Sowing the seeds of education reform

by Marilyn Achiron, 
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Plant a tree? Easy: dig up soil, insert sapling, cover roots with soil, water abundantly.

Unless the tree you want to plant is from Japan and the soil in which you want to plant it is in Paris. Then you have to negotiate with two different ministries of agriculture and arrange to have a branch of a Japanese cherry blossom tree grafted onto roots developed in France before you can follow the four simple steps above.

Who knew?

As it turns out, apart from illustrating how even the simplest and most well-intentioned act of gift-giving could turn into a bureaucratic nightmare if not properly thought out, the plan to plant a Japanese cherry blossom tree on the grounds of OECD headquarters in Paris, in gratitude for the organisation’s support of the Tohoku School, offered the Japanese students involved yet another example of why learning how to learn is as important as what one learns.

The OECD-Tohoku School project was born in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami that flooded more than 550 square kilometres of land, killed more than 18,000 people, and triggered a cooling-system failure at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant that led to a partial meltdown at the plant. The idea of the project was to turn the tragedy into an opportunity.  Through a “bottom-up”, project-based approach to learning, backed by the Japanese Ministry for Education, Fukushima University and other local stakeholders, and supported by the OECD, 100 junior and senior high school students in the Tohoku region worked with their teachers and members of the community – including industry, government and academia – to draw international attention to the region’s recovery and attractions. In the process, they began to acquire the kinds of skills – collaboration, innovation, leadership – that are so essential for life in knowledge-based 21st century economies.

“In regular school, we just sit at tables. The teachers teach and we study,” says Chikato Nakamura, 17, who participated in the project. “In this project, adults and children are equal. When we say something, teachers listen. Teachers and students co-operate with each other.”

Emi Kubota, a 17-year-old whose grandparents died in the tsunami, had similar experiences at the OECD-Tohoku School: “In regular school, when I’m worried about something, a teacher will help me. At the Tohoku School, the teacher will help, but I have to try to help myself first; and other students co-operate to solve the problem.”

The two-and-a-half-year project saw its fruition last weekend at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, when 80 Tohoku School students came with exhibits and performances celebrating the customs, foods and innovative technologies of their region. Yesterday, the obstacles thrown up by international law nearly overcome (a French botanist continues work on grafting branches to roots), the students also planted a cherry blossom tree – a symbol of hope, endurance and vitality in the face of adversity. Their presence in Paris was testament to their own efforts, ingenuity and resilience – and evidence that it is possible to change the way students – and teachers – approach education.

The idea now is to plant the seeds of these new approaches to learning in schools throughout Japan – and beyond. Says Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, “These young students are the innovators and game-changers for our schools today and our societies tomorrow. They don't just have great ideas; they also have the capacity to make them happen.”

Thanks to Hikari Kunishio for her translations.

Links:
OECD-Tohoku School
The OECD Tohoku School: Moving forward together: Interview with Kohei Oyama and Yoko Tsurimaki, Students of the OECD Tohoku School Project
Lessons in learning, amid the rubble by Barbara Ischinger, former Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
Rebuilding education after the tsunami - some impressions by Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
Image: ©OECD Tohoku School

The OECD Tohoku School: Moving forward together

Interview with Kohei Oyama and Yoko Tsurimaki, Students of the OECD Tohoku School Project

During a break from the OECD Forum, two students (11th grade and 12th grade) from the OECD Tohoku School Project shared their learning experiences with Cassandra Davis and Meredith Lunsford of educationtoday. They began by explaining the student-designed OECD Tohoku School logo. Like many things in Japan, every element of the logo has a significant meaning. The 15 multi-coloured arrows piercing through the bull’s-eye represent the 15 regions of Japan touched by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in 2011. Each arrow carries a unique colour to represent the individually diverse personalities that the respective regions hold. The tri-coloured rings surrounding the arrows represent the past, present and future of Japan. The most significant facet of the logo is the individual arrows pointing upwards from right to left, following Japanese calligraphy. This is meant to represent each region’s path reaching toward a common goal: to move forward together.

educationtoday: The OECD places a high value on student motivation, curiosity and creativity. In collaboration with the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology and Fukushima University, there has been an importance placed on the idea of “creative recovery”. What does “creative recovery” mean to you? Why is “creative recovery” important (versus traditional forms of recovery and reconstruction)?

