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

Skills will power Norway’s future prosperity

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

While in Oslo last month, I caught a glimpse of what can be achieved when social partners and governments put skills at the top of their respective agendas. This year’s annual conference of Norway’s leading employer organisation was squarely focused on the “Learning Life” and in her opening address Prime Minister Solberg set the stage. “Oil has given Norway prosperity, but it is knowledge that is Norway’s future,” she said, “Jobs will increasingly be knowledge and skills intensive.” 

The fact that the Prime Minister stayed the entire day, joined by her Ministers and most of Norway’s business elite, underlines how determined the Norwegians are to make this happen. Today, we hope to contribute to achieving this vision with the OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Report on Norway. 

This diagnostic report applies the framework of the OECD Skills Strategy to identify 12 skills challenges for Norway as it seeks to maximise its future skills potential. These skills challenges were distilled from a series of interactive workshops held in the course of 2013 which engaged a wide range of stakeholders including employers’ organisations, trade unions, local and county governments, student associations and education institutions. The report marshals a wide array of OECD evidence, including Norway’s results from the Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC), to shed light on the issues and offers concrete examples of how other countries are tackling similar skills challenges.

One of the key features of our collaboration with Norway over the past year has been the driving role played by the project team whose members are drawn from five ministries – education, labour, finance, industry and trade, local government and modernisation. This reflects the government’s strong commitment to cross-ministerial co-ordination in tackling skills challenges. As Norway’s project moves into the action phase this year we can expect to see innovative and practical ideas for tackling skills challenges emerge from this broad-based partnership across, and beyond, government.

So what are the main skills challenges facing Norway today? 

With regard to developing relevant skills, the report concludes that Norway would do well to focus its efforts on:

1. Ensuring strong foundation skills for all

2. Reducing drop-outs

3. Informing educational choices.

When it comes to activating its skills supply, Norway will need to tackle the challenges of:

4. Enhancing labour-market participation among those receiving disability benefits

5. Encouraging labour market attachment among low-skilled youth

6. Ensuring Norwegians remain active longer

Norway could make more effective use of the skills it has by: 

7. Engaging employers in ensuring a highly skilled workforce

8. Promoting innovation and entrepreneurship

9. Enhancing the use of migrants’ skills

Finally, Norway could improve the enabling conditions underpinning the overall skills system by:

10. Facilitating a whole-of-government approach to skills

11. Ensuring local flexibility and adaptability for nationally designed policies

12. Building partnerships at the local and national level to improve implementation.

In the coming months, we’ll also be releasing OECD Skills Strategy Diagnostic Reports for Austria and Korea.  It’s an exciting time, as we help map out countries’ skills challenges and work together to address them. 

As we do, we’re taking on board not just government’s perspectives but those of stakeholders. We’re learning from comparative data as well as on-the-ground experience. 

And we’re moving beyond diagnosis to action. 

Links:

Diagnostic Report: Norway

Andreas Schleicher’s presentation at NHO, 8 January

OECD Skills Strategy

Survey of Adult Skills

For more on skills and skills policies around the world, visit: http://skills.oecd.org/

See also the country pages on skills for Norway, Austria and Korea

Related blog posts on skills:

Skill up or lose out, by Andreas Schleicher

Let’s talk about skills, by Joanne Caddy

Image Source: OECD

Getting education to make biculturalism work

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

I was able to add half a day to visit schools in New Zealand, something I always try to do where my schedule permits. At Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Hoani Waititi, New Zealand’s first community school offering Māori medium instruction, I was greeted by a group of ferocious warriors slowly approaching us and offering the choice between picking a fight and settling for peace. With that choice made, we were warmly welcomed with a traditional pōwhiri at the school’s marae. In Māori culture greeting others is an important opportunity for people to show respect and to set the tone for whatever comes after. That hour-long ceremony included skilled speakers crafting poetic verbal images, but most impressive was how the school’s entire student population sang with one voice, confident and incredibly dynamic and self-orchestrated, without a conductor. Principal Rawiri Wright, former leader of the tough Māori language schooling organisation and who had challenged Minister Kaye and myself at my public presentation earlier in the morning, asked me later how the range of artistic and social skills so evident among his students were featuring in New Zealand’s national standards and our comparative work at the OECD. One could argue with some of his political rhetoric, but our conversation left me thinking. And he referred me proudly to the latest results on academic performance too, which showed his students outperforming schools at the 8th decile of socio-economic advantage - despite the fact that his own school was catering for low to middle-income families located at the 4th decile. He sees these results vindicating his stance that the kind of academic performance that we value comes as a by-product of the holistic Maori medium instruction that his school offers, while he claims that attempts to add the latter as a ‘nice-to-have’ to the former were failing in New Zealand.

