Schools Call for Improvement through Strong Leadership

by Marie-Amélie Doring Serre
Trainee, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Every organisation needs a strong leader to get a sense of direction, to set and achieve specific goals. Howard Gardner defines a leader as "an individual (or, rarely, a set of individuals) who significantly affects the thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviours of a significant number of individuals". Being a leader clearly involves a good understanding of human nature, no matter what the area of leadership.

School leaders are the connection between teachers, students and their parents or guardians, the education system and the wider community in which a school exists. Because their central role is combined with rising expectations of schools and schooling in a century characterised by technological innovation, migration and globalisation, we understand that school leaders can no longer be simple managers. The increasing demands of education stakeholders require that these leaders manage human and material resources, communicate and interact with a wide range of individuals, and make evidence-informed decisions.

The role of the school principal is changing: an effective school leader is an instructional leader. Harold Brewer defines a school principal as the “one that requires focusing on instruction; building a community of learners; sharing decision making; sustaining the basics; leveraging time; supporting ongoing professional development for all staff members; redirecting resources to support a multifaceted school plan; and creating a climate of integrity, inquiry, and continuous improvement”. That’s why many regard instructional leadership as the most important professional responsibility with which principals are entrusted. But are school leaders well-prepared to assume such responsibility? Do they feel they get enough support and have enough opportunities to do so?

The OECD Teaching and Learning Survey (TALIS) asked principals in over 34 countries about the leadership activities in which they engage most frequently. Depending on the country, the most frequently mentioned activities range from taking action to ensure that teachers take responsibility for improving their own teaching skills and for their students’ learning outcomes, to working with teachers to improve classroom discipline. Principals’ responsibilities do not end there. Principals also give information to parents about students’ performance, and they also have administrative duties, such as resolving conflicts in the lesson timetable in the school. Some of their other activities are also related to teaching, such as observing classroom instruction. The breadth of these activities shows that principals need sufficient preparation and continual training to be able to work effectively.

The latest Teaching in Focus brief, “School Improvement through Strong Leadership”, addresses the issue of how school leaders could benefit from more pre- and in-service training relevant to the core nature of their work. It is striking to see that although principals are highly -educated individuals with good professional experience, instructional leadership is often lacking in their preparation to become school leaders. As a result, their training does not match the diversity of their responsibilities.
 
It is even more worrying to see that this gap is not filled later on during their career. School leaders are not always able to benefit from instructional leadership training once in their role, even though they recognise their need for further development in this field. TALIS data show that many principals cite conflicts with their work schedule, insufficient opportunities and a lack of employer support as reasons why they do not participate in professional development activities.

Those findings are relevant to principals’ everyday work. One must not forget that strong school leadership can greatly facilitate school improvement and student achievement. But in order for strong school leadership to exert its influence, the concept of instructional leadership has to be fully understood and put in practice by all parties at the system and school levels. Principals should seek opportunities to further develop skills associated with those of instructional leaders. But for this to happen, the education system must provide such initiatives. Policy makers should thus help remove barriers by creating an effective initial education and training environment for school leaders. Only then will better student learning outcomes and school improvement follow.

Links:
The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey
A Teacher’s Guide to TALIS 2013
Teaching In Focus No. 7 : School Improvement through Strong Leadership by Marie-Amélie Doring Serre and Katarzyna Kubacka
Teaching in Focus No. 7: French version
International Summit on the Teaching Profession, Banff, Alberta, on March 29–30, 2015.

Photo credit:Group of People and Leadership Concepts / Shutterstock

Leadership for 21st Century Learning

by Marco Kools
Analyst, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Against a backdrop of increasing globalisation, rapid technological innovation and a growing knowledge workforce, few would dispute that the primary task for management today is the leadership of change. The education sector is no exception to this.

Contemporary learning environments (schools) must be able to keep pace with the changing times, while delivering on their core task - equipping students with the knowledge and skills for life in the 21st century. This requires leadership to set the direction, taking responsibility for putting learning at the centre and keeping it there. Sounds simple, but what does it really mean in practice? Where does one start? Who does what?