Kohei Oyama: There have been several types of recovery, with infrastructure being the basic component. But in Tohoku we have focused on creative recovery. We creatively think about the people affected by the tsunami and the futures that they seek. Then, we creatively think about how to draw people back into the impacted areas.

educationtoday: The OECD Tohoku School Project works through a series of project-based workshops which include lecturers, hands-on experiences and discussion. Has this project-based learning changed the way you learn? How?

Yoko Tsurimaki: What we do at the Tohoku School is different from a “regular” school in that we don’t follow a curriculum that is given to us by our teachers. Instead, we design the curriculum ourselves, we decide the best course of action to facilitate recovery and, then, we implement it.

educationtoday: What other Tohoku School derived methods can we use to foster creativity in order to facilitate recovery and reconstruction?

Kohei: The student-driven learning method used in the Tohoku School project is the best strategy for other schools to implement. The students have the freedom to decide what they want to learn and how they want to implement these ideas.

educationtoday: The students carrying out this project were anticipated to gain real-life skills such as initiative taking, leadership, critical thinking, co-operation and creativity. What are some of the skills that you learned through the Tohoku School project? What skills did you learn that you think will transfer into your real life? What skills do you imagine will be useful in your future career?

Kohei: The most important skill that I learned through this process is how to communicate effectively. Both inside the classroom and outside the classroom, communication is a necessity. If you have a great idea, you must still be able to communicate that idea to others in order to make it a reality. Otherwise, the idea will be lost through miscommunication.

Yoko: The most important skill I have learned is critical thinking. But, I have also learned so much about the differences in value systems inside and outside of Japan. Within Japan, there is increasing internationalisation and it is becoming more and more necessary for future generations to be able to communicate effectively with other people and other cultures.

educationtoday: Since the launch of the Tohoku School Project two and half years ago, the mission has been for the students to organise an international event here in Paris to show to the world the attractiveness and creative recovery of your country. What is the major achievement or the take away message from the Tohoku School?

Yoko: To be able to demonstrate how hard the junior high and high school students have worked. Through all of the ups and downs, we have persevered and accomplished what we set out to do.

Kohei: This journey has been like sailing on a ship. It wasn’t always easy and there have been many waves. However, if the ride had always been stable (like in school), we wouldn't have really learned the skills needed in real life situations, full of unexpected surprises! Instead, we have so much to take away from this experience.

As we concluded the interview, we were presented with t-shirts and bags that had been designed by the students of the Tohoku School. The appreciation of the OECD’s support on education and skills development in Japan is evidenced in the students’ answers to our questions as well as this meaningful gesture of gratitude.

Links:
OECD Tohoku School
OECD Forum
Japanese version of the OECD-Tohoku School website
Image: ©OECD Tohoku School

Hiroshima – from symbol of human destruction to leader in educational reform

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

I spent two days in Hiroshima, discussing education reform and global policy trends with prefectural leaders and the academic community. This city, target of a simply unimaginable attack on human mankind 59 years ago, is now the birthplace of some of the World’s most innovative education policies and practices.

No building, no tree and no other remainder of human activity in this city is older than 59 years. As school principal Kadoshima drives by an office tower on our way to his school, he explains this had been the place where his grandmother and two uncles had been burned alive like most other residents of the area, leaving nothing but a shadow on the floor. But I am also told how many of the survivors left wandering between life and death for the ensuing months and years have envied their fate. His father and his uncle were the only ones who remained from the family, as they had happened to spend the 6th of August in 1945 with classmates in the country side.

As we arrive at Hiroshima Nagisa High School, we meet a group of cheerful children on the school’s playing field. But what looks like casual play is actually part of a carefully planned and sequenced curriculum designed to help students develop their five senses; to find themselves and join others in life, work and citizenship; and to develop autonomy and identity that is social and cognisant of pluralism.

