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Chartered Teacher - the end of the beginning
This is a sad day for me as a Chartered Teacher. It is a sad day not because of the furore in the recent press re cutbacks etc, but because this is my final article for Teaching Scotland in my series on becoming a Chartered Teacher. As I mentioned earlier in the series, the doors which opened for me (pushed or swung through!) have been varied and many. Being asked to write this series is but one! And a very enjoyable task it has been too.
I certainly did not envisage a year ago, when asked to write these contributions over the year, that I would be writing my final article with so much pertinent discussion taking place around the Chartered Teacher status.
However, the very positive end with which I can conclude this series has been fuelled with the huge amount of interest and positive discussion which has been generated by the short-term decision to suspend further incremental payments to teachers advancing up the chartered teacher scale at their own expense. It would be a tragedy if highly motivated classroom teachers were to see their own hard work being undervalued and unrewarded in the long term.
Equally worrying may be the possible effects on qualified teachers who may now once again see advancement only via an administrative management role. This would be at the detriment of the strong development of classroom skills and curricular involvement that the CT programme promotes. Such a possibility may become a reality if the universities and other CT module providers are forced through budget cuts to suspend the support of their extremely valuable CT modules. Maybe it is now the time to expand and encourage the access to such CPD courses to promoted and unpromoted staff alike. The modules are all based on reflection and active classroom research underpinned by current theory and practice. This could further enhance learning and teaching for a common and consistent methodology.
With the shifting sands in education generally, Chartered Teachers the country over are better able to cope than some in the profession due to the very fact that they have been actively challenging their own thinking as part of their professional development.
In my first article last June, I mentioned that McCrone and his team saw "a perceived benefit of rewarding dedicated professional teachers who chose to remain as teaching specialists, and further help their professional development in a structured way." Given the current climate within the teaching profession, I am even more convinced of the value of this rationale.