Evaluación experimental

177 This study might offer the metaphor of the ‘silent staffroom’ to describe the absence of teacher voice that seems to exist at present in schools. For teachers, the implication of this study is for a louder collective voice which advocates for what actually works. This is true both within their individual context and at a broader national policy level. What teachers need to emphasise, perhaps, are not just the implications of performativity in terms of wellbeing or workload. This is perhaps occurring to some extent already and falling on unsympathetic or indifferent ears. What is perhaps needed is a greater articulation of the counter-productivity of much that occurs in the name of ‘performance’: how instrumentalism can wrench the focus from the learner; how performativity crowds out meaningful professional development. Teachers perhaps also need to be more conscious of unwitting or passive complicity with neoliberalism (Leaton-Gray, 2006), whilst gaining a keener sense of their psychological inculcation into this culture (Read, 2009; Sugarman, 2015). The notion of teacher agency could be important here and Carr (2015a), drawing on the work of Patrick (2013), articulates this as something not which for which ‘permission’ is sought, but rather that ‘it is heavily linked to creating and fighting for the circumstantial autonomy from which personal forms of autonomy might arise’ (Carr, 2015a, p112). This view of the teacher as an agitator for their own autonomy is a valuable one.

For school leaders, there is a clear need to engage with the good practice of their peers. By this it is meant that there are instances of school leaders who have proven able to foster and harness the benefits of constitutive motivation, despite the dominant national culture of performativity. This good practice needs to be shared, and embraced (how this might be achieved is described in section 7.5), emphasising the efficacy of such practices as much as their humanity. School leaders who have adopted these effective practices can also be encouraged to communicate their strategies to colleagues in other contexts. This empowerment of teachers needs to occur in an authentic fashion, rather than in a superficial or manipulative way. There is an argument that the true need is for a wholesale political re- trenching away from neoliberalism, however, in respect to what schools can do now, Dorman (2003) describes the positive motivational effects on teachers of a shared school mission, arguing that the more teachers understood/agreed with a collective ethos, the more resilient and driven they were likely to be. This would perhaps allow school leaders to access the more potent motivational states that are

presently undermined as a consequence of external regulation. What is meant by a ‘shared mission’ here is not that teachers should better understand why Ofsted, league tables, and exam results are so important to school leaders, or that school leaders pretend to share the goals of their teachers. This results in the ‘hollowed collegiality’ of Massy et al. (1994) or the yet more oppressive ‘vision work’ described by Courtney and Gunter (2015), where the façade of collaboration can be cast aside entirely

178 by an autocratic leadership. Instead, this articulation of a shared mission needs to be an authentic and truly consultative process. Deci et al. (1991) suggest that people naturally want to internalise

motivational processes unless prohibited from doing so, so this should be encouraging for school leaders.

For policymakers, an implication can be identified in relation to England’s school inspectorate. Given what appears to be the high prevalence of performativity workload, and given Ofsted’s (2017) apparent objections to this, it is now arguably necessary to conduct Section 5 inspections which actively look for and explicitly comment on evidence of school leaders increasing teacher workload for performativity reasons. There is a possible contradiction here (greater school leader performativity to reduce teacher performativity), but perhaps a useful and practical one, which may serve as at least a partial deterrent against instrumentalism. Likewise, in another consideration of how policy-level reform might work, Deci (2009) cites Feinberg et al. (2007) in the Israeli context and Connell and Broom (2004) in the United States as examples of more systematic attempts to integrate SDT principles into wider school reform (in the American instance this was at the level of various districts, rather than system-wide). These

interventions, in ordinarily highly neoliberal contexts, appear to demonstrate the value of school reform driven by the underlying principle of constitutive motivation. From a teacher’s perspective, the

American initiative included the conscious division of larger school organisations into smaller learning communities for professional development; it entailed affording teachers ‘some latitude to make decisions about issues relevant to them’ (Deci, 2009, p247); it advocated three hours formal common planning time on a weekly basis for collaboration; it recommended teachers choosing their own professional development modules.

These appear to be pragmatic measures rather than idealistic ones and, further, the emphasis on ‘some latitude’ as opposed to complete autonomy might prove more attractive to those nervous of fuller independence for teaching staff. Deci (2009) also emphasises the ideas of ‘alignment’ and ‘rigour’. While rigour is more self-evident, alignment in this sense is defined as being ‘consistent with state

standards…[but]…alignment is not an endorsement of the high-stakes assessments’ (Deci, 2009, p249). What this essentially seems to represent is a compromise between responsibility and accountability. Some might regard this as unsustainable because of a lack of logical consonance, whereas others might find the pragmatism of such an accommodation attractive. These processes are supported by ‘technical assistance’ (in effect an external adviser(s)) who, rather than impose reform ‘offer choice, provide a rationale for requested change, minimize pressure and control’ (Deci, 2009, p250). The success of this

179 American initiative is supported by other studies such as Levin et al. (2006) and Quint et al. (2005). Deci (2009) notes the particularly rapid improvements in Kansas City as a consequence of such initiatives, but also argues that the processes involved can be undermined where there is insufficient true commitment on the part of school leaders/administrators.