Classroom after classroom I observe deep and intense learning with a curriculum characterised by rigor, focus and coherence, and with lots of lively interaction both among students and with their teachers. Mathematics and the arts are not seen here as competing for scarce student learning time, but as reinforcing each other. Much of the school’s effort is devoted to making learning central and encouraging student engagement, to foster lifelong skills-oriented learning instead of exams-focused drill, to ensure that learning is social and collaborative, and to promote connections across subjects and activities in the school. I find Rudyard Brettargh from Australia and Olen Peterson from the United States co-teaching an English class, and that again is not by accident, but the idea is to show students that there is not just a single, but multiple ways to speak a language.

Many of the school’s pedagogical approaches are designed to construct experiences in learning, over exclusively intellectual engagement. In one classroom I meet a group of students cooking Okonomiyaki, Hiroshima’s most popular local dish, but they are not all doing the same, each student is creating and preparing their own variant of the dish. Students experience that they won’t know exactly how things will unfold, that they will be surprised, and that they will make mistakes and learn from them along the way.

During these days, a group of students from the United States is visiting Nagisa High School and they have immediately immersed into all aspects of the school life. Likewise, Nagisa High School students frequently venture outside. Principal Kadoshima shows us pictures from the many field trips his student have taken to other countries and cultures, or simply to the world of work and other social contexts in Japan. The meaning of all this to prepare global citizens for a world in which most people will need to collaborate with people with diverse views, experiences and cultural origins; and a world in which people’s lives will be affected by events that transcend national boundaries, and the authority of national jurisdictions to address them. During these trips, students learn to engage with dilemmas and controversy that result from globalization which have no singular solution, but where awareness of different perspectives on these dilemmas is essential to finding the common ground necessary to solve them. They learn to understand the global economic, social and political environmental forces that shape our lives; and to develop the skills, attitudes and values which enable people to work together to bring about change and to take control of their own lives.

Not least, the school is stretching students not just intellectually but also physically. One picture shows an exhausted group of students lying on a bridge at dawn, after walking 44 kilometres through the night. The aim is to strengthen resilience, the capacity to cope in an imbalanced world, recognising that the world exists in constant disequilibrium - trying, failing, adapting, learning and evolving in endless cycles. And Nagisa High School shows that learning is at the centre of resilience. This is all about helping vulnerable people, organizations and systems persist, perhaps even thrive, amid unforeseeable disruptions. At the individual level, this can shape the reach of social networks, the quality of close relationships, access to resources, but also beliefs and habits of mind, including the disposition to assess, take and manage risks. At the aggregate level, it can support Japanese communities and institutions with greater flexibility, intelligence and responsiveness to the rapid economic and social changes which Japan is facing.

Links:
Hiroshima Nagisa High School
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education Video
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Lessons from PISA for Japan
PISA 2012 Country-Specific overview on Japan
Photo Credit: Hiroshima Nagisa High School

Japan finds inspiration in its PISA results

by Miki Tadakazu
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

PISA 2012 showed mixed results for Japan. While Japanese students maintained their strong performance in mathematics, reading and science, the assessment found that 15-year-olds in Japan take less pleasure in learning mathematics and have less interest and motivation in doing so than the average student across OECD countries although Japanese students’ interest and motivation have improved since 2003. The Japanese government is using these findings to improve both the way students learn and what they learn.

Up until 2002, Japanese primary and secondary students attended school six days per week. Saturday schooling was eliminated that year in an effort to let students have a wide variety of activities and experiences outside of school. But after that reform was adopted, educators realised that inequities in schooling began to develop. In particular, while advantaged students benefited from Saturday studies at the privately owned and managed educational institutions known as juku, disadvantaged students usually did not have access to these opportunities. Many parents reported that they wanted their children to attend school on Saturday morning.

Late last year the government made it clear that individual local education boards could opt to have learning activities on Saturdays to meet their students’ learning needs. The aim of this reform is to conduct high-quality learning activities on Saturday in cooperation with parents, local communities and economic communities. Each school can provide diverse learning opportunities such as classes that fall within their curriculum, extra-curricular activities and non-profit organisations’ coordinating activities, based on their students’ needs.

