Let’s get the balance right!

“Life is a tightrope walk. One has to balance the do’s and don’ts.”

Haresh Sippy

In this post:

• Why balance matters when introducing new approaches in education
• The risks of treating complex challenges as if they were simple
• How recent reforms may unintentionally narrow teacher agency
• A call for trust-based, flexible, and research-informed practice

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Throughout my career I’ve had various mentors and friends remind me of how important it is to take a balanced approach when faced with challenges or difficult decisions – whether that be tackling something new, resolving conflicts in the workplace or reconciling apparently diverse views on a particular subject. As I reflect on my career I concede I’ve been an advocate for many of the approaches in education that might be labelled ‘progressive’, but in considering how I got there it’s been an almost ‘natural’ inclination to start from asking ‘why?’ which generally involves digging deep into the philosophical perspectives in which these are grounded, and using these understandings to help consider the many alternative ideas and views that are being expressed.

Of course, life is often about shifts that are occurring between one perspective and another – in my 50 years in education I’ve certainly seen a number of initiatives introduced that reflect a cycling between these different philosophical positions. We see this manifest in the arguments for and against the design of innovative learning environments, for example – generally portrayed in the media and by those advocating for one view or the other as a binary decision. Contributing to this dilemma is the fact that so many of the changes we experience are introduced in a way that doesn’t involve the level of ‘trust building’ required to achieve buy-in from all stakeholders. It simply becomes an argument based on ‘evidence’ and ‘research’ that is offered as authoritative and generally offered to support a particular view or perspective.

Another key issue is that a field such as education is notoriously ‘messy’ – the things we deal with are complex. Complicated problems are predictable, controllable, and designable while complex problems are unpredictable, self-organising and emergent. Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes. Complex problems, on the other hand, involve too many unknowns and too many interrelated factors to reduce to rules and processes.

Herein lies the problem we face in education. Too often, we’ve been endeavouring to address complex issues by treating them as complicated ones – offering solutions based on predictable, controllable and designable assumptions.

A couple of weeks ago I was presenting at a conference alongside Yong Zhao who was highlighting this very issue in his keynote address. He argued that despite decades of educational reforms, increased spending, and technology investments, student outcomes have consistently declined across OECD countries. He pointed to the evidence from the OECD data where average scores in math, reading, and science have been dropping for 25 years since international testing began and how, during this time, the ‘achievement gap’ has widened rather than closed. He was arguing that traditional one-size-fits-all approaches to education are fundamentally flawed and must be replaced with personalised learning that embraces individual strengths and prepares students for an AI-transformed world.

My prompt for writing this post came from reading an article this week in the Times Educational Supplement (TES) titled Why Phonics Hasn’t Won The Reading Wars Yet. The article provides a comprehensive and compelling overview of the global shift towards embracing a phonics-based approach to teaching reading, arguing that the phonics approach is now backed by a significant and growing body of cognitive science research. The article delves into the history of the so-called ‘reading wars‘ that have waged over past decades, and describes the efforts in a number of countries around the world where a phonic-based approach is being introduced.

From my perspective the evidence is compelling – many of the ways we’ve been attempting to teach reading simply haven’t worked for significant numbers of students in our population. Equally compelling is the evidence that phonic-based approaches do work for these students. We hear the argument from many of our most experienced teachers and education leaders that the use of phonics-based approaches have always been a part of the ‘kete‘ of pedagogical strategies used. I’d agree – however, the evidence would suggest we haven’t been using them in sufficiently targeted ways or with sufficient rigour given the steady decline in literacy rates across many decades.

So the case for a radical shift in how we teach reading seems justified as we’re seeing across many areas of the developed world. But are we at risk of yet another, unbalanced pendulum swing by embracing this solution as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, applied uniformly across all areas of our schooling system?

Alison Arrow, associate dean of the Academic Faculty of Education at the University of Canterbury shares her concerns about this in the TES article quoted here:

More phonics in classrooms is a huge win after decades of approaches that weren’t helping pupils to learn to read, Arrow says. But, she adds, the zeal with which schools are now adopting phonics presents its own problems.

“The pendulum has swung all the way to the other end and didn’t stop in the middle,” she says. “There’s lots of great things going on, lots of great phonics, but sometimes [practitioners are] coming from an approach where you must teach every child everything you know.

“That sounds great, but actually, not all children need everything. What we’re finding is that some children are being pushed backwards in their reading instruction instead of continuing to be supported.”

Arrow is also quoted in the article as saying:

‘Explicit instruction is incorrectly viewed as teacher-centred, boring, passive, authoritative and lecture-like’

In my travels around schools and conversations with education leaders over the past couple of months – both here in NZ and in Australia, I sense Alison may be right. There is undoubted evidence that the increased use of phonic-based approaches is having a positive impact on the reading ability of many students – so the increased emphasis on this must be good thing, right? But in our haste to shift the pendulum completely to one end of the spectrum are we in danger of creating yet another set of problems?

Last week I listened to Russell Bishop speaking at a kahui ako event in Masterton. He spoke about the positive impact these phonics-based approaches were having, particularly for so many Māori learners who have for so long been failing within the current system. He drew attention to how the use of explicit teaching fits within the ITAR framework (based on Hattie and Marzano’s teaching model) from his Teaching to the North East book, a learning sequence that aligns with both the science of learning and what he argues North East teachers do every day.

