Teaching as regulated improvisation

In this paper, we address the work of teachers at the intersection of educational policy and professional discretion, by undertaking a conceptual reading of Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools, and examining how the report conceptualises teacher practice. Drawing on the Bourdieusian notion of regulated improvisation, the study explores the constraints of pedagogical practices as conceptualised by influential policy reports of this kind, highlighting the paradoxical expectations of the report on teachers whose situational awareness of classrooms is curtailed through regulation. The study examines the tension between teacher autonomy and constraints, negating important considerations to temporalities of learning. The central contribution of the paper is a conceptual understanding of how policy drivers position teacher expertise through standardisation, compliance and performance, a concern not unique only to the Australian context of educational policy, nor schooling.


Introduction
In this paper, we offer a theoretical exploration of the Australian education policy report Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools (2018) herein referred to as (TGtA), asking: What can be said about current education policy priorities that are determinative of teacher practice? Established to make a concerted response to Australia's waning academic performance since 2000, TGtA is the Australian example of a global intervention aimed at enhancing the school system through "continuous assessment, personalised learning, and the embedding of a growth mindset in teaching" (Buchanan, 2020(Buchanan, , p. 1039. The report was commissioned in 2017 to ensure that educational excellence is repositioned as a high national priority. Aimed at "identifying impactful and practical reforms" (Gonski et al., 2018, p. vii), on the surface TGtA seems to underwrite a range of improvements both to sustainability and equity in education. Yet, it proposes a range of measures that consolidate logics of accountability, standardisation and datafication in teaching, fortifying a "move away from the teacher and school autonomy" (Allen et al., 2018, p. 318) in a drive to improve student achievement and school performance. Whilst the TGtA report is not policy, it is a "blueprint for educational reform in Australia" (Shay & Lampert, 2022, p. 48), and policy texts such as these shape what we imagine to be possible (Ozga, 2000).
In the paper, we analyse how pedagogy is conceptualised by TGtA (2018), using a framework resourced with the concepts of regulated improvisation and situational awareness. "Regulated improvisation" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 57) is understood as the translation of social capital or (habitus), where teacher professionalism confronts policy and is determinative of the possible pedagogical choices teachers can make in classrooms. We draw also on Situational Awareness which, following Endsley (1995), is a framework by which to make sense of the iterative process of becoming adept at working in classrooms, whilst acknowledging that learning is infused with temporal variances (Thomas & Whitburn, 2020). This examination contributes to critical understandings of how policy texts influence teacher pedagogy by determining so-called best practices at a systems-level (Lingard et al., 2000).
The paper is presented in four parts. In the first, we explore the priorities of TGtA, focussing in particular on the ways teacher performance is conceptualised. In the second, we draw on our dual theoretical tools, regulated improvisation and situational awareness, providing a rationale for their incitement to the analysis as theoretical concepts to think with. In the third, we undertake a document analysis of TGtA (2018), guided by the adopted framework. The paper then concludes in the fourth part by returning to teacher improvisation, to consider in more detail how the TGtA report frames pedagogical practices in relation to the temporal constraints of learning.

Part 1: TGtA: What's it all about?
The TGtA (2018) report marks the second major review of school education in Australia since 2010. It was commissioned by the Australian Liberal-National Coalition Government (2015Government ( -2018 to make recommendations as to how Australia could improve student achievement and school performance. It follows the Review of Funding for Schooling Final Report (Gonski, 2012) which was commissioned by the previous Australian Labour government (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010). The TGtA Report identifies 23 recommendations, 17 findings and 3 key priorities, the latter geared towards progressive future development, aimed at lifting educational outcomes system-wide across the nation: 1. Deliver at least one year's growth in learning for every student every year; 2. Equip every student to be a creative, connected and engaged learner in a rapidly changing world; and 3. Cultivate an adaptive, innovative and continuously improving education system.