Rawiri readily conceded that the school is not without its fair share of social and managerial issues, but it demonstrates how Māori running their own schools can offer their children - who tend to show dismal performance as minorities in many schools and whose parent generation makes up a disproportionate number of those on welfare or in correction facilities - a viable education that prepares them both to be citizens in the modern world in which they live, and to become active protagonists of their traditional culture. Rawiri sees helping children build an understanding of their cultural heritage as the foundation for the self-confidence and self-esteem that are so badly needed among the Māori student population. It may seem a thing of a long-gone past to ask children to know and remember seven-hundred ancestors, but it also means giving them assurance that they are not alone in facing the challenges of an ever-more rapidly changing world. Pita Sharples, Associate Minister for Education with responsibility for some key Maori education priorities, gave a moving account of how he had established this school against all odds but with the deep commitment of the community. This had been after more than a century in which Māori language and education had been outlawed. He did not seem that old and that brought home to me how recent biculturalism in New Zealand still is.

In very different ways, community engagement and partnership were also the guiding principles of Sylvia Park School. We’ve all experienced how it is when schools invite for a parental evening, on their own terms and timelines, and we know the kind of parents that show up at those events. The Mutukaroa Home School Learning Partnership at Sylvia Park has turned all this on its head, building educationally powerful partnerships that change what happens in classrooms, and that recognise the importance of engaging with families in honest, rigorous and robust ways to accelerate student learning. Arina, a truly inspiring teacher and counsellor, explained how she does whatever it takes to meet each parent at their home or at work, reviews their children’s performance with them individually, and then provides parents with the tools and assistance they need to assume their responsibilities for the development of their children. The Ministry’s evaluation found that the Sylvia Park project has lifted the achievement of new entrants from well below the national average to above it in just two years. It is now looking to bring that initiative to scale, replicating the core elements of Mukukaroa in a way that preserves their integrity, while adapting them to the individual context of schools.

At Newton Central School, I met Hoana Pearson, another amazing school principal. She defines the world through relationships, for her there is no bridge too far, no stakeholder too distant, no dispute that cannot be resolved through consultation, dialogue and collaboration.  And no one escapes her warm hug. As we walk from one richly decorated classroom to the next, she greets every child by name, and picks up pieces of trash to maintain the meticulous order of the premises. Newton Central provides education that reflects a deep commitment to biculturalism and the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, with four learning pathways to choose from. The school is creative and truly visionary, celebrating the diversity of its community. Here, social background and culture are not obstacles to learning, but the school capitalizes on the diversity of its learners, taking learning to the learner in ways that allow students to learn in the ways that are most conducive to their progress. All this is built on the kind of instructional and distributed leadership that Hoana provides, with a focus on supporting, evaluating and developing teacher quality as its core, where teachers collaborate to design, lead and manage innovative learning environments. Hoana also works with individual teachers to become aware of any weaknesses in their practices, and that often means not just creating awareness of what they do but changing the underlying mindset. She helps them gain an understanding of specific best practices, through experiencing such practices in the authentic setting of other classrooms. And she motivates her teachers to make the necessary changes through high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and a collective belief in their common ability to make a difference for every child. The school is succeeding even when she is absent, putting the final touches on her Master’s thesis towards the end of her career. What better indication could there be of effective leadership?

Hoana makes this happen, and New Zealand’s liberal and entrepreneurial school system gives her the space to make it happen. It would be hard to imagine her in one of Southern Europe’s bureaucratic school systems. Newton Central is an example for how school autonomy works at its best, and it explains why many of New Zealand’s schools perform top of the class in PISA. These schools set ambitious goals, are clear about what students should be able to do and then provide their teachers with the tools to establish what content and instruction they need to provide to their individual students. They have moved on from delivered wisdom, to user-generated wisdom, from a culture of standardization, conformity and compliance towards being innovative and ingenious.

