Tom Mahoney Archives

The use of “Evidence-Based-Practice” (EBP) as a discourse harms teachers. I’m not the first person to say that here. Nicole Bunker, in a previous post, describes the landscape of Australian education as awash with the dominance of the “what works” agenda.

She says that the all-encompassing desire to impose EBP has become an oppressive force upon teachers. It promotes a narrow base of evidence in relation to “what works”. It removes teachers from the position to make judgments of what is best in their contexts. And it obscures the structural problems that perpetuate inequity in Australian schools. This is something that teachers need to push back against.

I want to add to the discussion surrounding this issue for teachers. I’d like to propose communities of practice (CoPs) can serve as an important opportunity for teachers to challenge the oppression of EBP. It can also be a means of supporting teachers to reclaim their voice and agency in education.

Where we find ourselves

Due to the complexity of the Australian education landscape, teachers are often left to navigate diverse and conflicting educational ideologies about Australian schooling. Yet, when EBP is applied in education this fact is ignored in favour of narrow ideas of education. EBP relies on ideological perspectives that see the role of the teacher as one that has a causal effect in student learning. This view is uncritically accepted by many. The tendency for policymakers over the past 20 years has been to follow this logic by applying top-down reform to teaching and initial teacher education (perceived as inputs). These are then assumed to achieve increases in various quantitative measures of student success (viewed as the expected outputs).

Ideas about “what works” in education always get caught up in ideologies of how schools should function and how teachers ought to teach. This is rarely acknowledged. As a result, EBP becomes more of a legitimation tool to enforce reform and discourage critique rather than move the project of Australian education forward to a more desirable future. We cannot expect that “what works” in one school community will inevitably achieve the same result in another. Teachers therefore need to be given opportunities to engage with evidence that considers its appropriateness to their context. By ignoring the importance of context, EBP ideologies ultimately limit the ability for teachers to engage in this important work of navigating and challenging “evidence”, as policy continues to favour “top-down” mandate approaches.

It attempts to redefine what it means to be a teacher

EBP also attempts to redefine the very nature of what it means to be a teacher. It places itself within a paradigm that wants to claim teaching as an effective and efficient profession. That is unrealistic. We need not – indeed we can’t – see the teacher as wholly efficient or effective. There are many aspects of education that are neither effective nor efficient, but are still valued. The move to support young Australians in understanding consent and respectful relationships is just one example of this.

What counts as evidence is highly contested. It therefore needs to be considered in light of the group or organisation citing it. This is especially true now, as the push for “what works” in education becomes increasingly driven by vested interests. Ultimately, the uptake of evidence depends upon the ideological perspectives of teachers, school leaders and the wider community in which schooling takes place. Professional development that allows opportunities for teachers to thoughtfully consider research evidence (including EBP) and evaluate its worth in relation to context affirms the authority that each school has to meet the needs of their communities.

We need to remind ourselves that it is not evidence that will move education forward, but the current and future decisions of teachers and school leaders.

Why we need to centre on teachers

Although it has long disappeared in the media cycle, teacher supply in Australia remains at crisis level. The focus of our federal government has been on recruitment. In the meantime, state governments continue to pile on the mandates ignoring the messages this sends to our current teachers.

If educational discourse continues to treat teachers as simply obedient implementers of somebody else’s EBP, we will continue to lose many passionate and powerful teachers.

What we need – maybe now more than ever – is to find ways of empowering teachers to enact intentional practice that supports the purposes and aims of education in their communities.

Creating new futures

My research is interested in how a community of practice (CoP) model can be used to provide a space for teachers to explore and challenge the ideologies that currently impact on their teaching practice, including (but not limited to) that of EBP.

A CoP consists of a group of teachers that join together regularly around a common concern. They learn how to improve their practice as a result of their interactions with one another. CoPs respect teachers as public intellectuals, who engage with one another to discern from “what works” in their context in tandem with (as opposed to being dictated to by) evidence.

Along with supporting teacher retention, belonging and agency, CoPs are a powerful opportunity for teachers to reclaim their voice and ownership of their practice, through the interrogation of the ideologies that impact on their work, including those of EBP.