Fostering an agenda of ambition, TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018) argues that as a nation, Australia must work to "raise our aspirations and make a renewed effort to improve school education outcomes" (p. viii). The perceived reality of low expectations is cast as a weakness of the current Australian schooling system, reinforcing the assertion that declining "academic performance is jeopardising the attainment of Australia's aspiration for excellence and equity in school education" (p. viii). The report draws on international testing data (OECD, 2019), highlighting how a generation of students' achievement has "declined in key areas such as reading, science and mathematics. This has occurred in every socio-economic quartile and in all school sectors" (p. ix). By implication, Australia's future prosperity is at stake. The report goes on to suggest that in some classrooms, the disparity can be as great as "five to six years ahead of the least advanced students" (p. ix).
The report spotlights teacher performance and a culture of continuous improvement in schools where teachers will "adjust their pedagogy to the different needs of individual students based on evidence" (Gonski et al., 2018, p. 56) to lift declining educational standards. Implicit in the TGtA report is a position on learning whereby what is tested matters most. Learning development is ascertained in sequenced forms, benchmarked and measurable against system-wide indicators of progress. To that end, learning success is narrativised as transparent and tangible, easily captured through formal summative checks and verifiable against standardised system-wide tests. Developing such an education system is contingent upon reforms that affix evaluation for "maximum impact" (p. 57) to consolidate logics of accountability, standardisation and datafication in teachers' work.
TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018) gives particular attention to examining "the evidence" and making recommendations around the most effective teaching and learning strategies. The report offers a pedagogic re-vamp of teaching practice/s and draws on refined assessment practices and "tailored teaching" (p. 66) founded on and informed by measurement to lift sagging educational performance. A key aim of the report is to promote innovation and continuous improvement in schools through "the most effective interventions" (p. 56) which will require a shift in teacher capacity. External intervention "requires teachers to embrace changes to their planning, teaching and assessment practice" (2018, p. 56). This draws on refined assessment practice/s and 'tailored teaching'. Implicit in TGtA's (Gonski et al., 2018) analysis of the Australian schooling system is a conceptualisation of learning as standardised knowledge, which both guides and benchmarks achievement and excellence. Continuous improvement, innovation and evaluation are interwoven in the Report in ways wherein the standardised and verifiable are valourised above all else. Education systems and school sites are to be engaged in a tactical mission of "continuous improvement" (p. 98), drawing upon specific interventions to inhibit statistical low points or "plateauing" (p. 97). The proposed innovation cycle promises an embrace of the experimental to deliver enhanced performance. That is, continuous improvement through innovation aims to identify and scale "new methods of knowledge generation and analysis to find new solutions, such as predictive analytics and big data, randomised controlled trials, social investments, and innovation competitions and challenges" (p. 99).
This form of policy rhetoric (Norman, 2022) opts for an alignment of the "efficient and effective" (p. 99), binding evidence of improvement against the standardisation of teaching, and in doing so, it aims to consolidate accountability and standardisation as a unifying singularity. Biesta (2010) suggests this sort of unity may be understood as a kind of "democratic deficit" wherein "a particular use of evidence threatens to replace professional judgement and the wider democratic deliberation about the aims and ends and the conduct of education" (pp. 492-493). We also agree with Allen et al. (2018) that the "impact of the proposed changes on teachers and teachers' work in this country [Australia] will be significant" (p. 319). To set the context for how we consider this will play out, in the next part of this paper, we examine the intersection of regulation, such as that emphasised in TGtA through teacher improvisation.

Part 2: Regulated improvisation in education
In this part of the paper, we explore the dynamic nature of teaching, examining the contribution of frameworks by which pedagogy has been structured, to give context to the theoretical concept of regulated improvisation. Regulated improvisation allows educators to embrace "what teachers do, regularly and routinely, differently every time, as they improvise, adjust and adapt the routine" (Mathewson Mitchell & Reid, 2016, p. 43) alongside the stimulus they are confronted with in real-time. Improvisational teaching draws on a teacher's temporal reaction in response to classroom-based contingencies. These comprise student needs as determined by the resources teachers can bear witness to within the confines of the curriculum. Whilst appearing spontaneous, it is connected to meaning-making practices, which by their very nature are implicit in pedagogical actions. Responsivity, the time between stimulus and response, is the foundation of the improvisational in teaching and the art of pedagogy in practice. Graue et al. (2015) suggest that teachers improvise continually when responding to student needs. This suggests that effective improvisation in teaching is by necessity, relational.