These are some of the challenging questions that the recently released OECD publication Leadership for 21st Century Learning responds to. The publication builds on the prominence given to the concept of learning leadership in the recently released Innovative Learning Environments. It addresses the "Why? What? How? Who? Where and When? of learning leadership and presents a selection of leadership strategies from Austria, Australia, Canada, Israel, Norway, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The analysis of the leadership strategies, international literature and the contributions to this volume by leading international experts shows that by its very nature, learning leadership is social and connected. It shows the importance of participating in professional learning communities and networks as a vehicle for learning leadership to flourish and to make it more effective. This is not argued principally in order for community members to feel more positive about themselves through a sense of belonging. Rather, it allows professional learning communities and networks to serve as a means for shared strategies and visions to emerge within learning environments, and for developing appropriate expertise through sharing. A key role for government therefore lies in creating the conditions that facilitate networked professional learning opportunities.

For 21st century learning to flourish on the ground, learning leadership must be exercised at different levels of the education system. Although the initial impetus for change might come from any level - from within the system or outside - it needs the corresponding decision making and action at other levels of the system in order for it to be sustained at scale. This is increasingly relevant as learning environments become more innovative and involve a range of different non-traditional partners like businesses, foundations or cultural bodies from outside the formal system. 

A key question for governments to consider therefore is what these changing leadership dynamics mean in terms of issues like quality assurance, governance and accountability when the education system's boundaries deliberately become more blurry. These are some of the key issues being investigated in the last strand of work of the OECD Innovative Learning Environments (ILE) project on "Implementation and Change" and its sister project Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES), which are activities of the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI).

Links:

Leadership for 21st Century Learning
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation CERI
Innovative Learning Environment project
Governing Complex Education Systems
Related blog post by Marco Kools: Designing 21st century learning environments

Photo credits: Cover © Inmagine LTD.

Women leaders can break the mould

Indira Samarasekera, President of the University of Alberta  in Canada, was one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Institutional Management in Higher Education (IMHE) Conference, held at OECD headquarters in Paris this past September. Marilyn Achiron, Editor at the OECD’s Education Directorate, spoke with her about a variety of subjects:

Marilyn Achiron: What unique talents do women have as school leaders, and how can we achieve gender equality in school leadership positions?
Indira Samarasekera: At the risk of overgeneralising, women tend to network more, and perhaps listen more, to a variety of stakeholders. Men have tended to have to follow the mould of someone before them; but women can break the mould. That’s the advantage of women leaders.
Gender equality in school leadership has often been difficult to achieve because of the challenges of women having children. The question is: How do you support that? It requires that people in the university be thoughtful and mindful. There were leaders in my university who sought me out and put me in leadership positions, heads of committees who helped to put me where I am today. They went out of their way to find people like me—I was only an assistant professor, for goodness sake. I think gender equality can be achieved without overnight social change, but you need thoughtful men and women leaders.

MA: The latest edition of Education at a Glance highlights the fact that young women are now more likely than young men to graduate from upper secondary school. What is your reaction to that finding?
IS:  I worry about it. For the longest time we worried about the fact that there weren’t enough women; now we’re worried that we’re losing young men. The potential social consequences of that are huge. In a society where innovation and higher education provide access to high-wage jobs, we have huge numbers of young men who will be left behind. We need gender parity for all those who need education. Young men develop later; as a result, they are not as prepared to compete on university entrance exams as young women are. But they catch up quickly later. We have to consider high school grades with a pinch of salt. We have to find a way, without diluting the quality of education, to transfer young men to university, maybe after two years in a community college. Community colleges can be a kind of bridge between high school and higher education. Two years can make a big difference.

MA: In your keynote address, you spoke passionately against university rankings.
IS:  Rankings are absolutely detrimental, and it’s very questionable what value they add to society. They don’t recognise teaching, they foster homogenisation, there are no assessments of publications and the effect of research on society, they completely discount valuable research. In fact, these rankings promote the “caste culture” in science. They want everyone to be Harvard, but even Harvard is having trouble being Harvard because they can’t afford it anymore. To their credit, though, rankings have focused the spotlight on high-quality universities. But those who are doing the rankings are not accountable to anyone; they’re there to make money.

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
See related blog post: Welcome to my world. Won’t you come on in? by Valérie Lafon
Photo credit: ©OECD

A lesson in teaching from the grassroots

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

I was in London last week to give a talk on “how to transform 10,000 classrooms” at the annual Teach First/Teach for All conference in London. Some 3,000 teachers and social entrepreneurs from around the world gathered there to discuss ways to re-invent and strengthen the teaching profession. The aspiration of the organisations under the Teach for All umbrella is to enlist promising future leaders from across academic disciplines and careers to teach at least two years in high-need schools and become lifelong promoters of educational quality and equity.

