What did we learn from TALIS?

by Kristen Weatherby

Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Last week we shared with the world the latest results from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) , at an Informal Meeting of Ministers of Education (17th OECD/Japan Seminar) held in Tokyo on 25-26 June. 

TALIS touched upon a wide range of teacher-centred topics, from professional development to collaboration and teaching practices. TALIS has revealed many areas about teacher policies and behaviour that should be encouraged to continue development of the profession as a whole. However, it has also highlighted areas in some countries that could benefit from reform. The results of TALIS were widely received across countries as valuable information from which school leaders, teachers and policy makers can benefit.

For example, at the launch event in Mexico last week, the OECD presented the finding that 1 in 4 Mexican teachers do not feel prepared for their work. Furthermore, the TALIS results indicate that Mexico has the lowest percentage of teachers who have completed initial teacher education (only 62% versus 90% on average across countries). Additionally, 7% of Mexican teachers do not feel qualified to perform their work. The Mexican Secretary of Basic Education, Alba Martinez Olive, conceded that the TALIS results were not surprising given the complex realities that Mexican teachers face.

At the U.S. launch of TALIS, it was very encouraging to learn that so many teachers love their jobs (nearly 90%) but less heartening to find that only around 40% of US teachers believe the best-performing teachers in their schools receive the most recognition. However, there was much discussion about the support that is provided to teachers, in terms of quality, professional development and feedback on their teaching. Participants in the U.S. launch discussed the importance of increasing in-depth collaboration between teachers and how school leaders and districts need to provide space and guidance for teachers to do this.

The Education Fast Forward debate (EFF 10) on the TALIS results further emphasised the significance of teacher collaboration, and the topic resonated amongst followers on Twitter. Participants also discussed the important role of interpersonal relationships between teachers in negating some of the otherwise detrimental effects that a challenging classroom climate might have on a teachers’ job satisfaction and feelings of self-efficacy.   

Meanwhile, in Spain, TALIS was launched at a National Seminar for teachers. Participants discussed the findings that feedback and appraisal mechanisms for teachers are rare in Spain. One-third of teachers (32%) report never having received feedback in their current school and less than half (43%) of teachers in Spain report receiving feedback following a classroom observation.

This is only a small sample of the wealth of national and international findings that are available from the TALIS data. More importantly, it’s not only the data, but what we do with the data that is important. In addition to the international report, country-specific findings and the TALIS dataset, you can also download the TALIS Teachers’ Guide on our website. This small report offers insights to teachers and school leaders as to how they can make changes to improve teaching and learning in their schools, based on key findings in TALIS. 

Links:

2013 TALIS Results 

Free Teachers’ Guide to TALIS 

Draft chair’s summary of the Informal Meeting of Ministers of Education

Congreso Presentación TALIS

Education Fast Forward debate
Data visualisation: Compare your Country on key OECD indicators 

What can we learn from our teachers?

by Kristen Weatherby
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

 

The latest results from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) are made public today at various events in countries around the world. TALIS 2013 surveyed 107,000 lower secondary school teachers in 34 countries.  Everyone from education ministers – who are gathered at an event in Tokyo – to teachers – like those at a TALIS conference in Madrid – want to learn from the data collected in the survey in order to improve the teaching and learning in their schools.

So what are teachers telling us? First of all, teachers love being teachers. On average across TALIS-participating countries, 9 in 10 teachers report being satisfied with their jobs, and nearly 8 in 10 (78%) report that they would still choose to become a teacher if they had to make the choice again.

Given this finding, it is perhaps surprising that, on average, more than two out of three teachers across TALIS countries do not feel that their profession is valued by society. This percentage varies by country: in some countries, particularly those with high-performing education systems (Finland, Korea, Singapore), notably larger proportions of teachers report feeling that their profession is indeed valued by society.

Why do most teachers feel that teaching isn’t valued? And why does it matter? In some countries, it could be that the teachers’ perceptions are correct, and that societies may not value teaching as much as other professions. But it could also have something to do with how teaching has evolved – or not – as a profession. If you take a look at TALIS 2013 Results: An International Perspective on Teaching and Learning, you will learn a great deal about what teachers say about their background, education, support, development and teaching practices. Together with data from school principals, these data paint a picture of the teaching profession around the world today.

When you look at the statistics on teacher appraisal and feedback, for example, it’s not difficult to see why some teachers may not feel valued. The teachers surveyed agree that appraisals are helpful, with more than 6 in 10 teachers reporting that appraisal leads to positive changes in their teaching practices. Yet nearly half of teachers feel that the appraisals in their school are performed simply to fulfil administrative requirements. Only about one in three teachers feels that the feedback received will lead to any kind of career advancement, which might include higher pay or additional responsibilities. Indeed, nearly 80% of teachers report that annual increments in their salaries are awarded regardless of the outcome of formal teacher appraisals.