Improvisational teaching then is about a classroom teacher drawing on their situational awareness of students in real-time, so that they can engage pedagogic possibilities for a class by weaving together both existing pedagogical content knowledge and their knowledge of the students in classrooms. In practice, this is evidenced Teaching as regulated improvisation when experienced educators draw on "automized routines" (Sawyer, 2004, p. 18). In doing so, experienced teachers invoke established patterns of behaviour through which to frame their practices; however, these must be built up for novice or beginning teachers who lack both experience and routines from which to draw. Whilst the disposition, capacity and experience level of classroom teachers to improvise has the appearance of whimsy, it is serious work. In his consideration of teachers and improvisation, (Huberman, 1993) advocated for an artisan model of teacher practice, meaning that reimagining the solitary, independent, classroom teacher as a skilled bricoleur is perhaps a more accurate representation of how professional teachers engage with their craft. The artisan model is "highly individualistic and contextsensitive" (pp. 22-23). Improvisational teaching in this sense is then about teachers working across dynamic and fluid spaces, drawing on various levels of awareness.
To teach is to improvise; but we caution, to improvise is not to be free. Although easily confused with adaptation and creativity, the term improvisation is most readily understood in performing arts schemas, leading to a paradox between the creative agency promised by improvisation and the regulatory reality of structured classrooms. Rather than an imagined creative eutopia, classroom teachers are, as a matter of circumstance, framed by policy positions which "structure and script teachers work" (Sawyer, 2011, p. 2). This is a kind of disciplined improvisation "because it always occurs within broad structures and frameworks" (Sawyer, 2004, p. 13) in an attempt to teacher-proof students. To paraphrase Francis Keppel cited in Dershimer (1976, p. 50), education is too important to be left in the hands and minds of teachers and improvisational teaching "doesn't mean that anything goes" (Sawyer, 2004, p. 199). Whilst teachers may draw on classroom-based structures, enacted as a backdrop to the usual running of a lesson structure, the priorities of education policy reports such as TGtA (2018) provide the conditions of pedagogical practices and establish what is possible. It is from here we turn to consider Bourdieu's (1990) conceptual contribution to this tension.
The notion of "regulated improvisation" (Bourdieu, 1990) refers to the imperfect alignment between established habitus (a mode of operation) and the conditions that accompany the uncertainties inherent in any particular field. Defined as a "network of objective relations between positions occupied by agents or institutions" (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 3), all actions, whether explicit or implicit, carry meaning. Habitus is the "generative principle of regulated improvisations" (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 78) and is the basis for the production of all practices. This is because habitus is "a social product, a specific embodiment and set of dispositions" (Hardy & Lingard, 2008, p. 64).
The complexities of human relationships, of which schools have many, and their explicit actions inherent in any given field, are composed of implicit intentions. This coalition of intentions occurs through a soft assembly of social structures jostling for influence over how people acquire preferences and behaviours, which they explicitly embody and enact when entering a field predisposing them towards a commitment to specific decisions. The decisions a classroom teacher may make are, by extension, the function of habitus, and so, the habitus "provides the connection between agents and practices through 'systems of dispositions', which are bodily incorporations of social history" (Rawolle & Lingard, 2008, p. 731). Meshing the incorporation of interactions between individuals, social structures and systems, Bourdieu's habitus "consists of corporal dispositions and cognitive templates [which] overcomes subject-object dualism by inscribing subjective, bodily actions with objective social force" (King, 2000, p. 417). Every subjective individual act, therefore, is instructive of some social meaning as the habitus tends to shape individual action. To anticipate possible futures implies an element of precognition. As the action unfolds over time, teachers continually improvise and in doing so adapt their responses to situational needs. Classroom teachers' adjust their responses to a given stimulus "in the moment", enacting both in and across temporal boundaries. A teacher responds and modifies their pedagogical practices as needed in time, adapting as circumstances change which in turn elicits adjustment.