The enthusiasm, commitment and growing professionalism of these grassroots organisations was inspiring. I heard many stories of people who had left successful careers to join the teaching force in order to make a significant impact on the lives of disadvantaged children. In some countries, participation levels have reached the critical mass to have a transformative impact on student achievement, and have made the success of this work both scalable and sustainable. Wendy Kopp, who co-founded Teach for America 22 years ago, recounted the evolution of her organisation from a small group of friends to one that reaches more than 750,000 students. In New Orleans, 25% of teachers are now from Teach for America. In the UK, too, Teach First is now the third largest recruiter of graduates and reaches over 150,000 children.

Still more impressive were the stories told by the young participants who had designed and were delivering intensive training courses for 400 teachers per year in Nigeria – a country with an essentially non-existent teacher-training infrastructure; and a participant from China shared how she was collaborating with local governments to build urgently needed teaching capacity in remote rural areas.

Critics of these organisations maintain that there is just no alternative to the traditional route of undergraduate studies, teacher training and then a career in the classroom. But those critics may simply underestimate the potential for creativity in the field of education that this combination of talent, passion and experience represents. The fact that, in many countries, these programmes are now so attractive that they can recruit the most promising candidates, even where the general status of the teaching profession is in decline, speaks for itself. We should also not overlook the rapid professionalisation of these organisations, which combine intensive initial training, ongoing support, and a work environment in which teachers work together to create good practice. They also offer intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers, and support teachers in their efforts to find innovative ways of teaching.

What struck me most is the vision of social transformation behind all this work – extending from teacher leadership through school leadership, policy and political leadership, up to community organisation. The work of these organisations can complement the OECD’s efforts to design and implement policies by challenging the teaching profession and education systems from within. We should do what we can to engage with them.

Links:

Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century: Lessons from around the world

OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education

Photo credit: Grass roots / Shutterstock

A View from the Teachers’ Summit

By John Bangs

Special consultant on OECD issues for Education International, the global body for all teachers’ organisations

I have two hopes for this summit: The fact that the number of countries and unions participating in the summit this year is up by a third compared with last year reflects the increasing understanding that it is teacher policies that matter. Their ability, their confidence and their self-efficacy are crucial. I hope that the kind of dead-end discussion about how choice and the market yield better performance begins to fade away.

My second hope is that the Dutch government continues this summit in 2013 as it has offered to do, and that we continue to build greater dialogue into the summit. South Africa is attending as an observer country this year. This is absolutely the right thing to do: to invite countries that are determined to improve their education systems to enter the dialogue with those whose education systems have improved, to encourage a dialogue between developed and developing countries. There is the dawning realisation that you cannot improve without dialogue; you have to be constantly learning.

Look at the controversy about teacher evaluations. We discussed this issue during last year’s summit. If you learn from places like Finland, Singapore and Hong Kong, you see that enhancing teachers’ self-efficacy and capacity is the way to go. That is done among colleagues and peers. The issue of pay and punishment are not central to driving performance; and publicising the results of individual teacher evaluations is insane. There is a better model—which is about development, not punishment.

Unions are essential participants at the summit. Strong teachers’ unions are an engine, not a hindrance, to reform. The success of the last year’s summit has really put the critics who say that teachers’ unions are inevitably the obstacles to reform on the back foot. They’re still there, they’re still wrong, and they’re on the defensive. This kind of summit brings the words ‘social partnership’ centre stage. The breadth of knowledge that unions can contribute to the dialogue has been highly underestimated by governments. Through Education International, for example, unions have been engaged in deep and fundamental exchanges of information about education systems. Governments often have short institutional memories about what works in education reform; unions have enormous resources and have long institutional memories. Unions can give governments the knowledge capital to work with.

I’m particularly fascinated by two areas that we’ll be discussing in this year’s summit. One is leadership; and I’m glad the agenda has shifted from focusing only on school principals to the understanding that all teachers can show leadership.  The second is on 21st century skills: What do students and teachers need to know? How do we evaluate them? That, I’m sure, will make for an absolutely fascinating discussion.

Links:

International Summit on the Teaching Profession

Education International

OECD Pointer for Policy Makers on Improving School Leadership: Policy and Practice

OECD publications on teachers
Follow the summit on twitter #ISTP2012

 Photo credit: © Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock