – for teacher agency to flourish (Foucault 1990).

Proponents of neo-liberalism have repeatedly sought to legitimate and extend their agenda through claims that there is no alternative, no escape from performativity. With a neoliberal agenda firmly entrenched in education policy, it would be naïve to expect its influence to lessen in years to come (Sachs and Mockler 2012). Hence, the challenge for the profession, and PD in particular, is to minimise the harmful effects of performativity, including its constraints on teacher professionalism. Ball (2003) questions whether the form and substance of performativity can ever be separated, whether the beast can be ‘tamed.’ He is doubtful, and may well be proved right, at the macro or system level. However, as we have demonstrated in this analysis of QTR, it is possible to conceive of a system of metrics that is benign or even progressive. Teachers report QTR employs metrics in ways they find productive. Importantly, it allows teachers to breathe in the spaces of freedom that exist when PD is reimagined for professional rather than performative purposes.

Freedom always involves strategically reworking the power relations to which we are subjected (Allen 2011). As Foucault (1997, 298) put it, the issue is not that power relations, or the strategies by which individuals try to direct and control the conduct of others, are something bad in themselves; rather the problem is to ‘acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, and also the morality, the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these games of power with as little domination as possible.’ In QTR, there is power, certainly, but also reprieve from the ‘terrors’ of performativity that individualise and fragment teaching (Ball 2016). This collaborative approach to PD, positioned as it is within a performative education system, enables teachers to support each other’s professional growth and create a new field of judgment about what counts in teaching. This field of judgment (Ball 2003) enables teachers to evaluate and improve practice using meaningful professional criteria rather than metrics external to teaching. Opening up classrooms and watching each other teach fostered teachers’ accountability to their peers and their students. In this case, surveillance is not performative but productive and no longer terrifying.

Our study demonstrates that PD can create spaces of freedom even within regimes of performative accountability. We contend that Foucault would not see our teachers’ talk of creativity, spontaneity, resistance, risk-taking, collaboration and care as the words of disciplined subjects (Foucault 1977). Teachers embraced QTR because it enacted accountability in a way that is professionally validating. It seeks improvement in terms that resonate with teachers’ own values and philosophies, enabling them to engage with concepts and language for quality teaching which are ‘not trapped in the destitution of performativity’ (Standish 2002, 165 cited in Gibbons 2018).

We argue, therefore, that PD is a strategic site for altering the field of judgment in education; from a field that holds teachers to account for compliance, to one that empowers them to exercise professional judgment while giving account to their colleagues. In so doing, PD can help teachers recapture the pleasure and energy of the teaching learning relationship, and still attend closely to student outcomes. We invite others to explore this reconceptualization of PD as a ‘courageous counterpoint’ (Ball 2016, 1057) to confront the beast and halt the insidious undermining of teacher professionalism that is so endemic to performativity.

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support provided in the preparation of this paper by the team of casual research assistants who visited schools during data collection. We would also like to extend our sincere thanks to the excellent team of research project officers, research assistants and administrative staff who work behind the scenes at the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre and whose work supports projects such as this. We are most grateful to the school leaders, teachers and students who participated in this project.

Our gratitude is extended to the NSW Department of Education and the Australian Research Council for funding the project that sits behind these analyses. Finally, we acknowledge the University of Newcastle for its ongoing support of our research programs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council; NSW Department of Education.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Gore

Jenny Gore is a Laureate Professor in Education and Director of the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre. Jenny began her career in education as a secondary physical education teacher before commencing her academic career. Her educational and research interests have consistently centred on quality and equity, ranging across such topics as reform in teacher education, pedagogical change, and professional development.

Bernadette Rickards

Bernadette Rickards is a registered nurse with a Public Health degree. Prior to joining the Teachers and Teaching Research Centre (TTRC), Bernadette worked chiefly on the qualitative component of a large health services research project in Central Australia. At TTRC she finds strong similarities between the challenges faced by teachers and healthcare practitioners as both professions strive to provide quality teaching, and care, respectively.

Leanne Fray

Leanne Fray is a Senior Research Fellow in Education. A former teacher, Leanne has extensive experience in qualitative and mixed methods research and has previously worked on research projects across such disciplines as health, education, and social science. Her research interests include improving student access and participation in post-secondary education.

Notes

1. Higher School Certificate (HSC) is the highest educational award in NSW schools and is granted to students who have satisfactorily completed Year 11 and 12.

2. Australian Tertiary Admission Rank.

3. HSC performance bands provide meaning to the HSC mark. Band 6 indicates the highest level of performance. Band 6 = 90–100 marks, Band 5 = 80–89 marks, Band 4 = 70–79 marks, Band 3 = 60–69 marks, Band 2 = 50–59 marks, Band 1 = 0–49 marks. (Education Standards Authority 2021).

4. QTR guards against the use of coding as top-down accountability, by requiring confidentiality within PLCs and recognising limitations of the coding scheme; namely, acknowledging that not every element will code highly in each lesson and the context and purpose of the lesson must be taken into account.