Is teaching like other jobs, and is it a profession?

Educational Psychology might be defined rather poorly as the practice of applying an understanding (probably based on psychological research) of the systems of education to educational problems as discerned by the Psychologist or by actors within the system (whether teachers, parents, or the students themselves).
This leaves us thirsty to understand what education might be. At its heart education aims to teach or to set up situations in order to provide teaching and/or learning. I can't really see any point of an educational system that doesn't do that, which seems to me to show that this definition is useable.

Now, the problem arises that we must accept that one can become educated without a teacher. While we can argue about the effectiveness of auto-didacticism, it must be acknowledged to exist and be successful on occasion. In fact, I would say that the whole point of education is to produce auto-didacts. The most lasting legacy of my degree, of my inculcation into education, is that I can now quite independent of the direction of another direct myself to educate myself. This is the whole reason of this blog and my whole strategy for impressing others that I should become an EdPsych.
This implies that teachers are not always useful. We can imagine education in some situations without teachers. Can we imagine a job being done in other spheres without the main tradespeople being involved?
Well, we can build a house without a professional builder, and this is known as DIY. We can do without solicitors and draft legal documents ourselves - legal DIY. We can handle the catering of our own wedding to save money, and so on and so on. I am sure we could think of multiple examples of DIY. However, I would argue that in all these cases we would need to educate ourselves in some respect in order to Do It Ourselves.

Do we need to be educated about education, to be taught to be teachers, in order to teach? It must be obvious that learning, teaching, and informal educations must have been going on for a long time previous to the first schools, the first universities, the first government bodies. It can, on this basis, be argued that teaching is a process of refining the essential skills of communication in order to pass on information. We have educated each other since before formal education, and we learn without being taught. It seems to me that there is some essential difference between the status of teaching and the status of, say, being a fully-qualified and acknowledged lawyer.
Whereas a lawyer must learn the ins-and-outs of a particular fixed system that is what it is because that is how it has been made, teachers do not exactly live in such a fixed world. In fact many would argue that teaching is more akin to some sort of art, subtly doing what is necessary while attempting to 'meet the student halfway'. This involves telling the student what to do at the same time as trying to fit what must be done to what the student can do. And what this leaves a student with is not just the teaching, but hopefully also a clarified process of learning that they continue with independently.

It is possible to see teaching as just a prompt for learning independently. According to Socrates, teaching only brings out what a person already knows, as everybody was born knowing everything. While this romantic notion is laughable it can be seen why it is believable - when you teach somebody something, when they learn something, it quickly becomes quite as obvious as if it was always known. This notion also leaves teaching as quite superfluous, just a reminder of what was alreday known.
Perhaps a more potent argument against our currenty system of teaching according to Socrates and Plato is teaching should not involve being paid as a professional. This involves some centralised body that can control what is being taught, and suddenly teaching becomes a vehicle of social control. Whether this is actually a beneficial control would be, to some philosophers, a pointless argument, since the threat of abuse is so awesome.



I would say that these strands are made from an assumption from Ivan Ilych's "Deschooling Society", that formal education is an unecessary perversion of informal education; and a touching Classical ideal of intellectual autonomy. While I admit these points are ideological and I present them merely as rhetorical exercuse, it should at least be evidently factual that teaching is in some ways different to accepted professions. Let me sum up the evidence:

• Teaching and learning can be entirely separate - one can teach another without them learning, one can not teach them and they can still learn. It seems impossible for the same to be true that building a house and the house itself can be so disconnected, or that a lawyer can go into a court-room and find that the law process is totally disconnected from their efforts. (Side issue: We must ask in what way 'teaching' can be measured, defined, and judged if one cannot rely on teaching producing learning at all reliably)
  
• The link between teaching and learning is not precise and scientific, nor can it adequately be defined by a social system or dictated by a political body
  
• Teaching in an attempt to cause learning is therefore often felt to be an 'art', and to be effective must be altered to suit individuals and is only effective when the individual chooses to learn while being taught, and this management of learners is notoriously unrepeatable across different situations and contexts
  

It seems to me that a real profession is something that can be managed exactly in certain core respects, such as how law is controlled entirely by the laws passed and its practise is strictly controlled.
Teaching can not be controlled entirely - we cannot tell teachers to do all things the same without destroying teaching itself. And we certainly cannot specify the learning that will go on! So we can neither control what teaching is or how it is done. Please note that it is not just uncertainty of outcome that bothers me. Medicine has such uncertainty, but it can still be controlled and prescribed far more than teaching.



It seems to me to be quite threatening for teaching to be a profession. 'Profession', to me, implies a control of content and of practise and teaching does not flourish under such control. Teaching is important, and teachers are important - this does not make teaching a profession or teachers professionals. Teachers may deserve respect, but this does not make them professionals.
Perhaps it is as ludicrous to call teaching a profession as it would be to call the process it is both intimately bound up in and also sometimes entirely separate from, learning, a profession also.

What is Educational Psychology? Preliminary thoughts.

I am quite aware that, of the core texts of educational psychology courses in Britain that I have seen, the courses are focused on Special Educational Needs. This seems to imply that the basic job of an Educational Psychology is to diagnose Special Educational Needs in children, and indeed that is what they are required to do within our current educational system as far as I have currently read. Yet, this has led to the appellation of "problem pimp", the idea that edpsychs simply go around bringing to light these problems and then disappearing to let someone else deal with it. I imagine that this is most likely to happen in infant and primary schools.

However, working in a Sixth Form College I do not see this initial diagnosing of problems and the resulting aftermath of difficulty and dislike. Instead I see students who are aware of, but have hidden their educational needs all their life. I see students struggling with the concept of being labelled. On the reverse side, I see students desperately wanting to be labelled as an excuse. And, otherwise, I see that almost all students have a diagnosable need. To give one common but perhaps counter-intuitive example, some students are so hard-working and task-focused that this behaviour starts to impair them educationally and even emotionally, the stress becoming crippling. It might even be said that, generally, the easier a student finds education and assessment the less likely they will be to succeed to their potential, except in some very lucky cases. There will always be points at which hard-working students simply cannot cope.

I want to see a widening and breadthening of educational psychology provision. I think educational psychology is necessary all over the place, for all sorts of learners, in all sorts of settings. I do not think that educational psychology is useful if it mainly exists to diagnose the SEN of young children. I imagine that there are two good reasons to hold back from intergrating educational psychologists into schools and make them work closely with classes, individuals and teachers. These would be money and territoriality. Educational Psychologists are fantastically expensive and we still need to pay for teachers. Also, teachers have a general feeling of 'professionalisation', and don't like their toes being stepped on. I get a feeling that this sometimes leads to a mutual distrust, as if there are opposing 'sides' that must do battle.

Educational Psychology should have a lot to say about education, learning, and teaching. It should not just be concentrating on SEN to the exclusion of NEN - 'normal' educational needs.

Obligatory 'purpose of this blog' blog post

I'm a sixth-form psychology teacher interested in becoming an educational psychologist. Hopefully writing in this blog will act as a spur to read around on the relevant issues - educational, psychological, critical - and therefore become more knowledgeable. This is very important as I am quite aware that many psychology teachers aim to become educational psychologists simply to escape teaching - "I guess I can do that sort of stuff, it's about helping dyslexics isn't it?" This is, in my eyes, comparable to a Lego enthusiast launching happily into an architecture course as if it will all be quite easily assimilated. To avoid this pitfall I will learn and express my learning in a series of pointlessly opinionated blog-posts that won't even seem convincing to me in a month's time.