Uncertainty coupled with the pre-regulation of action/s provides space for the enactment of pedagogical practice, in which tacit shifts in knowledge and experience brought on through improvisation in teacher actions result in an adaptive and cumulative change. Such changes may be significant or minor depending on the teacher's awareness as it frames their perception of the elements in their context, their comprehension of a situation, and their relative capacity to project a potential future. Anticipation and a capacity to respond accordingly is a form of regulated improvisation that in classrooms requires a knowing "feel for the game" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 66) which is built over time. The necessity of regulated improvisation in teaching is structured by the temporality of field encounters when a given classroom teacher's capacity to engage in the game of pedagogy is dependent upon their time spent playing in that experience, with tangible effects on their capacity to respond to a teaching situation.
Core to the argument we make in this paper is that pedagogical practices are often improvisational. Teachers are regulated yet must be adaptable, need to be predictable, yet able to improvise in the moment. Teachers are therefore caught in a "double bind" (Grenfell, 2004, pp. 60-61) of adhering to regulations whilst remaining true to the actions of a professional educator; and so must often deal with the issues of diminished educational opportunity i.e. unequal distributions of power and wealth, financial and social impoverishment, discrimination and broader cultural and economic disenfranchisement. Here, we consider pedagogic freedom, implied by improvisation, as the implicit function of regulated improvisation to legitimise unequally dominant representations of power, constantly legitimised between teacher improvisation and the policy structures present in schooling. This sits in contrast to the high level of perception, comprehension and projection required of teachers through situational awareness.

Part 3: Situational awareness in regulated classrooms
Though often understood in the military (Suchman, 2015), aeronautical (Melander & Sahlström, 2009) and technical diving (Kuri et al., 2019) applications, Situational Awareness provides a useful model for us to understand the evolution and adaptation of regulated improvisation for teachers. Situational Awareness is often associated with highly stressful, time-sensitive applications. It is centrally concerned with human decision making; and though not an exhaustive descriptor, it can be understood as "the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future" (Endsley, 1988, p. 97).
There are three domains of situational awareness (Endsley, 1988): perception, comprehension, projection; or noticing, making sense, and mapping future action, to which we will give context in more detail in the next part of the paper. However, in short, through this framework, improvisation for teachers in the classroom then is about understanding and drawing on pedagogical practices to suit the context. These manifest as established and routinised patterns of relating, with imbued meaningsuch as marking the roll, taking down the chairs or gaining the attention of a class. This reflexive process allows for adaptations in habitus, wherein the teacher can adapt pedagogical practices through perpetuation or adaptation. A teacher's capacity to achieve this reflexivity is determined by their experience in the field. With experience, teachers can "use knowledge and situational awareness in real-time to respond to the emerging present moment" (Weberg & Davidson, 2019, p. 89).
We now turn to present the analysis of the TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018) report aligned with the three domains of situational awareness (perception, comprehension and projection), interweaving how the report situates the practices of teachers through regulated improvisation. This critical analysis draws on the method of document analysis (Prior, 2008), which provides a "strategy for mapping the context of educational reform and its implications" (Hard et al., 2018, p. 5). In doing so we have drawn attention to connections and patterns in the policy text, and the rendering of teacher practice as framed in TGtA against the backdrop of classroom practice when teachers implement such reforms through varied levels of situational awareness. This has been a methodical process of linking textual references at the level of word and sentence to what is expected of teachers in policy texts, highlighting our concerns of perception, comprehension, and projection for a teacher as they respond through regulated improvisation.

Perception
The first domain of situational awareness is perception, which, within the context of pedagogical practices of classroom teachers, is concerned with noticing. Perception speaks to a classroom teacher's capacity to bear witness to all the varied stimuli in a classroom environment without suffering task overload. Perception is about the conscious awareness of teachers, accounting for the fact that they might be aware of some but not all the contextual factors that shape classroom dynamics. This is particularly acute with beginning or novice teachers who, in the absence of a frame of reference, often deploy command and control pedagogical practices as a "response to situational elements confronting them" (Denscombe, 1982, p. 253). A graduate and an experienced educator may separately conceive of behaviour management, curriculum goals, the value of relationships and even the physical resources at their disposal in different ways. The novice teacher is still coming to terms with the interrelationship between these elements of pedagogical practice; for some, it can be the 1 3 difference between a teacher being able to "sink or swim" (Lortie, 2010, p. 258). Unfamiliar information and complex stimulus have the challenge of being collectivised for the inexperienced educator. Therefore, "those children are problematic", is galling in contrast to "what is happening with Chris today?" These perspectival and experience-based differences are central to the difference between student learning and behaviour management (Corcoran & Thomas, 2021).