If we want teaching to improve so that school systems can produce the skilled citizens that our societies need, then we not only need to change the practices of existing teachers, we also need to ensure that teaching attracts high-quality candidates. Providing teachers with a career path that includes recognition for good performance and support to improve is certainly one way to start. TALIS data also indicate that teachers who are given the opportunity to participate in decision making at school not only are more likely to report that teaching is valued as a profession, they also report higher job satisfaction and more confidence in their own abilities as teachers. Thus it seems about time to treat teachers as the professionals they are.

Links:
2013 TALIS Results
Free Teachers’ Guide to TALIS
Join:
Education Fast Forward (EFF10) Global live debate - 25 June 2014
Alliance for Excellent Education webinar - 27 June 2014
Photo credit: © Fotolia

Learning in rural China: The challenges for teachers

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

Mr. Huang became principal of Qiao Tou Lian He school at the age of 25, not because he was specifically trained for the post, but because he had been the only educated person in his village. He’s a dynamic leader who is squarely focused on supporting, developing and evaluating his teachers, of whom only a handful have a high school degree and more than basic teacher training.

The teaching conditions in the rural Qiao Tou Lian He school, 3,000 kilometres southwest of Shanghai, are tough and teachers are struggling. In Shanghai, teachers not only have smaller classes, but they can also rely on much better initial preparation and more extensive training opportunities at the school, district and municipal levels. They spend 70% of their time teaching and 30% of their time learning, often in collaboration with teachers from other schools. In many countries, we see learning outcomes severely impeded if a quarter or more of the students come from disadvantaged educational backgrounds. Here every child does. The Qiao Tou Lian He school is mainly on its own; but the teachers I met there showed an amazing commitment, and I was struck by the positive learning atmosphere – rigorous, highly disciplined, yet joyful – in every classroom I visited.

Over lunch in his office, Mr. Huang explained how he 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 also changing their underlying mindset. He helps them understand best practices by seeing how they are applied by other teachers in other classrooms. And he motivates his teachers with his high expectations, a shared sense of purpose, and with the belief that they can all make a difference to every child. He keeps close track of teacher performance, looking at both student achievement and classroom management in order to help teachers strengthen their practice. Over time, he also hopes to bring parents along, offering workshops for them not just on how to support their children’s education, but also simply on how to be good parents.

This is a country where everyone is willing to learn: students are learning for a better life; teachers are learning to improve their teaching; schools compare themselves eagerly with other schools; and, perhaps most important, the system as a whole is willing and able to learn. Whether China is interested in designing a better sewer system, retirement system or school system, it sends key people from the relevant sector to visit the world’s best performers in those areas with instructions to find out how it’s done and to put together a design for China that is superior to anything seen anywhere else.

Seven years ago, Andrea Pasinetti came to the area as a college student to brush up his Chinese. He saw both the enormous challenges facing the country’s schools, and also the opportunities afforded by China’s openness to learning. He dropped his studies and founded Teach for China. His organisation is now supporting over 80 schools; it doesn’t provide a high volume of resources, but it offers what is most critically missing in this area: teaching capacity to build teaching capacity. He is enlisting promising future leaders from across academic disciplines and careers to teach at least two years in those rural schools and become lifelong promoters of educational quality and equity.

I met two of these teachers, Xianming Xu and Madeline Christensen and was inspired by their enthusiasm, commitment and professionalism. Critics of organisations like Teach for China maintain that there is no alternative to the traditional route of undergraduate studies, teacher training and then a career in the classroom. But they underestimate the potential that this combination of talent, passion and entrepreneurship represents. In fact, the administration in China understands this better than many other countries and is embracing their work. Zhenhua Mi, another enthusiastic leader of this organisation explains to me that Teach for China is now so attractive that it can recruit the most promising candidates, even where the general status of the teaching profession is in decline. The programme also provides intensive initial training, ongoing support, and a work environment in which teachers work together to create good practice. What impressed 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.

By strengthening teaching capacity, these people are making a difference towards helping rural China build an education system that shifts from reproducing educational content for school towards strengthening competencies for life; from education to serve the state towards education for citizenship in the local and global community; from education for competition in exam hell towards strengthening relevant skills; and from education for situational values (I will do anything the situation allows me to do) to sustainable values. That will help the next generation to better reconcile resilience – managing in an imbalanced world – with greater sustainability – putting the world back into balance – that China needs so badly too.

Links:
Video series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education - Shanghai, China
Related blog posts by Andreas Schleicher
Learning in rural China: The challenges for students
China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?
Implementing educational reform in China
Chinese lessons

Photo credit: @ Schleicher OECD

Big data and PISA

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

Big data is the foundation on which education can reinvent its business model and build the coalition of governments, businesses, and social entrepreneurs that can bring together the evidence, innovation and resources to make lifelong learning a reality for all. So the next educational superpower might be the one that can combine the hierarchy of institutions with the power of collaborative information flows and social networks. More than anything else, this will hinge on getting people to generate innovative applications on top of big data. It’s about the co-creation of governance, about delivering more progressive and better policies than the industrial work organisation and the bureaucratic and litigation-oriented tools and strategies that we are used to in education.

