The Panopticon: the ethos of monitoring systems and why they need reform

Recently, I wrote a blog on accountability and how I think that we need to reimagine the shape of the concept in education as a circle, rather than a hierarchy. Since then, I have been thinking in a bit more depth about why a top-down model of accountability is s troubling and I keep arriving at the fact that it has such a draining effect on teachers emotionally. So, I started to think about why this was and whether there might be a useful metaphor to analogy to capture something that is most powerfully experienced as that feeling of being under constant pressure.

When I speak to teachers who are finding the job hard, they often say that they feel overwhelmed, scrutinized or micro-managed. When I ask them for examples, often they struggle to give many. They often end up saying things like: ‘It doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s more how it feels’ or ‘it’s just relentless’ or ‘I feel like I’m just waiting to be told I’m not doing something right’. It seems that it isn’t the fact that teachers are being hauled over the coals and disciplined for not doing thigs the right way all that often but that they live in constant fear of being so. Why is that? Where does that feeling come from? Interestingly, I think it’s baked into the accountability model that many schools use and the approach they take to monitoring. To illustrate this point, I want to go back to the 18^th century.

In 1787, Jeremy Bentham wrote a series of letters proposing the construction of a Prison that he called the Panopticon. This 3-minute video provides an excellent summary of the design of the Panopticon. The design of the Panopticon featured a watch tower in the centre of a cylinder-shaped building. Because of the design of the cells, including where the windows were positioned, a single guard could survey 192 prisoners while the prisoners could not see the guard at all. This meant that at any point they could be being watched and they would have no way of knowing. Logically, this leads to the prisoners having to always act as if they are being watched. No true Panopticon, as envisioned by Bentham was ever built in England but the design has inspired other prison designs throughout history. Troublingly, I feel as if it may have inspired some of the ethos of accountability that we live with in modern-day schools. Let’s illustrate this with an example.

Dan is a teacher who has just attended a professional learning session about driving student thought. The person leading the session introduced the act of cold calling, where teachers pick students to answer questions without taking hands up. This means that any student could be asked at any time, meaning they all have to act as if they are going to be asked, and therefore engage in thinking (ironically, there are parallels here with the spirit of the Panopticon but that isn’t the focus of this blog). The person leading the session says that staff will have the opportunity to start putting cold calling into practice over the next week and that learning walks the week after will focus on how well the technique is being applied. Dan goes about his usual daily teaching, practicing cold calling at every opportunity and then starts to realise that for some questions, he actually needs to know what every student is thinking rather than only the one who gets cold called. So, he starts to intersperse cold calling with other techniques depending on the demands of that moment.

A week later and Dan receives a learning walk which notes that ‘it would be great to see you using cold calling more regularly’. Dan is a bit disappointed because the feedback didn’t take into account the questioning strategies that he did deploy and, he thought, the fact that he deployed them for the right reasons in the interests of student learning. Nevertheless, Dan wants to get positive feedback from the person dropping in and so he doubles down on his cold calling so that the next time he has a drop in, the routine is slick and in line with the training the whole staff had on how to cold call effectively. Sure enough, when the next drop in arrives, Dan throws in a question and cold calls a response. The feedback he receives is: ‘Great to see you using cold call to drive student thinking’. Encouraged by the positive feedback, Dan continues to use cold calling at every opportunity, unsure of when the next learning walk will be. Every time someone visits, Dan dutifully showcases his cold calling routine and receives reaffirming and positive feedback. At a follow-up professional learning session three weeks later, the person leading the session announces that Dan’s practice has been great and that others should go and see him using cold calling in his class. This makes Dan feel a million dollars and so he makes sure that he focuses even harder on his fidelity to the cold calling routine that has been shared in the session, reflecting to himself each time on how well he did it.

What we see in this example are the three interconnected elements of disciplinary power that Michel Foucault (1975) wrote about in his book ‘Discipline and Punish’. Foucault described:

1.      Surveillance

A system of continuous observation or continuous prospect of observation.