In a profession imbued with complexity such as teaching, the TGtA Report aims to position teachers as performers and ensure that a standard of teaching is continually monitored and maintained. Regulated improvisation, then, is produced via the cumulative experience and knowledge of what constitutes schooling, and to that end, the "objective structures within which it is played" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 66). This concerns the incorporation of awareness and orientation towards "an impending outcome" (p. 66)-the relative success of which is enhanced under the knowledge of structures, rules and expectations that experience develops over time. Independent of any singular cause, regulated improvisation in teaching is a manifestation of the "sense and rationality" (p. 66) harmonised by the structures inherent in a particular context and/or environment, i.e. habitus. While a classroom teacher's habitus may be the source of distinctive reactions and/or pedagogical practice/s, it does not act alone. Habitus works by bounding the pedagogical patterns of teachers' work in a classroom within a preordained "best practices" frame. This way of "assuring quality within teaching-learning interactions can be another way in which institutional habitus is situated in teaching learning interactions" (Ashwin, 2009, p. 116). So, classroom teachers are free to improvise, adapt and change, indeed TGtA expects them to insofar as they can show "continuous improvement, to ensure results move upward" (Gonski et al., 2018, p. xi). What this means is that teachers are anticipated to continually monitor and notice room for improvement.
In another related imposition by TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018), learning success is narrativised as transparent and tangible, easily captured by formal summative checks and verifiable against standardised system-wide tests. Developing such an education system is contingent upon reforms that affix evaluation for "maximum impact" (p. 67) at the centre. Connected to such a manoeuvre is a dependence on diagnosis and the remediation of student under-performance with a "particular focus on teachers" (p. 67) regardless of experience, to use "assessment outcomes and data to diagnose and evaluate" (p. 67). A policy of this kind works to increase the "external control of schools, teachers and students through inspections, evaluations and assessments" (Sahlberg, 2020, p. 260). Here, assessment and diagnosis are deployed as part of a prescription, intervention and evaluation process favouring deficit perspectives of learning and where a teacher's capacity is the active constituent in mediating education and other systemic (social and economic) demands.

Comprehension
The second domain of situational awareness builds on perception, turning to comprehension of stimulus. This is about making sense of objects, people, systems, modes, and actions as they occur. For teachers, what is key at the comprehension stage of situational awareness is the synthesis of the classroom stimulus: how they create a picture of the class environment as it is mobilised. Consequently, "comprehension involves integrating external data with knowledge and goals, which in turn informs the projected status of the world" (Stanton et al., 2001, p. 194). This is the synthesis of teacher experience and external policy understandings. Comprehension is key for new and experienced teachers alike, particularly when procedures regulate what improvisational choices are available. Regulated improvisation is forever constructed as a series of "path-dependent relations" (Lingard, 2021, p. 2). Put simply, the forward tilt of schooling and policy establishes an imagined future by eliding "a break with the past to project a way forward to a better future to be achieved through the (aspired for) fidelity of policy enactment" (2021, p. 6). We can see this keenly in the TGtA Report through its coupling of diagnosis and diagnostic solutions as the armaments of classroom teachers. This "clinical" approach to learning envisions a schooling system in which the capacity for the "continuous diagnosis" of students' (Gonski et al., 2018, p. ix) performance is paramount so that under-achievement is remedied sooner rather than later. Problem students can presumably be fixed and cured of their educational ills and reintroduced to the student population with their challenges remedied (Slee, 2018).
By design, TGtA rejects one of the most critical aspects of the classroom teacher, their relational work in the social context of the classroom with their students. Not everything in education can be measured (nor should it be) such that the obvious "next steps in learning to achieve [equates to] the next stage in growth" (Gonski et al., 2018, p. x). Classroom teachers, differentiating their pedagogical practices and drawing on their comprehension-awareness of students' specific needs, the resources available in context, can imagine more than a singular future predicated on what are taken to be measures of growth.

