The de-intellectualisation of teaching

There is a peculiar sadness in watching teaching, one of the most intellectually demanding professions in public life, slowly presented as something much smaller than it is.

Teaching asks a human being to know a subject deeply, understand how novices encounter it, anticipate misconception, respond to emotion, build culture, sustain attention, interpret evidence, make ethical decisions and adapt in real time. It is intellectual, relational, practical and moral work. Yet in too many schools, teaching has been flattened into the performance of approved moves: Use this questioning strategy. Start with retrieval. Show a model. Circulate. Check for understanding. Use cold call. Give feedback. Exit ticket. The problem is not the existence of techniques. The problem is what happens when techniques are severed from thought.

Sam Gibbs captured this powerfully in her Tes article, How we dumbed down teaching — and what we must do to fix it. Gibbs argues that in responding to accountability pressures, workforce challenges and the desire for consistency, we have sometimes sacrificed the intellectual process and professional curiosity of teachers. That phrase matters: the intellectual process. Not the paperwork. Not the performance. Not the laminated checklist. The process of thinking professionally about pupils, subjects, evidence and decisions.

The de-intellectualisation of teaching rarely announces itself. It often arrives dressed as support.

“We are just making things easier for staff.”

“We are reducing workload.”

“We are giving everyone the same structure.”

“We are being evidence-informed.”

And, of course, some of this is necessary. Teachers should not be left to invent everything from scratch. Shared language is useful and codification can protect quality. Novices need models and departments need coherence. Schools need routines and evidence should absolutely shape practice.

But there is a difference between supporting professional thought and replacing it.

A playbook can be a map. It becomes dangerous when leaders start mistaking it for the territory. A teaching framework can name the principles of effective practice. It becomes dangerous when it is used to decide whether teaching is good by counting visible behaviours. A coaching model can help teachers rehearse high-leverage moves. It becomes dangerous when the move matters more than the judgement behind it.

This is how the profession gets thinned out. We stop asking, “What is the learning problem here?” and start asking, “Did the teacher do the thing?”

Did they cold call?

Did they model?

Did they use mini-whiteboards?

Was there retrieval?

Was there independent practice?

These are not useless questions, but they are insufficient. A teacher can cold call badly. They can model without revealing thinking. They can use mini-whiteboards to collect meaningless answers. They can run retrieval that retrieves the wrong knowledge, at the wrong time, for no purpose. They can set independent practice before pupils are ready.

The strategy is not the pedagogy. The decision is the pedagogy.

I once heard a story about a senior leader planning CPD for what they described, casually and without shame, as their “thickest teacher”. The phrase landed like a stone. It was not said with malice, exactly. It was said with the brisk impatience of someone who believed they were being practical. This teacher, the leader explained, “just needs to be told exactly what to do.” The CPD, therefore, had to be simple enough that even they could follow it.

There, in one sentence, was the whole problem.

The leader thought they were designing accessible professional development. In reality, they were designing from contempt. They had already decided that some of their colleagues was not a thinker. Not a developing professional. Not someone with reasons, gaps, experiences, habits, pressures, strengths and possibilities. Just a problem to be managed.

And when CPD is designed for the “thickest teacher”, it does not only insult that teacher. It impoverishes everyone.

The most experienced teachers are bored because complexity has been removed. The newest teachers are patronised because they are given actions without principles. The struggling teachers are denied the dignity of understanding. The whole staff receives the message that teaching is not something to think about; it is something to comply with.

This kind of leadership creates the very weakness it claims to solve.

If teachers are never invited into the intellectual architecture of practice, they will not develop the judgement to use practice well. If they are only told what to do, they may become dependent on being told. If they are trained to perform techniques, they may become less able to adapt when the technique does not fit the moment. If leaders remove uncertainty by removing thought, teachers become less expert, not more.

The irony is that many simplified systems are created in the name of evidence-informed practice. But evidence does not remove the need for thought. Evidence requires thought. It gives us probabilities, mechanisms and principles. It does not tell us what to do with 9X3 on Tuesday afternoon when half the class has misunderstood the source, two pupils are dysregulated, the model has not landed, and the lesson plan says it is time for independent writing.

That moment requires judgement.

It requires the teacher to notice, interpret and decide. What exactly have pupils misunderstood? Is the issue vocabulary, prior knowledge, attention, the explanation, the task, or confidence? Should I reteach, remodel, pause for paired rehearsal, use a hinge question, return to the text, reduce the scaffold, increase the scaffold, or move on? What will happen if I continue? What will happen if I stop?

This is the intellectual work of teaching.

The antidote to de-intellectualisation is not a return to heroic individualism, where every teacher shuts their door and does whatever they like. That is not professionalism either. The answer is disciplined professional thought.

We need shared frameworks, but they must be used as tools for thinking.

We need instructional coaching, but it must get beneath visible behaviour.

We need CPD, but it must explain mechanisms, not just moves.

We need quality assurance, but it must ask better questions than “Was the strategy there?”

We need consistency, but not conformity.

Most of all, we need to stop talking about teachers as if they are delivery mechanisms for other people’s ideas. Teachers are not empty vessels waiting to be filled with research summaries and routines. They are intellectual workers. They deserve clarity, evidence, challenge and support, but they also deserve to be treated as people capable of thought.

There is an irony here that education does not always like to acknowledge: many of the people most celebrated as “great thinkers” in our sector are often those furthest away from the daily work of teaching. They write fluently about complexity, nuance, evidence, cognitive science, curriculum and professional judgement, but they are not the ones standing in front of Year 9 after lunch, deciding in real time whether to reteach, redirect, pause, probe, comfort, challenge or abandon the plan altogether. This does not mean their thinking has no value. Of course it does. Schools need research, theory and external challenge. But there is something troubling when intellectual status attaches itself most readily to distance from the classroom, while the people doing the most intellectually demanding work are handed checklists and simplified routines. The further some people move from the classroom, the more they are permitted to be complex. The closer teachers are to the work, the more they are asked to be simple.

A profession becomes de-intellectualised when its members are not trusted to understand the why. It becomes re-intellectualised when leaders insist that every teacher, novice or expert, is entitled to the deep structure of the work.

So the next time we plan CPD, we might ask different questions.

Not: “How do we make this simple enough for the weakest teacher?”

But: “How do we make the complexity clear enough that every teacher can think with it?”

Not: “What do we want everyone to do?”

But: “What do we want everyone to understand?”

Not: “How do we ensure compliance?”

But: “How do we develop judgement?”

Because teaching was never meant to be the mechanical delivery of approved strategies. It is the thoughtful, evidence-informed, subject-rich, pupil-responsive work of helping young people understand the world.

And if we dumb that down, we do not just diminish teachers.

We diminish what pupils receive from them.