The challenge for New Zealand is to get everybody to that level, to spread good practice and to make excellence universal. The evening before I had dinner with New Zealand’s cross-sector forum where some school principals’ spoke of the difficulties they face with attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers, of prioritising and delegating their work, of managing their resources strategically and of collaborating with other schools. In New Zealand’s socio-economically privileged schools, the school’s trustees provide magnificent stakeholder support. They elect talented principals and add the expertise of lawyers, accountants and administrators which autonomous schools need to function effectively. In many disadvantaged neighbourhoods, however, schools have a hard time finding any trustees, and where they do, these are unlikely to provide the governance, oversight and resources that are needed - and even more unlikely to challenge an underperforming principal.

The idea of New Zealand’s school systems is not to respond to this with administrative prescription, but for improvement to come from the best knowledge and understanding from within the school system. That means that professional autonomy needs to go hand in hand with a collaborative culture, with autonomous schools working in partnership to improve teaching and learning throughout the system. New Zealand needs its best teachers and its best schools to provide the expertise and resources for all teachers to update their knowledge, skills and approaches in light of new teaching techniques, new circumstances, and new research; it needs its best teachers to help other teachers to get on top of changes made to curricula or teaching practice and it needs its best school principals to enable other schools to develop and apply effective strategies. But knowledge is very sticky, particularly in a highly competitive school system. Knowledge about strong educational practices tends to stick where it is and rarely spreads without effective strategies and powerful incentives for knowledge mobilisation and knowledge management. That means New Zealand will have to think much harder about how it will actually shift knowledge around pockets of innovation and better align resources with the challenges.

The government is trying. Having successfully introduced a coherent system of educational standards – first of their kind in New Zealand - it is now providing schools and teachers with the tools they need to implement these standards in their classrooms and to monitor how individual students progress. But it is still a long way to go until strategic thinking and planning takes place at every level of the system, until every school discusses what the national vision along with desired standards means for them, and until every decision is made at the level of those most able to implement them in practice. Not least, the unions contest the implementation of standards and any notion of public transparency vigorously, fearing this will introduce a culture of external accountability and industrial work organisation of the kind that has driven out creative and professional practice in other countries. Given the nature of the tools and their heavy reliance on professional judgement within schools, these concerns seem somewhat farfetched, but they were an undercurrent in many of my conversations. There seem too few principals like Hoana, who cherish autonomy but see their schools as part of a national education system, who embrace national standards as a tool for peer-learning and for the continuous improvement of their daily practice.

For as long as I have been working with New Zealand there has been talk about equity. But the results from PISA show that the school system is still far from delivering equity, in terms of moderating the impact which social background has on learning outcomes. Disparities are, if anything, on the rise. The challenge for New Zealand lies in moving towards a culture of improvement, framed around not where schools and students are today but how they are advancing. This is about attracting the most talented teachers to the most challenging classrooms and getting the best principals into the toughest schools, it is about developing diverse and differentiated careers for teachers and principals that recognise and reward improved pedagogical practice and the kind of professional autonomy in a collaborative culture that makes school systems cohesive. It is about making sure that every child benefits from excellent teaching.

Links:
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Education Policy Outlook:New Zealand
Education at a Glance 2013: Country Note

Arts education in innovation-driven societies

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Senior Analyst and Project Leader, Directorate for Education and Skill, and 
Ellen Winner, Professor and Chair of Psychology, Boston College

There is growing consensus that today’s economies require people who can contribute and adapt to innovation. In addition to strong technical skills, many international task forces on the future requirements of our societies have identified skills such as creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication and collaboration as critical. Some even see the rise of a “creative class” as the driver of growth, and subject to a growing international competition for talent.

In this context, education systems have to equip students with the skills required for innovation societies, and some countries take this agenda very seriously.

Artists are role models for innovation in our societies, along with scientists and entrepreneurs, and thus it is not surprising that many see arts education as a means of developing skills critical for innovation. According to Arne Duncan, the US Secretary of Education, “education in the arts is more important than ever. In the global economy, creativity is essential. Today’s workers need more than just skills and knowledge to be productive and innovative participants in the workforce. […] To succeed today and in the future, America’s children will need to be inventive, resourceful, and imaginative. The best way to foster that creativity is through arts education”.