Projection
The third domain of situational awareness is projection. Projection involves an individual's ability to consider what is possible based on the tools and materials available. To the regulated improviser, projection is about anticipation, based on what is probable. To project effectively is "the ability to predict the dynamic implications of current events and anticipate future events" (Wolff et al., 2020, p. 140), which is undoubtedly the domain of experience for the classroom teacher. What may look to be effortless improvisation is "[m]ediated by teachers' knowledge & experiences in the classroom" (Wolff et al., 2020, p. 134), built up over time with learners in context. The projection of possibilities for classroom teachers is regulated by policy drivers, such as TGtA, when they move to curtail contextual responses. Education policy is a keyway in which policymakers can engage in "steering at a distance" (Kickert, 1995, p. 148). The regulation of teacher professional practice in this way enables the modern classroom to reconcile the irreconcilable or to "not only promote flexibility, autonomy, and choice, but presuppose it and, in a certain way, produce it" (Muller, 1998, p. 179). This may be further understood by teachers as "the potential consequences of their interpretation" (Gregory et al., 2015, p. 334).
Framing regulated improvisational moves available to the classroom teacher in this way, in effect, determines the range of possibilities available to them.
Projection also defines potentiality in a given situation. The volatility of the classroom may be stilled when an experienced educator chooses not to act, but instead shifts themselves physically in a room in response to behaviour management concerns, or indeed are more likely to consider a wider range of possibilities. Conversely, an inexperienced teacher may project an immediate threat from a cursory issue or worse, missing critical details which are also occurring in and around any given classroom event. Regulated improvisation at this final stage of Situational Awareness achieves a great deal, because it frames pedagogical choices as personal decisions, making self-management within regulation "a disciplinary practice" (Ball, 1994, p. 66). How TGtA is implicated here is that it presents a harmonised "scientific account of practice" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 82), whereas the TGtA implementation of "evidence-based pedagogical practices" (Gonski et al., 2018, p. 57) by regulated teachers overcomes the challenges inherent in student under-achievement. It reinforces the authority of external evidence as sacrosanct, and privileges external data to "diagnose and evaluate" (p. 67) students' shortfalls and assessment outcomes to "deprivatis[e]… teaching-moving away from teachers being solely responsible for their own teaching practice" (p. 58).
In so doing, classroom teachers are regulated to minimise any potential negative impact and ensure a stronger level of conformity. If we focus purely on student achievement and the regulation of pedagogical practices, TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018) reflects the invisible hand of control. It posits a type of teacher needed for today's classrooms, those with "strong professional skills, motivation and commitment" (p. 56), an adaptive and compliant type who understands the imperative to "embrace changes to their planning, teaching and assessment practice" (p. 56). So the pedagogy of today, under-written by TGtA, involves the development of individual student "flight paths" (p. 56) projected towards tomorrow; in effect, an intensification of diagnostic assessment mixed with "tailored teaching".

Part 4: Discussion: Relationships take time
A particular aspect of teaching that has persisted through the above analysis, and which we now want to examine further for its relevance to this closing discussion of the analysis, relates to time. Teacher work through TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018) has a normalising function, wherein the experience of regulated improvisation is subject to temporal compressions. Temporality means the experiences of time, forever accelerated, so that time thriftiness becomes the value most prized in educational transactions (Lingard & Thompson, 2017). Moreover, pedagogical practices are "entirely immersed in the current of time, [ensuring] practice is inseparable from temporality, not only because it is played out in time, but also because it plays strategically with time and especially with tempo" (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 81). Not only does the practice of regulated improvisation take place in time, but it is also bound by time.
Teaching as regulated improvisation Schools, like teaching practices, need to be recognised as means through which time is differentially shaped and experienced. Chronographies of power allow for lived temporalities, and how pedagogical practice "allows the social and relational contours of power, in its temporal form, to emerge" (Sharma, 2014, p. 14). Importantly, these function across the "policy cycle" (Lingard, 2021, p. 5) stages imbuing both policy and practice in temporally fused slices of time that determine what is possible. Situational Awareness provides a means to understand decision making under pressure, which is especially true when we "tend to ignore or devalue information that does not match our perception of a problem or issue" (Lunce & Xiaoxia, 2013, p. 21). Situational Awareness is itself a temporally differentiated concern, and this is made plain in the classroom. As Shulman notes "the teacher must have at hand a veritable armamentarium of alternative forms of representation, some of which derive from research whereas others originate in the wisdom of practice" (1986, p. 9). Whilst experienced educators can draw on their history of having techniques to draw on and established relationships with their cohorts that can save time, in contrast, less inexperienced teachers often become quickly overwhelmed and reliant on policy positions and default responses (Whitburn & Thomas, 2021).