On 14 December, using PISA mathematics items, the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Hakubun Shimomura took the initiative to experimentally teach mathematics during Saturday learning activities in a public elementary school located in Itabashi City in Tokyo. The goal was to ensure the effectiveness of Saturday learning activities in school by increasing students’ diverse learning opportunities and improving their pleasure, interest and motivation to learn. During his learning session, he not only taught how to solve equations, but also dissected them and showed students how they encounter these kinds of problems in everyday real life situations.

Students who took the session said, “I got tense but enjoyed myself,” and “I hope my score will improve if I join Saturday learning sessions.” Minister Shimomura gathered from this session that Japanese students could enjoy a wide variety of learning activities, which could further develop their pleasure, motivation and interest to learn. 

Among other ways of using this additional time in school, the “period of integrated study”, mandatory in the Japanese curriculum, will be used. During this study time, the focus is on learning through observation, experiments, field study, investigation and problem solving. The idea, then, is that on Saturdays, parents and members of the local community are more available to offer their specific knowledge and skills to students, skills that are used in daily life and that may also inspire students to take a greater interested in weekday course work.

Providing learning activities on Saturdays is not intended to add more time for students to absorb and reproduce established knowledge. Rather, the aim is to offer learning activities that challenge students to apply what they have learned in school to real-life problems and that help them acquire the kinds of “soft” skills – communication, collaboration and imagination – that are considered essential for the 21st century.

Links:
PISA 2012 Results
PISA 2012 Country-Specific overview on Japan
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment
Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Lessons from PISA for Japan
Photo credit: Ministry of Education, Japan

Getting internationalisation right

by Andreas Schleicher
Deputy Director for Education and Skills, Special Advisor on Education Policy to the OECD's Secretary General

The exceptional turnout at the 2013 OECD/Japan Seminar  in Tokyo this week, where over 300 participants from over 20 countries discussed global strategies for higher education, shows that the seminar had exactly the right agenda at exactly the right time. I asked myself how many people would have turned up had this seminar been held five years ago; or whether five years ago, Japan would have ventured to take the lead on this theme.

At long last higher education has become a global enterprise, with a rapidly growing number of students who are going global, with educational content going global, and with providers of higher education going global.

And as many speakers at the seminar pointed out, where those people go, where that content goes, and where those institutions go has huge economic and social consequences, for individuals, for institutions and for the economic and social well-being of nations.

That's why getting internationalisation right matters so much. And why, in turn, global rankings of universities have become so popular – no matter what we think about those rankings. I am afraid the only choice that the international higher education community has is to either do those rankings well, or to have the media doing them poorly.

A country like Japan stands at an historically unprecedented point, in which supply and demand for university education are, for the first time, broadly in balance, and in which consumer choice, grounded in high-quality information, could be a powerful force in steering universities towards closer engagement with the development of abilities suited to professional life. But that's only going to work if that information is available.

At the OECD, we are making significant investments in this area, with our aim of developing a direct  Assessment of Higher Education Learning Outcomes (AHELO). Surely, such assessments will tell us a lot more about the quality and competitiveness of world-class universities than past reputation or the volume of resources that are being invested can ever do.  However, while I have no doubt that the concentration of global talent and favourable governance are key to the success of world-class universities, I need to be convinced that abundance of resources is equally important. We had that same hypothesis in school education, where we used spending per student as a proxy for quality, until  PISA  showed with great clarity that the world is no longer divided between rich and well-educated systems and poor and badly educated ones. Indeed, one of the greatest results we should see from outcome-based comparisons of higher education institutions will be significant gains in effectiveness and efficiency.

But even instruments such as AHELO are just one piece of the bigger puzzle. Prof. Judith Eaton explained how global trends are changing demand for and the dynamics of quality assurance in higher education. As she noted, everywhere, there is expansion of government attention to quality: there is pressure to increase access with limited financing and international competitiveness matters more than ever. There is growing interest in market or industrial models of higher education, with the centre of attention shifting from intellectual development to economic development, even if I very much hope that universities will continue to question that trend, as it could be hollowing out the very mission of universities. There is also scepticism about the adequacy of quality assurance for public accountability, illustrated by diminished public confidence and perhaps diminished trust. As Judith put it, there was a time where the public turned to universities to make judgements on quality. Now we see the public wanting to make judgements about the quality of universities, demanding greater transparency and better data on outcomes. And there is disruptive innovation, there is no need to go to college to study any more, there is no need to go to college to get a degree, there is no need to go to college to meet with a professor, and there is no need to go to another country to pursue international studies.