In a new OECD report, Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, the extent to which arts education fosters skills such as critical and creative thinking, motivation, self-confidence, and the ability to communicate and cooperate effectively is assessed. The book also examines whether arts education has an impact on learning non-arts disciplines: reading, mathematics and science.

This kind of exercise typically reveals the scope of our ignorance, and indeed currently many intuitively plausible assumptions are not backed by any empirical evidence. However, a few interesting and robust findings emerged that deserve more attention from parents, teachers and policy makers.

Acquiring foundational skills, notably reading, writing and arithmetics, is a major objective for many countries. Over and over, the PISA study finds that too many 15-year olds have only a basic proficiency in text understanding.

Strong evidence shows that theatre education in the form of enacting stories in the elementary level classroom (classroom drama) strengthens verbal skills (reading, writing, text understanding, etc.). Unfortunately, this does not seem to be a prevalent school practice in many schools.

Music education also has a clear causal impact on verbal skills, probably via its facilitation of auditory skills: music training improves phonological skills, the ability to hear speech in a noisy environment, and there is preliminary evidence that it might facilitate foreign language learning.

What about creativity? And social and behavioural skills? Here we have much less evidence. There are a few studies linking enhanced creativity with theatre and dance education, but their limited number as well as their correlational designs make it impossible to draw causal conclusions. There is also no more than tentative evidence regarding the impact of arts education on behavioural and social skills such as self-confidence, self-concept, motivation, communication and cooperation, empathy, perspective taking and the ability to regulate one’s emotions. Initial evidence concerned with education in dramatic art appears the most promising, with a few studies revealing that drama classes enhance empathy, perspective taking, and emotion regulation – plausible findings given the nature of such education.

Don’t misread these findings. The lack of evidence does not imply a lack of impact. We find very plausible the assumption that different forms of arts education have an impact on creativity, critical thinking and attitudes. For example, Studio Thinking 2 shows that visual arts teachers at their best promote reflection, meta-cognition and other creative habits of mind. They do so by teaching students to evaluate their own works and those of their peers, and asking students to talk about their working process. Research is now called for to test whether students in arts classes actually develop these habits of mind.  Other disciplines could learn from arts education how to nurture innovation-friendly habits of mind.

The impact of arts education on non-arts skills and on innovation in the labour market should not be the primary justification for arts education in today’s school curricula. Students who gain mastery in an art form may discover their future career or a lifetime passion. For all children, the arts allow for a different way of understanding than, let us say, the sciences. Arts education allows students to express themselves freely and to discover, explore and experiment. They also give them a safe place to introspect and find personal meaning. In this respect, the arts are important in their own rights for education.

Nevertheless, Art for Art’s Sake? shows that one way to foster skills for innovation societies may well be through the arts, as Arne Duncan put it.

Links:
Arts for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, by Ellen Winner, Thalia Goldstein and Stéphan Vincent­Lancrin
Art for Art’s Sake? Overview
Kunst um der Kunst Willen? Ein Überblick
CERI Innovation Strategy for Innovation and Training
Art for Art’s Sake? A gift to philanthropists and policymakers, OECDInsights
Photo credit:Cover © Violette Vincent.

How “green” are our children?

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

As the threats to the environment become ever more urgent, are our children learning what they need to know to make environmentally responsible decisions now and later on? The latest issue of PISA in Focus finds that while most 15-year-olds have some understanding of environmental issues and feel responsible towards the environment, those without some scientific knowledge consistently underestimate the amount of time needed to find solutions to pressing environmental problems.

When tested on their understanding of the science of environmental issues, and when asked about their attitudes towards these issues, large majorities of 15-year-olds across OECD countries not only knew about such issues as air pollution, the loss of plant and animal species, and water shortages, but also felt a strong sense of personal and social responsibility towards these issues. For example, an average of 92% of students believes that air pollution represents a serious concern for themselves or others in their country, and over 80% of students feel the same about energy shortages, the extinction of plants and animals, and the clearing of forests. Some 78% and 76% of students, respectively, feel the same about water shortages and nuclear waste.