This model provides a structured approach to teaching and learning with eight key steps, broken into three phases as outlined below:

• Induction Phase: (Direct teaching with clarity. Tell them what they’re learning and why.)
  1. Clear lesson focus
  2. Overt instruction
  3. Multiple learner familiarization opportunities.
• Trialing Phase: (Observe, give feedback and feedforward. Scaffold the learning.)
  4. Diverse contextual learning exposures
  5. Actionable feedback and feedforward mechanisms.
• Application: (Let them try it in collaboration with others.)
  6. Application of knowledge in subsequent learning phases
  7. Problem Solving with peer collaboration.
• Reflection: (Retrieve, review, and take ownership of what’s been learned.)
  8. Fostering student self-efficacy to reinforce belief in their capabilities.

Bishop’s caution was that while the current focus on phonic-based approaches to reading is a welcome shift in pedagogical practice – we have to recognise that this serves primarily to support the fidelity of teaching at the induction stage, and that it is important that for deep, enduring learning to occur, we must ensure that our approach as teachers includes the other three dimensions as well.

Unintended Consequences

About a week ago I was speaking with a senior education official about how teachers and schools were responding to the introduction ‘structured’ approaches to literacy and maths, and the resources being provided to support them in this. The view of this official, based on the feedback being received from schools and teachers, was that there is a high level of satisfaction (around 70% was quoted if I recall correctly) with the direction being taken. I have no doubt this is an accurate account based on the feedback being received – but I can’t help but wonder if, behind these reports of ‘satisfaction’ lies a more complex set of issues and concerns that have yet to be fully revealed?

There’s no doubt, based on what I’ve been seeing, that most schools and teachers are working to implement the ‘hour a day’ approach to structured literacy, maths and writing in some form or another, and that there’s also wide adoption of the free resources being made available to support these approaches. These indicators would certainly support the perception of high levels of ‘satisfaction’ being reported.

Sadly, however, I also see the emergence of some unintended consequences of the rather sudden introduction of these approaches and resources. While well researched and clearly useful as a way of addressing the decline in achievement in these areas, the pace at which they are being introduced is exposing areas of concern within our teaching profession as shared with me by many principals. Aside from the obvious impact on teacher workload and stress, several principals I’ve heard from are becoming concerned about the ‘uncritical’ adoption of these approaches by teachers.

Two principals in the South Island shared concerns with a colleague of mine just recently that they’re already seeing changes in the behaviour of some teachers, many of them younger, who are now simply relying on the resources that have been distributed to form the basis of their daily lessons. Instead of staffroom chatter about teaching numeracy and maths problems, they talk about “doing Prime Maths” (one of the resources made available by the Ministry of Education.

Other principals have shared with me concerns about the quality of professional development available, reporting that much time is spent simply on explaining the resources and associated teaching strategies, but little or no time on the broader ideas of developing mathematical or literacy understanding. Staff in their schools have fed back that while they felt they were now more familiar with the resources and technical strategies, the impression they were left with was that this was to be implemented in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ manner, with little guidance (if any) given about how to differentiate approaches to cater for different levels of ability, interest or approach.

Reports of feedback from the English Teachers Association would support this. Despite efforts of their national executive (comprising a number of extremely experienced English teachers) to point out shortcomings with the design of the revised English Curriculum, the feedback given to them by their members suggests many are simply looking for guidance on ‘what to teach’ rather than exercising the level of insight and design one might expect from an experienced pedagogue. This would support the reports of high levels of satisfaction with what’s being developed being fed back to the bureaucrats.

My reflection here is that as we seek to introduce any new form of strategy into our schools and system we need to be mindful of those we are expecting to carry that out. The manner in which the current reforms have been planned and managed would appear (to me at least) to regard teachers not as professionals, but as technicists – their task simply to implement what has been designed. The more this happens the more likely it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we see the diminishing of the teaching profession as a profession.

When we focus so heavily on fidelity of implementation – on consistency, pace, and uptake – we risk sidelining the professional judgement of teachers, the nuanced needs of learners, and the importance of localised innovation. The danger is that the system begins to reward compliance over creativity, delivery over design.

Yes, structure is important. Research-informed practice is essential. But the moment we reduce teaching to the delivery of a pre-set programme, we flatten the richness of what effective teaching actually is. We lose sight of the why behind the what, and we begin to erode the space where teacher inquiry, adaptive practice, and relational responsiveness thrive.

If we are not careful, the very reforms intended to lift achievement may begin to narrow our collective understanding of what good education looks like. Worse still, they may cultivate a generation of teachers who see themselves as implementers rather than as professionals engaged in a complex, creative, and deeply human endeavour.

The unintended consequence, then, is not simply a misstep in pedagogy, but a slow, systemic diminishing of teacher agency. And without teacher agency, no reform—no matter how well-researched—will truly take root in ways that endure and adapt over time.

So what might a more balanced path forward look like?

It means combining clarity with curiosity. Supporting structure without suffocating flexibility. Valuing research without silencing reflective practice. And above all, designing reforms with teachers, not just for them.

Because if we want lasting change, we must build it not just on evidence, but on trust. We have to get the balance right!