From the example: Dan was told that there would be learning walks to see cold calling in action but was not told when they would be or how many there would be.

2.      Normalisation

Establishing a model or the desired behaviour and judging subjects based on how well they meet this desired behaviour.

From the example: the feedback that Dan received related to the extent to which he adhered to the model of cold calling at the moment he was observed

3.      Examination

Classification of individuals based on the extent to which they adhere to the desired behaviour.

From the example: Dan adheres to the desired behaviours and so is held up as an example of excellence to others.

Of course, Foucault’s three-part model also applies to Bentham’s Panopticon design. In a Prison setting, (I imagine), prisoners come to realise that breaking from the expected behavior is too great a risk, in case they are seen. They accept the highly structured expectations on their behaviours even though it is a drain on their sense of individual liberty. In a Prison, I guess that is part of the lesson being taught.

However, for teachers in schools, experiencing that constant sense of surveillance, having to normalise certain behaviours agnostic from context and being submitted to the examination of RAG ratings, WWW and EBIs or 5-point quality scales, the mental toll taken is considerable. I think that is what leads to the feeling of exhaustion with the system that so may teachers say they feel.

We might have lots of great thinkers telling us that teacher agency is crucial in securing the best outcomes but if we still have leaders who are willing to subject teachers to the surveillance, normalisation and examination triumvirate, we’ll never be achieve the agency we know is so important.

What can we do about it?

Fundamentally, we don’t need to stop watching teachers at work. Leaders can mistakenly think that staff wellbeing will be improved if they are not in classrooms as much because their presence inevitably puts pressure on staff. One Headteacher I recently spoke to said that they felt that their ‘status’ was off putting for teachers.

For me, it isn’t a case of watching less, it’s a case of watching to understand and not to survey, normalise or examine. If leaders go in to classrooms, I’m not sure they should be looking at cold calling per-se across a school. They should instead be looking at the principle of driving thought. They should then ask themselves, ‘what does it look like this teacher is doing to drive thought?’ ‘Why does it appear that they are doing so in this way?’ ‘What might the effect be on student learning?’. The words in bold are a reminder that even when watching to understand, thoughts must be held lightly and are always provisional upon talking to the teacher in question.

When it comes to giving feedback, the answers that the observer has to these questions could be posed to teachers, crucially, for their response. For example:

It appeared to me that you were driving thought by providing extended thinking time after you asked students why people may get confused between similes and metaphors. You overtly scanned the room at this point which I thought may have been to send the message that you expect all to be thinking. To what extent was I right?

This could also be applied to situations where the observer wants the teacher to reflect on something that did not appear to support student learning. For example:

It seemed to me that you were using cold calling to make sure everyone was more likely to be thinking. You asked why people may get confused between similes and metaphors and then you chose someone to answer two seconds later. My hunch is that they would have all benefited from having longer to do the thinking. To what extent do you agree?

If you are observing in order to understand then you must be interested in the teacher’s responses. My belief is that if more monitoring time was committed to understanding rather than to normalising and examining, leaders would get a far clearer picture of the typicalities of decision making across the school. This would then enable them to monitor the extent to which decision making and subsequent action were being driven by a concern for student learning.

If we want to help teachers feel less drained, the answer isn’t to monitor less teaching. The answer is to shift the purpose of our monitoring. Bentham’s Panopticon was designed with surveillance, normalisation and examination in mind. If we monitor with surveillance in mind, we’ll exhaust teachers. If we monitor with normalisation in mind, we’ll produce inevitable failure by neglecting decision making. If we monitor with examination in mind, we’ll be met with the predictable disappointment of finding that weighing the pig won’t make it fatter. Teaching and learning should be liberating. Furthermore, learning is a force for liberation. Perhaps this is a useful reminder that a monitoring system that has so many parallels with a proposed prison design (an institution that constrains liberty by design), should be making us more uncomfortable.