But the numbers were nearly inverted when it came to students’ sense of optimism that solutions to these problems would be found in the next 20 years. On average across OECD countries, only 15% or fewer of students believe that there will be improvements with respect to nuclear waste, the extinction of plants and animals, and the clearing of forests for other land use; 16% of students feel the same about air pollution, only 18% are optimistic about tackling water shortages, and 21% feel the same about energy shortages.

The majority of students across OECD countries reported that school was their main source of information about the environment, although families also play a key role in forming students’ attitudes and opinions about environmental issues. Students’ often share their parents’ sense of responsibility and optimism towards the environment, although the strength of this correlation varies across countries, and is stronger when it comes to feelings of optimism than with a sense of personal responsibility.

Interestingly, the extent to which students feel optimistic that solutions to environmental problems will be found over the next 20 years was negatively related to student performance in environmental science: the lower their scores in environmental science, the more optimistic students were that the situation will improve over the next two decades. This may be due to the fact that students who lack a deep understanding about environmental issues may be more optimistic, or that students who are optimistic about the future of the environment have less incentive to become more knowledgeable about environmental science.

In short, PISA finds that making the link between environmental science studies at school and how they apply to the “real world” can help to foster a sense of responsibility towards the environment. But undue optimism—or pessimism—about the environment could stymie students from using their knowledge and understanding to positive effect.

Links:

For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/

PISA in Focus No. 21: Do today's 15-year-olds feel environmentally responsible?

Green at Fifteen? How 15-year-olds perform in environmental science and geoscience in PISA

Photo credit:  Green fingers / Shutterstock

Welcome to my world. Won’t you come on in?

by Valérie Lafon
Analyst - Institutional Management in Higher Education

As a young mother, in relation to my children’s age, and being the ripe old age of 40, I am discovering the daily ritual of education.

Education, we believe, will make our children’s dreams real, open the door to knowledge and experiences, help them grow, and ultimately give them the tools to live a happy, well-rounded life with a fulfilling career.

Filled with goodwill, well-informed thanks to working at the OECD and steeped in the notion that higher education will provide my children with the best and most appropriate skills, I found myself, like many other parents, lost in this new environment.

Looking at all of these issues, different worlds having different rules with goals at times at odds with each other and difficult to reconcile. Five separate worlds…

The world of learning

A plethora of various stakeholders are saturating the media and students are fighting to be heard. Perhaps so many different players makes it difficult to figure out who wants what.

• How do these students see their future? What do they expect? What do they want?
• How to bring their aspirations into the debate?

The world of knowledge 

Mass higher education affects all countries and academic systems. Participation, role, impact, and responsability of higher education institutions have taken on greater significance and will continue to do so.

• How can institutions maintain and improve quality despite limited resources?
• Which institutional strategies are more effective to improve students’ learning experience and keep them engaged and motivated?
• How to help students, parents and governments make informed choices based on information that has been certified, verified and accepted internationally?

The world of public goods

Developed economies rely on skilled labour to drive productivity and economic growth as well as to support social cohesion. Besides, the economic benefit of higher education is good for individuals as well as society.

• How can governments, or should governments, steer higher education?
• How to hold on to the public good while faced with the commodification of higher education?
• How to reconcile individual aspirations, the public good and the economic reality?

The world of economics

As skills are a country’s future, each and every government should be thinking about how to manage these skills strategically. Erasing the “bright red dividing line” between education and work will require, among many other things, greater collaboration between education systems and industry.

• How to recreate the link between higher education and the job market?
• What skills does the knowledge economy need most and how to strike the balance between specific skills and generic skills?

Planet Earth

Lastly comes globalisation, the planet, English as the dominant language, the internet, facebook, twitter, McDonalds, the financial crisis and, within the higher education market, we can add rankings and student mobility. To be free to make the right choices, we need to understand the balance of power, and then the landscape becomes even more complex!

Sometimes at night, after the children have gone to bed, I think about the different colours of all these different worlds. How do we bring these worlds together and build bridges rather than remain in silos? The OECD is organising a conference in Paris from 17 to 19 September that will examine the issues around mass higher education. Governments, universities, students and the private sector will discuss the present and the future of higher education

I will be wearing two hats: that of a parent, and that of an OECD analyst. Will you join me?

