4. The Algorithm Will See You Now
Teaching quality, pacing guides and the slow death of craft
Cold open - Learning walk, 10:02am.
Two senior leaders glide into Room 14 with tablets. The new observation tool timestamps everything –
§ “Do Now (3 mins) ✔︎
§ Phonics routine (7 mins) ✔︎
§ Text-dependent questions (11 mins) ✔︎
§ Stretch task (5 mins) ✔︎.”
Ms Li is mid‑discussion about a metaphor in the class novel. The visit clock blinks red - you are over time. She closes the book, opens the decodable. The children switch from thinking to filling in the blank. “Great fidelity,” someone says in the corridor. The lesson lost its pulse and gained a tick.
The policy move - Scripts, pacing and dashboards.
This reform’s promise is seductively modern - close variation by specifying what to teach, how to teach it and when to move on. Back it with a pacing guide, plug it into a dashboard and watch teaching “improve at scale.”
The vendor slide shows beautiful step changes. The memo speaks of “consistency,” “science‑based practice,” and “closing gaps through fidelity.” If a teacher is a variable, make teaching a constant.
There’s a kernel of truth. Clear routines help novices. Well‑sequenced knowledge matters. Feedback beats vibes. But when the programme becomes the pedagogy and the pacing becomes the curriculum, something essential gets retired - professional judgement. What old hands used to call craft.
Human impact - A tale of two Tuesdays.
Tuesday A. The guide says Week 7, Day 2. All Year 5 classes read the same passage, ask the same five questions, perform the same choral response. Call‑and‑response is tight. The data are tidy. Ruby, who could have led a small group deep into the metaphor, rehearses the “right” inference three times. Manu, who needs concrete anchors and movement, is anchored to the carpet with a warning card.
Tuesday B. Same objective. Ms Li keeps the routine but flexes the route. She uses the novel chapter because the class is in it. The decoding practice pulls from that text, the knowledge build draws on their local history project - the exit tickets split - one for quick decoders, one for writers who need more runway. She doesn’t abandon structure, she uses it. The algorithm can’t see the difference. The children can.
Meanwhile in maths, Mr Afoa is told to “trust the sequence.” He trusts children more. He swaps ten minutes of silent practice for partner talk with manipulatives. The dashboard later flags him “behind.” The workbooks are lighter; the understanding is heavier. Which gets rewarded?
Systems lens - Why craft beats compliance over time.
Teaching is decision‑making under uncertainty. A good teacher runs hundreds of micro‑experiments a day - Who needs a scaffold? Who needs silence? Can we risk productive struggle here? Scripts lower cognitive load for the adult, but they also lower the ceiling for the child.
In complex systems, three things go wrong when we replace craft with compliance -
Goodhart visits the classroom. Once the walkthrough rubric or interim test becomes the truth, teachers optimise for what is measured. Lessons grow performative. Thinking gets chopped into observable bits. The map replaces the territory.
The middle swallows the edges. Uniform pacing serves the median learner and quietly abandons those far from it - neurodivergent students, emergent bilinguals, the deeply curious, the deeply stuck. Equity by sameness produces polite exclusion.
Learning decays after inspection. Scripted lessons can look strong in a 15‑minute slice and fade fast in memory. Craft trades some short‑term neatness for long‑term stickiness - review, connection, retrieval, struggle, joy. Dashboards are impatient with that kind of time.
The uncomfortable truth - quality is not copy‑and‑paste. You can standardise materials, not relationships. Sequence, not judgement, checks, not curiosity. The best systems know this and invest in teacher capability, not teacher obedience.
Evidence snapshot - What the receipts suggest.
Where high‑stakes scripts and pacing guides dominate, teachers report rising stress and shrinking autonomy, curricula narrow to what “counts”. Gains concentrate on interim metrics and stall on deeper ones.
Conversely, when teachers are prepared deeply and trusted to adapt - Finland’s loose national frame with strong moderation, Scotland’s capacities plus teacher networks, New Zealand’s best local curricula - engagement and durability improve and basic skills don’t collapse.
Randomised trials of inquiry/PBL show content gains and language growth when craft is scaffolded well. Even the accountability crowd now whispers about “multiple measures” and “professional accountability.” Translation - we pushed the dashboards too far.
NZ now - Use the science, dodge the scientism.
The “science of” movements (reading, learning) brought welcome clarity - explicit instruction matters. Knowledge builds comprehension - practice strengthens memory. Keep that. What to decline is scientism - the habit of turning contested research into one unquestionable script.
A practical bargain for Aotearoa -
Guardrails, not guard towers. Publish clear progressions, model routines and share high‑quality tasks - but state plainly that teachers will adapt to context and learners. Expect it. Train for it.
Invest in judgement. Time for collaborative planning, lesson study, moderation of student work. Replace some walkthroughs with co‑planning and co‑teaching.
Mixed evidence, mixed methods. Light sampling tests + portfolios/exhibitions + rich exemplars. If the only evidence that “learning happened” is a number, it probably didn’t stick.
Design for the margins first. UDL as default - multiple ways to access, process, show learning. Build bilingual pathways into the programme, not on the side.
De‑weaponise fidelity. Fidelity to purpose, not to page numbers. Ask, “Did the kids get the thing?” not, “Did you reach page 74 by Thursday?”
What to stop pretending
That copying a strong teacher’s moves makes a weak teacher strong. It helps, briefly. Capability makes it last.
That pace equals progress. Sometimes it’s just noise.
That a lesson “looked great” means learning happened. Ask tomorrow’s brain.
Meanwhile, in Room 14…
Ms Li’s next learning walk lands at 10:02 again. She’s still using routines, she’s just not letting the routines use her. The decodables are there, nested inside a text kids care about. The questioning is brisk, but it pauses long enough for a thought to land.
Two learners use speech‑to‑text to get ideas out while another pair annotates in te reo and English. The observers’ app dings green. Someone whispers “fidelity.”
“Almost,” she smiles. “Integrity.”
Closing beat - The slow death of craft, or its quiet return.
Craft rarely dies - it goes underground. It lives in the choices teachers make when no one’s watching and in what students remember a year later. If we want more of it, we have to buy it back - with time, trust, coaching and measures that won’t punish a teacher for doing the right thing the untidy way. The algorithm can keep its dashboard. The children will take the learning.
If you’d like to share your thoughts or discuss further, feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear from you. +64 275 665 682 john.luxton@regenerationhq.co.nz