The Effects of an Advanced Skills Teacher Classification of Teachers' Work: From Storied Accounts to Policy Insight

This article examines the introduction of the advanced skills teacher (AST) classification into Australian schools and its effect on the articulation and defense of the work of experienced classroom teachers. We argue that the specification of criteria for recognition of advanced teaching is best seen as a discursive construction of the relation between the work of the experienced teacher and educational policy. The purposeful selection of certain skills and dispositions above others, as well as the translation of the work of advanced teachers into written performance indicators, privileges a policy discourse of skill over the oral discourse of practice preferred by teachers. Official discourses on advanced teaching encoded in written forms simultaneously enable and disable competing conceptions of how experienced teachers should work. In the AST scheme this has repositioned the discussion of advanced teaching within policy frameworks through the devaluing of the contextually rich articulation of practice in the selection process.