Follow the Conference live on twitter @OECD_Edu and @OECDLive (#OECDIMHE)

Links:
General Conference 2012: "Attaining and Sustaining Mass Higher Education"
OECD Skills Strategy
Education at a Glance: www.oecd.org/edu/eag2012
Visit our interactive portal on skills: http://skills.oecd.org
Photo credit: World globes / Shutterstock

Making the right connections

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education

It’s becoming clear to me that the crisis in youth unemployment around the world is not just one of the aftershocks of the global economic downturn, but may also have roots in education systems that are not adequately preparing students for 21st-century economies. I took that message to a regional conference on Promoting Youth Employment in North Africa,  held in Tunis in mid-July, where I presented not only the OECD Skills Strategy but also discussed the importance of improving the quality of education and of teachers, and of making quality education accessible to all.

Some 41% of 15-24 year-olds in Tunisia are unemployed – a statistic that is devastating in the present and potentially catastrophic for the future of the country and the region. In more than half of OECD countries, the rate of unemployment among young people approaches or exceeds 20%; and many of the underlying conditions are the same as those found in Tunisia. These include not only weak or stagnant economic growth, but education systems that cling to outdated policies and practices and are divorced from the labour market.

Today, education systems are expected to provide graduates not only with foundation skills and knowledge in given disciplines, but also with the skills needed to adapt to changing employment circumstances and to transfer what they have learned to different environments – what are known as generic skills. To do this effectively, there has to be more co-operation between education systems and industry. Without dialogue, education systems will not know which skills are in demand in the labour market, while prospective employers will not know whether graduates are leaving education with the skills they are looking for. Employers, too, have to be willing to invest in further training for their employees; and policy makers need to provide fiscal incentives to make it attractive for employers to do so.

But equally important, education systems need to adopt more innovative, project-focused teaching methods, particularly in science, to spark students’ curiosity and involvement. I’m encouraged to see this already happening in many places: from France’s La Main à la Pâte programme, developed by the French Academy of Sciences, which aims to reinvigorate a hands-on approach to the teaching of science in elementary schools, to the Agastya International Foundation, which dispatches mobile science labs throughout rural India, to the science education company  founded by Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, who died last month, whose aim is to develop and support young girls’ and boys’ interest in science, math and technology.

There are – and will be – many more of these kinds of initiatives. Their value is not only that they help to make science more meaningful to students, but they can also help to make the important connection between what students learn in school and how that knowledge and those skills can be used effectively in the wider world. And if we can also make more connections between education systems and employers, then we may be able to help more young people fulfil their potential – and help more societies prosper – by creating a better match between young people’s skills and the jobs that propel economies.

Links
OECD Skills Strategy
Related blog posts:
“Creativity” is spelled with a “why”
Understanding youth, unemployment and skills in Africa
Photo credit: Stack of pebbles / Shutterstock

Hooked to be connected!

by Lynda Hawe
Communications Officer, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), Directorate for Education OECD

Concerned parents are becoming more and more anxious as they watch their bright children getting completely absorbed by and attached to new mobile devices.  Young people’s attachment to digital media and connectivity will shortly reach a level of almost universal saturation. In some OECD countries, more than 95% of 15-year-olds use an internet connected computer daily while at home. How many of us have experienced frustration while trying to get kids to actually listen, as their eyes remain glossily glued to their favourite pet gadget?  So just how worried should we really be? Well, it still remains difficult to clearly identify the risks or rewards of such behaviour, especially in relation to long-term learning and brain functions.  But first, let’s be reassured - it’s not all bad news!

The OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has just released an inspiring new publication called Connected Minds: Technology and Today's Learners, authored by Francesc Pedró. This book has wisely researched technology in relation to emerging issues for education.  Particularly, given that digital media and connectedness are an essential part of the lives of today’s learners, schools and teachers must now cope with the new responsibilities in relation to these skills.  This explorative book tackles the issue and helps to contribute to filling the knowledge gap.

Frankly, it’s not about the technology, but it’s all about connectedness. Connectedness, which is the capacity to benefit from connectivity for personal, social, work or economic purposes, is having an impact on all areas of human activity. Consequently, devices and gadgets are less important than the ability to be connected and seizing the opportunities that connectedness offers. Education is expected to play an important role in this transformation as it can equip individuals with the required skills for harnessing the opportunities that the knowledge economy and society offers.

