Reclaiming Professional Judgment in an Age of Pre‑Packaged Certainty

The Rise of Easy Answers

School leaders often describe AERO materials as "easy to digest." That's part of their appeal, and part of the problem. When complex educational questions are reduced to black‑and‑white claims of "proven practice," teachers are positioned not as thinkers or researchers, but as implementers. As discussed by Hattam in a public discourse "this isn't science being applied to education. It's bureaucracy borrowing the language of science to manufacture authority," read more here.

This shift matters. It changes how school leaders make decisions, how teachers understand their work, and how students experience learning.

The danger isn't evidence. It's the narrowing of what counts as evidence.

AERO's preferred evidence base of cognitive science summaries, meta‑analyses, and randomised trials has value, but it excludes rich disciplinary research from broad ranges of Australian classrooms and abroad. It privileges what can be packaged, scaled, and sold. And it encourages a systematised approach to teaching that reduces complexity to scripts.

When leaders tell me, "We don't need to read more widely; AERO has done it for us," I worry. Not because broader reading and developing a critical lens is an academic luxury, but because professional judgment depends on it.

The Disappearance of Teacher‑Researchers

Many teachers (including myself) remember a time when inquiry was part of the profession: action research, phenomenology, collaborative exploration of practice, creating our own resources. These weren't romantic add‑ons; they were ways of building shared knowledge and professional autonomy.

Today, that space is shrinking.

Teaching is becoming formulaic, contained, and dogmatic. Teachers are asked to implement strategies because "AERO said so," or this is what explicit teaching for instructional models looks like from the purchased programs teachers use, not because they've interrogated the evidence or adapted it to their context. The message is subtle but powerful: what teachers know from experience, debate, and intuition "isn't really knowledge."

When professional judgment is devalued, risk‑taking disappears. Creativity fades. Knowing is slowly chipped away. And learning becomes something delivered rather than discovered. I remember teaching about discovery in my teacher education university courses: the dynamic ecology of the classroom, the curiosity of the shared learning journey. What happened to that authentic learning? That joy? The joy of creating new learning experiences tailored to my students is superseded by time spent making pretty canva slides.

The Domestication of Critical Analysis

When we look at what's proposed as resistance to AERO's approach "actions from below" and "surfacing alternative understandings" we see classic Foucauldian micropolitics discussed by Thomson (2026): resistance at the point of application, local contestations of meaning, discursive interventions. There's a real debate about whether Foucauldian critique has been domesticated by neoliberalism, whether analysing power at the micro-level inadvertently reinforces it by making resistance seem local and fragmented rather than systemic. Critics like Nancy Fraser have argued that Foucault's focus on dispersed power meshes uncomfortably well with neoliberalism's hatred of collective structural analysis.

But here's the problem as I'm navigating these tensions: AERO's apparatus isn't just a discourse network it's backed by ministerial ownership, federal funding, standardised testing regimes, and the material power to enforce curriculum compliance across Australian states. "Alternative understandings" don't change that power structure. Individual teachers "resisting from below" just get performance-managed out of the profession.

The Fraser critique bites hard here: by framing the struggle as discursive and localised, we transform a structural political economy problem (the commodification of education through evidence-based policy) into a hermeneutic problem (competing interpretations of "knowledge-richness"). This is how neoliberalism prefers its opposition, debating meanings rather than challenging ownership and governance structures.

Children Are More Than Data Points

In my work with schools, I spend a lot of time helping leaders interpret, report and strategise data including NAPLAN and VCE data. The numbers matter, but they are not the children; they are snapshots, not identities. This distinction becomes critical when I look at the data collected by teachers to measure the efficacy of pre-packaged learning programs. When I correlate that internal data against external standardised tests, I'm seeing a worrying pattern: the programs claim some success internally, but they are still creating specific, identifiable gaps in the skills that matter most on NAPLAN and VCE; and more importantly in the transdisciplinarity of learning. The rise of these productised programs and narrow accountability metrics is pushing schools toward decisions that serve institutional numbers rather than student learning. Teachers are then left to find the time and tools to fill the very gaps these programs create. Accountability is necessary. But compliance is not the same as quality or freedom to choose.