Situational Awareness provokes a narrowing of effectiveness when "high workload and/or multi-tasking, preoccupation with less relevant tasks, inadequate feedback from students, or periods of stress" (Lunce & Xiaoxia, 2013, p. 24) are the norm, all of which occur daily for the beginning teacher. Teaching effectively, either synchronously or non-synchronously is reliant on building effective relationships in the classroom. Our concern is the developing capacity of teachers to work meaningfully in classrooms where excellence is prioritised over time. The capacity of early career teachers, for example, to notice the multiple elements at play in classrooms and respond efficiently and effectively is inhibited significantly due to their incapacity to task load without being overwhelmed.
The less experienced teacher is far more likely to suffer task overload when they are unable to rely on automated skills and routines. The seasoned educator, in contrast, draws on their memory of like situations and can nuance and respond with a bank of practised alternatives. Indeed as "a worker becomes more skilled, then he or she will be able to perform tasks in a much more automatic fashion" (Crichton et al., 2013, p. 32). This seems to be what is also suggested by TGtA (Gonski et al., 2018) when it claims that expert (experienced) teachers "understand reasons for individual student success, can anticipate student difficulties, can adapt with confidence in unexpected situations, and in doing so promote a student's learning growth" (p. 77).
Through TGtA, the perception seems to be that there is nothing to problematise or demystify about teaching, everyone can do it-because everyone has been to school, but in the advent of performance measures, science and evidence have determined all that matters. The dislocations connected with disadvantage and inequity present only as a professional challenge where teachers make objective judgements based on the known science and evidence about how best to meet the needs of their students to maximise attainment. Since classroom teachers "develop a sense of situational awareness over time" (Purinton, 2011, p. 137), our core concern is inquiring into which voice or voices are privileged by TGtA.
Put another way, we wonder what values and professional identities are possible when what teachers do is a product of their capacity.

Conclusion
The central contribution of this paper is a conceptual understanding of how policy texts, such as the TGtA report (2018) can position teacher practice through standardisation, compliance and performance, a concern not unique to the Australian context of educational policy, nor to schooling. This paper extends this understanding by foregrounding the Bourdieusian notion of regulated improvisation and engages with the paradox of policy and practice when teachers are expected to improvise their teaching practices within a restricted frame of reference, drawing on a dynamic form of situational awareness. A close reading of the TGtA report (Gonski et al., 2018) is offered to highlight the inherent tensions, between teacher autonomy and constraints, negating important temporalities of teaching and learning considerations.
In sum, whilst the policy conceptualisations of teachers' work such as that suggested by (Gonski et al., 2018) determine the pedagogic boundaries that are afforded to classroom teachers, they also align teaching practice/s to the evaluative mechanisms of accountability and performativity which limits the creativity and spontaneity of improvisation. The TGtA Report emphasises a need for student achievement, continual growth and benchmarked standards through calls for continuous improvement and/or systemic innovation. This in turn disciplines teachers' adherence to evaluation and accountability frameworks, actively dismissing broader socio-economic and cultural geographies as pervasive inhibitors of achievement and learning growth. This occurs when what is expected of the school, and by extension the teacher, is quarantined into only that which serves external policy articulations, re-defining the pedagogical practices of educators to that which is fully predictable and calculable. Teachers' skills and capacities become inextricably bound alongside the policy demands of specific performance priorities which tend to gloss over the contextualised and temporal needs of students, and the regulated improvisations that come with an idealised version of the teacher as a simultaneous worker, forever adaptive and always caught within a frame of externally mandated performance measures. It is imperative then that we question the sort of future put forth by this form of educational orthodoxy which constrains teacher practice whilst simultaneously centralising improvisational teaching.