In particular, teachers need to be well prepared in terms of the potential pedagogical benefits of new technologies. Challenges for schools and teachers are to better integrate the new digital media and the resulting innovative social practices into the daily experience of schooling.  With the objective to help learners to make the most out of connectedness, while enabling teachers to improve their skills. In addition, teachers should simultaneously pay attention to the different needs of learners and provide increased support to those who come from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds.

It is very reassuring to discover that Mobile Learning is emerging as one of the solutions to the challenges faced by education. As described in UNESCO’s Mobile Learning project, it offers unique characteristics in comparison to conventional e-learning: personal, portable, collaborative, interactive, contextual and situated.  As well as the fact that it highlights "just-in-time-learning", since instruction can be delivered anywhere and at anytime.

Nobody can predict what new technologies may bring, or how the teaching and learning experience in education will evolve over the next decade.  So in the meantime, let’s just stay aware of the learning opportunities, while keeping a caring eye on the gadget screens as well as a little clock beside the video-games, see Setting Computer Limits Tips.   Of course, not with the intention to deprive youngsters of all the fun, but just to ensure that the final rewards will fully outweigh any eventual risks.

Links:
OECD work on New Millenium Learners
Activities: Centre for Eduational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Photo Credit: © Eric Audras/Onoky/Corbis

What should students learn in the 21st century?

By Charles Fadel
Founder & chairman, Center for Curriculum Redesign 
Vice-chair of the Education committee of the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC) to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
Visiting scholar, Harvard GSE, MIT ESG/IAP and Wharton/Penn CLO

It has become clear that teaching skills requires answering “What should students learn in the 21st century?” on a deep and broad basis. Teachers need to have the time and flexibility to develop knowledge, skills, and character, while also considering the meta-layer/fourth dimension that includes learning how to learn, interdisciplinarity, and personalisation. Adapting to 21st century needs means revisiting each dimension and how they interact:

Knowledge - relevance required: Students’ lack of motivation, and often disengagement, reflects the inability of education systems to connect content to real-world experience. This is also critically important to economic and social needs, not only students’ wishes. There is a profound need to rethink the significance and applicability of what is taught, and to strike a far better balance between the conceptual and the practical. Questions that should be answered include: Should engineering become a standard part of the curriculum? Should trigonometry be replaced by more statistics? Is long division by hand necessary? What is significant and relevant in history? Should personal finance, journalism, robotics, and other new disciplines be taught to everyone - and starting in which grade? Should entrepreneurship be mandatory? Should ethics be re-valued? What is the role of the arts – and can they be used to foster creativity in all disciplines?

Skills – necessity for education outcomes: Higher-order skills (“21st Century Skills”), such as the “4 C’s” of Creativity, Critical thinking, Communication, Collaboration, and others are essential for absorbing knowledge as well as for work performance. Yet the curriculum is already overburdened with content, which makes it much harder for students to acquire (and teachers to teach) skills via deep dives into projects. There is a reasonable global consensus on what the skills are, and how teaching methods via projects can affect skills acquisition, but there is little time available during the school year, given the overwhelming amount of content to be covered. There is also little in terms of teacher expertise in combining knowledge and skills in a coherent ensemble, with guiding materials, and assessments.

“Character” (behaviours, attitudes, values) – to face an increasingly challenging world: As complexities increase, humankind is rediscovering the importance of teaching character traits, such as performance-related traits (adaptability, persistence, resilience) and moral-related traits (integrity, justice, empathy, ethics). The challenges for public school systems are similar to those for skills, with the extra complexity of accepting that character development is also becoming an intrinsic part of the mission, as it is for private schools.

Meta-Layer:  Essential for activating transference, building expertise, fostering creativity via analogies, establishing lifelong learning habits, and so on. It will answer questions such as: How should students learn how to learn? What is the role of interdisciplinarity? What is the appropriate sequencing within subjects and between subjects? How do we develop curiosity? How do we facilitate students’ pursuing of their own passions in addition to the standard curriculum? How do we adapt curricula to local needs?