EBP favours “top-down” approaches to educational problems and displaces questions of purpose with questions of process and effectiveness. CoPs provide an important counter-practice to EBP, which is “bottom-up” in its approach and allows space for teachers to critique and wrestle with EBP in light of the ideologies that they – along with their colleagues and broader school community – hold about education. CoPs allow for teachers to be heard, in a climate where teacher concerns are at best ignored, or at its worst, silenced.

My research will investigate the extent to which providing space for this kind of reflective practice might make a difference in the lives of teachers currently working in Australian schools.

Interested in taking action?

I am currently looking for teachers who are interested in participating in a CoP to explore and reflect on the various ideologies impacting on their work in 2025.

Are you, or someone you know, interested in participating in this project? I have included details of the project at the end of this post to consider.

It’s about time we prioritised spaces for teachers to critically engage with the ideologies that seek to claim education on their behalf.

This project seeks to do just that.

Are you a critically reflected teacher?

Are you a teacher who thinks deeply and critically about your practice? Or is this something you have never really had an opportunity to do but would like to engage in with others who think the same way?

I am seeking a group of committed critically reflective teachers, who are eager to experience what kind of transformational impact individual and collective critical thinking can have on their practice. Where you perceive yourself on the path of becoming “critically reflective” is unimportant. What is important is that you have a desire to think deeply about your practice!

In 2025, as part of my research project exploring critical thinking and teacher agency, participants will have the opportunity to join together in a community with other like-minded teachers, exploring the ideological nature of education and their work as teachers. Participation in this study will involve approximately 7 hours of commitment over a period of around 18 months. Participation will involve dialogue and reflection upon the various ideological impacts of teacher work in various Zoom conference meetings and through an asynchronous private chat group, followed by an individual interview at the conclusion of the project. I am interested in your personal experiences and opinions, not in information about specific schools and their practices.

For many of you who have either listened to my podcast segment, Ideology in Education, on the TER Podcast, or have read my posts on my Substack, The Interruption, you will know that this is something I am deeply passionate about and believe to be truly important for all teachers.

So it doesn’t matter whether you:

teach primary or secondary,
have been a teacher for 20 years or have just started,
work in the government, independent or catholic systems,
are on-going, part-time or casual.

If you’re a registered teacher currently teaching in Australia, you can get involved!

If this seems like something you would be interested in being involved in or have further questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email at tdmahone@deakin.edu.au and I will get back to you with further information about participating in the project.

Know of anyone who might be interested? If so, feel free to forward this information on (as is) via email or social media!

This study has received Deakin University ethics approval (reference number: HAE-24-046).

Tom Mahoney is a teacher and educator of secondary VCE mathematics and psychology students. He is currently completing a PhD in Educational Philosophy part time through Deakin University. His research explores the influence of dominant educational ideologies on teacher subjectivity. Tom is on LinkedIn.

What should we be talking about when we talk about teachers? Teachers’ pay, working conditions and the looming teacher shortage.

What are media talking about instead? A commonly suggested ‘solution’ to address concerns about standards in teaching: pre-prepared lessons, or, as the Grattan Institute describes them in a recent report, ‘high quality teaching materials’.

The Grattan Institute, a thinktank, notes in its summary of the report that: “of 2,243 teachers and school leaders across Australia, … only 15 per cent of teachers have access to a common bank of high-quality curriculum materials for all their classes.”

In a departure from any claims to objectivity, the report paints a picture of teachers “being left to fend for themselves, creating lessons from scratch and scouring the internet and social media for teaching materials”.

This is yet another example of a large scale survey conducted by those with only a tangential relationship to the profession. It ignores the views of many teachers and offers a ready-made solution – one likely to become another costly and wasted expense for taxpayers. It also fails to note such approaches have been tried in some jurisdictions in Australia – with limited success, for example, the Curriculum-to-Classroom program in Queensland was found to be deficient. The surest outcome of such an approach would be a new revenue stream for specifically chosen edu-businesses as they rush to be selected as the provider of choice.