The Accountability Paradox

I've sat in enough curriculum meetings to recognise the pattern. The conversation begins with student learning, what we want our students to know, do, and become...but quickly shifts to compliance. Are we meeting the VCAA requirements?  Have we documented our assessments properly? Will this survive an audit? 

What I'm seeing in schools is a dangerous slide from accountability to compliance, where the documentation becomes more important than the learning it's meant to represent. Schools create elaborate systems not because they improve student outcomes but because they look good on paper. My question is auditing the only time documents are checked, and are they being checked meaningfully to really improve the ecology of learning in classrooms?

The Loss of Pedagogical Responsiveness

Responsive teaching, the ability to read the room, adjust instruction, follow curiosity, and create moments of engagement is timeless. It's also becoming increasingly rare. Pre‑packaged explicit instruction programs with multitudes of slides to read scripts from can support structure, but when they dominate practice, they squeeze out:

• targeted learning stations
• off‑script exploration
• multimodal expression
• collaborative meaning‑making
• creative application of literacy and numeracy
• play in learning, embodied learning and experimentation

These are not "extras." They are the conditions under which deep learning happens and cognitive building blocks are formed.

A Structural Problem, Not an Individual One

Some analyses frame resistance as individual teachers "reading more widely" or "going off script." But this individualisation is part of the problem. When resistance becomes personal rather than collective, the system remains unchanged. The issue is structural: Who decides what counts as knowledge? Who benefits from pre‑packaged certainty? What happens when professional inquiry becomes a commercial product?

This is not simply a discursive shift, it is a governance shift at a school level and government level. Principals have stakeholder pressures to meet, including government pressures. AERO's model centralises authority, standardises practice, and reduces teachers to implementers of evidence rather than contributors to it.

A Humane Alternative

In my doctoral work, I drew on Maxine Greene's ideas of social imagination. Greene argued that education must remain open to possibility and curiosity...responsive, relational, imaginative. Pre‑packaged programs foreclose possibility. They eliminate the aesthetic encounters and lived inquiry that make the relationship of teaching and learning human. Greene's work reminds us that professionalism is not just technical competence. It is the capacity to imagine, interpret, collaborate, and respond. 

Drawing on my doctoral research into collaboration, creativity, and innovation in Initial Teacher Education programs, I’ve seen how professional judgment flourishes when educators work in what I call co‑created social spaces, environments where dialogue, shared inquiry, and collective intentionality shape practice. In these spaces, academics described feeling a greater sense of agency, voice, and professional possibility, even within highly complex and accountability‑driven systems.

The same principle applies in schools: when teachers and leaders have structured opportunities to think together, take risks, and build meaning collaboratively, they generate more responsive pedagogy and stronger professional cultures than any pre‑packaged program can offer. My research shows that collaboration isn’t a “nice to have,” it’s a structural condition for humane, adaptive, and intellectually rich educational practice.

Accountability Without Compliance

Schools need systems that support learning, not systems that look good in audits. In my work with curriculum and assessment teams, the most effective systems share four qualities:

1. Purposeful documentation: Curriculum documents that guide practice alongside satisfying auditors.
2. Responsive assessment: Tools that reveal learning and offer snapshots where we can support and improve our approaches...maybe go off script. THe numbers are important, but more so is the narrative around them.
3. Professional trust: Structures that assume teachers can make complex judgments.
4. Student‑centered metrics: Measures aligned with educational values and student agency, not institutional or marketable optics.

Accountability should be a scaffold, not a cage.

Lastly, A Way Forward

Reclaiming professionalism doesn't mean rejecting evidence. It means broadening it...trusting teachers. It means designing systems that support authentic inquiry rather than replace it.

A healthier educational future will require:

• leaders who value professional judgment alongside research
• teachers who engage critically with evidence and researching their own practice
• systems that protect time for collaboration, creativity and inquiry
• research organisations that treat teachers as partners, not consumers

If we want engaged professionals, inspired students, and schools that value creativity as much as consistency, we must put teachers back at the centre of educational knowledge.

Not as implementers. As thinkers, researchers, and professionals.