So what is actually being done to ensure that our workforce is skilled for 21st century success and  to ensure that students are skilled, ready to work and contribute to society?

The global transformation, often called the "21st century skills" movement is helping move schools closer to learning designs that better prepare students for success in learning, work and life. The OECD Skills Strategy is responding to this by shifting the focus from a quantitative notion of human capital, measured in years of formal education, to the skills people actually acquire, enhance and nurture over their lifetimes. My hope is that schools, universities and training programs will become more responsive to the workforce and societal needs of today, and students will increasingly focus on growing and applying essential 21st century skills and knowledge to real problems and issues, not just learning textbook facts and formulas.

This will raise levels of creativity and innovation, and provide better  skills , better jobs, better societies, and ultimately better lives.

Links:
21st Century Skills – Learning for Life in our Times, by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel, Wiley.
Center for Curriculum Redesign

Photo credit: Finger smileys / Shutterstock

Knowledge and skills are infinite – oil is not

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

As the bible notes, Moses arduously led the Jews for 40 years through the desert – just to bring them to the only country in the Middle East that had no oil. But Moses may have gotten it right, after all. Today, Israel has an innovative economy and its population enjoys a standard of living most of its oil-rich neighbours don't offer. More generally, countries with greater total rents from natural resources tend to be economically and socially less developed, as exports of national resources tend to appreciate the currency, making imports cheap and the development of an industrial base more difficult. And as governments in resource-rich countries are under less pressure to tax their citizens they are more prone to autocratic leadership.

But there is more to this: OECD’s PISA study shows that there is also a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their school population (see figure): Israel is not alone in outperforming its oil-rich neighbors by a large margin when it comes to learning outcomes at school, this is a global pattern that generally across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment. Exceptions such as Canada, Australia and Norway, that are rich of natural resources but still score well on PISA, have all established deliberate policies of saving these resource rents, and not just consuming them. Today’s learning outcomes at school, in turn, are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.

One interpretation is that in countries with little in the way of natural resources - other examples are Finland, Singapore or Japan - education has strong outcomes and a high status at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. So the value that a country places on education seems to depend at least in part on a country’s view of how knowledge and skills fit into the way it makes its living. Placing a high value on education may be an underlying condition for building a world-class education system and a world class economy, and it may be that most countries that have not had to live by their wits in the past will not succeed economically and socially unless their political leaders explain why, though they might not have had to live by their wits in the past, they must do so now.

The most troubling implications of these data relate to the developing world. Many of the countries with below-average GDP succeeded to convert their national resources into physical capital and consumption today, but failed to convert these into the human capital that can generate the economic and social outcomes to sustain their future.

But there is an important message for the industrialised world too. Particularly in these times of economic difficulties, it is tempting to resource our standard of living today through incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. But in the long term, there is no way to stimulate our way out or to print money our way out. The only sustainable way is to grow our way out, and that requires giving more people the skills to compete, collaborate and connect in ways that drive our economies forward. Without sufficient investment in skills people languish on the margins of society, technological progress does not translate into productivity growth, and countries can no longer compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy.

In short, knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st century economies. But there is no central bank that prints this currency, you cannot inherit this currency and you cannot produce it through speculation, you can only develop it through sustained effort and investment by people and for people.

Moreover, this new ‘currency’ depreciates as skill requirements of labor-markets evolve and individuals lose the skills they do not use. The toxic coexistence of high unemployment and skill shortages in many countries today illustrates that producing more of the same graduates is not the answer. To succeed with converting knowledge and skills into jobs, growth and social outcomes which nations require, we need to develop a better understanding of those skills that drive strong and sustainable economic and social outcomes; we need to ensure that the right mix of skills is being taught and learned over the lifecycle of people; we need to develop effective labor-markets that use their skill potential; and we need better governance arrangements with sustainable approaches to who should pay for what, when and where. OECD’s new Skills Strategy is now providing a framework to support countries with building, maintaining and using their human capital to boost employment and growth and promote social inclusion.
Links:
Figure: The negative relationship between national resources and skills
OECD Skills Strategy
Presentation: Skills matter: Developing an OECD Skills Strategy
PISA: www.pisa.oecd.org
Follow Andreas Schleicher on twitter @SchleicherEDU
Photo credit: © diez artwork / Shutterstock