There are already a range of paid options for teachers to access similar resources through sites like Twinkl, Teachers Pay Teachers, TES and others. Admittedly, these are paid resources; we argue it is unreasonable for teachers to pay for any curriculum resources out-of-pocket. However, even a ‘free’ version seems misguided because it does not pay attention to the work – and the expertise – that is central to teachers’ practice. And this practice includes the careful design and development of learning materials. This is not something that can be outsourced.

As we say, the assumption and positioning of highly trained and university-qualified teachers, many of whom have trained for 4 or more years, as vulnerable and ‘fending for themselves’ is odd.

Planning lessons, finding, curating and developing resources is central to the work of teachers. Many teachers take great delight in carefully crafting lessons that leverage students’ interests; education is not, and never has been a one-size-fits-all model and any claim otherwise is undermining teachers, leaders and education support staff around Australia.

Teachers delivering content via a pre-prepared script or lesson might seem easier and simpler, but it remains difficult to see who benefits from a lifeless and unthinking teacher delivering someone else’s content. The key to teaching – and learning – lies in the human relationships between teachers and students. Those human relationships allow for careful contextualisation and design. It is that which drives teachers to search for just the right YouTube clip – the one that will appeal to that particular Year 9 Science class – not a sense of ‘fending for themselves’. Whereas teachers are responsible for their school students, families and communities, creators of ‘teacher-proof’ lesson banks are accountable to their corporate employers. As Lucinda McKnight reflects, ‘who would we rather have designing learning experiences for our own children?’.

Our new book, Empowering Teachers and Democratising Schooling: Perspectives from Australia has taken the focus of empowering teachers and outlines alternative, human-centric ways that teachers can be trusted and empowered to make decisions about their work, with the shared goal of democratising approaches to education. By combining theory, academic thinking and teachers’ best practice examples, the book provides a range of suggestions on many of the key challenges facing Australian education. For example, George Lilley outlines the way that teachers have been sidelined in favour of a rigorous adherence to educational research.Alex Wharton’s chapter imagines what an education system might look and function like if teachers were respected across all facets of their domain.

Polly Dunning’s chapter articulates the range of pressures placed upon teachers – and the effects this has on children. Not surprisingly, the nature of lesson planning is not mentioned, but rather the rise of administrivia and additional expectations placed upon teachers without additional time or funding provided.

As with many things in education, the best solutions require humans to be empowered to find their own solutions. Education is filled with complex, ‘wicked’ problems, where solutions can take time, and require contextual nuance. ‘Solutions’ such as those suggested by The Grattan Institute ultimately misunderstand the work of the teacher as technocratic and therefore something that can be standardised. Until we appreciate the complexity of what it means for teachers to teach, we will continue to be presented with claims of ‘teacher-proof’ policies and materials that ignore the diversity of the students, whilst disenfranchising the teaching profession.

If we are aiming to recruit and retain teachers, poorly thought out solutions such as providing teachers with pre-prepared teaching materials, as suggested by the Grattan Institute, is not the answer. This will do little to reduce workload, and it will also further damage the reputation of the teaching profession by limiting the expertise of teachers. These outcomes will do little to encourage people to become or remain teachers.

Instead, we must look towards long term solutions that recognise the expertise of the profession. Trust, empowerment and listening to the voices of the profession is key.

Keith Heggart is an early career researcher with a focus on learning and instructional design, educational technology and civics and citizenship education. He is a former high school teacher, having worked as a school leader in Australia and overseas, in government and non-government sectors.

Steven Kolber is a teacher at a Victorian public school, the founder of #edureading founder, secretary of Teachers Across Borders Australia and a proud member of @AEUvictoria. #aussieED Global Teacher Prize top 50 Finalist

Tom Mahoney is a teacher and educator of secondary VCE Mathematics and Psychology students, currently completing a PhD in Educational Philosophy part time through Deakin University. His research explores the influence of dominant educational ideologies on teacher subjectivity. You can keep up to date with Tom’s work via his fortnightly newsletter, The Interruption, via Substack. Tom is on Twitter @tommahoneyedu

Tom Mahoney

How we can challenge oppression from the ground up