Does the globalisation of higher education imply that the space for national policy intervention is getting smaller, as we have seen in the economic or financial sectors? As Prof. Simon Marginson explained, education and national research systems are still part of governments’ nation-building projects, including strategies for enhancing global competitiveness. Institutions remain partly dependent on national funding, and remain shaped by regulation and by national politics. Prof. Steve Egan pointed out that no one has yet gone for wholesale commercialisation of research universities. But globalisation changes the scope for government action, expanding it in some ways and contracting it in others.

If there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that we don't have a real alternative to internationalisation. We just can’t afford to hold on to the past, but we do need to be active in defining the future we desire.

Links:
OECD/Japan Seminar: “Global Strategies for Higher Education－Global Trends and Rethinking the Role of Government”
Approaches to Internationalisation and Their Implications for Strategic Management and Institutional Practice: A Guide for Higher Education Institutions
OECD work on Higher Education and Adult Learning
Follow Andreas Schleicher on twitter: @SchleicherEDU
Photo credit: Globe with diploma /Shutterstock

Lessons in learning, amid the rubble

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education

A school band played for us. It was the best school band I’ve ever heard—and I’ve heard many. It was the true image of hope, team spirit and positive attitudes. For the students, it was the welcome experience of normality.

A brass band playing in the midst of vast devastation; a landscape that reminded me of street scenes from my childhood in Germany after the war. But this was just one week ago, in Japan, during a visit to the area torn apart by the earthquake and tsunami a year ago today. I went there to participate in the launch of the Japan edition of our Strong Performers, Successful Reformers series and to discuss the OECD’s Tohoku School project with local partners.

This is a project whereby students learn through doing. In this case, they are planning an international event, scheduled to be held in 2014 in Paris, to attract visitors to the devastated Tohoku region of Japan. To do this, they will need to acquire and use very specific skills, but ones that still aren’t commonly taught in classrooms: critical thinking, creativity, teamwork. They will have to think and act like entrepreneurs: create a plan, develop it and see it through.

PISA results show that students who are motivated perform better in school than students who aren’t; and project-based learning is a great motivator. The students participating in this project are given real-life tasks to perform to accomplish their goals and they learn while doing those tasks.

These children are learning these skills in dramatic circumstances; but these are skills that all children, everywhere, need to learn to participate fully in 21st-century societies. Students around the world need the confidence to not just accept what they have seen around them during their childhoods, but to be bold and courageous and try new things, consider professions for themselves that aren’t customary in their families or even in their regions. Every child should have the confidence to think big—have big dreams, big ambitions—and both teachers and parents should help to instil this confidence in their children.

The responsibility for education does not only lie in the hands of government and enterprises, it also lies in the hands of individuals. To be committed to lifelong learning is the solution. We want to plant this seed in the Tohoku School and elsewhere, so that schools teach students the skills they need to become lifelong learners. Indeed, one of the main messages of the OECD’s Skills Strategy, which will be unveiled in May, is that to thrive in the global knowledge-based economy, we all need to become lifelong learners.

The children and teachers I met in the Tohoku region understand the value of learning. I found evidence of that in an unlikely place: a non-descript building next to a temple that had been claimed by an enterprising local NGO as a study room. The room seemed to absorb the temple’s spiritual atmosphere and comforting silence. It is where displaced students could go to prepare for their school entrance exams. These students are living with their families in one-room temporary housing; were it not for this space, they would have had no other quiet place in which they could concentrate on their studies. The teachers there were coaching the students, mentoring them. You see small gestures like this and you feel that something is coming back: flowers are blooming, spring is unfolding.

Links:

OECD-Tohoku School

Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Lessons from PISA for Japan

Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education
Photo: Japanese cherry - sakura flowers. Petals of cherry blossoms on the water surface as a sign of sorrow and sympathy to the Japan after by floods and earthquakes. 
Photo credit: Repina Valeriya / Shutterstock