This isn’t just about improved transparency and public accountability in education. Throwing education data into the public space does not change the ways in which students learn, teachers teach and schools operate. It does not lead to people doing anything with that data and transforming education in ways that will actually change education practice. On the contrary, it often results simply in adversarial relationships between civil society and government over the control and ownership of information.

The prerequisite for using big data as a catalyst to change education practice is to get out of the “read-only” mode of our societies. It’s about combining transparency with collaboration. The way in which educational institutions often work is that you have a single expert sitting somewhere in a corner who determines the application of rules and regulations affecting hundreds of thousands of students and teachers – and nobody can figure out how those decisions were made. Big data can lead to big trust if we make that data available, train civic innovators, experiment, create a maker culture. It is no surprise that OECD’s new Survey of Adult Skills shows that the more proficient people are in literacy, the more they trust others.

Collaborative consumption provides a great example of this. These days, people share their cars and even their apartments with strangers. Collaborative consumption has made people micro-entrepreneurs – and its driving engine is building trust between strangers. Think about it: in the business world, we have evolved from trusting people to provide information, to willingly handing over credit card data, to connecting trustworthy strangers in all sorts of marketplaces. We are light-years away from that when it comes to data about education.

But here’s how we can get a little closer. Some years ago we created PISA, a global survey that examines the skills of 15-year-olds in ways that are comparable across countries. PISA has created huge amounts of big data about the quality of schooling outcomes. PISA has also helped to change the balance of power in education by making public policy in the field of education more transparent and more efficient. At the micro-level, there were still a lot of sceptics: teachers thought this was just another accountability tool through which governments wanted to control them. So what did we do? This year we put in place a kind of “MyPISA” – PISA-type instruments that we circulated out into the field. The PISA based test for schools provides comparisons with other schools anywhere else in the world, schools that are similar to them or schools that are very different.

Suddenly, the dynamic has changed; schools are beginning to use that data. Ten schools in Fairfax county in Virginia, for example, have started a year-long discussion among principals and teachers based on the results of the first reports. With the help of district offices (and the OECD), they will be conducting secondary analyses to dig deeper into their data and understand how their schools compare with each other and with other schools around the world. Those principals and teachers are beginning to see themselves as teammates – not just spectators – on a global playing field. In other words, in Fairfax county, big data is building big trust.

Links:   
For more information on PISA:www.oecd.org/pisa/
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
The Role of Data in Promoting Growth and Well-Being
 Photo credit: big data mind mapping,info graphics / Shutterstock

Getting our youth back to work

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

If there’s one lesson we’ve learned over the past few years, it’s that we cannot simply bail ourselves out of a crisis, we cannot solely stimulate ourselves out of a crisis and we cannot just print money our way out of a crisis. But we can become much better in equipping more people with better skills to collaborate, compete and connect in ways that drive our economies forward.

There is no group for whom this is more important than today’s young people. Between 2008 and 2011, the gap in unemployment rates between higher- and less-educated youth widened dramatically. While young people with advanced skills have weathered the crisis reasonably well, those without foundation skills have suffered. Unemployment among young people without a high school education soared 20% in Estonia and Ireland and 15% in Greece and Spain. The short-term impact on individuals, families and communities beg for urgent policy responses; the longer-term impact, in terms of skills loss, scarring effects and de-motivation, will affect countries’ potential for recovery. Without the right skills, people will languish on the margins of society, technological progress will not translate into economic growth, and countries can’t compete in the global economy.

What’s often overlooked amid the grim statistics is that a few countries, like Austria, Chile, Germany and Korea saw a sizeable drop in unemployment rates among their low-skilled youth. What this tells us is that, with the right policies and economic environment, we can do something about this and it seems to boil down to three actions: build the skills that foster employability; give young people the opportunity to make their skills available to the labour market; and ensure that those skills are used effectively at work.

To begin, we need to be able to anticipate the evolution of the labour market: we need to know what skills will be needed to reignite our economies. The coexistence of unemployed graduates on the street, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need, shows clearly that more education alone does not automatically translate into better jobs and better lives.

We need to put a premium on skills-oriented learning throughout life instead of on qualifications-focused education that ends when the working life begins. We need to tackle unacceptable rates of school dropout by offering more relevant education and second-chance opportunities, and by offering work experience to young people before they leave education.

OECD’s Learning for Jobs analysis shows that skills development is far more effective if the world of learning and the world of work are integrated. It’s not difficult to understand why. Skills that aren’t used can atrophy. And, compared to purely government-designed curricula taught exclusively in schools, learning in the workplace allows young people to develop “hard” skills on modern equipment and “soft” skills, such as teamwork, communication and negotiation, through real-world experience. Hands-on workplace training can also help to motivate disengaged youth to stay in or re-engage with the education system.

But building skills is the relatively easy part of the plan; far tougher is providing opportunities for young people to use their skills. Employers might need to offer greater flexibility in the workplace. Labour unions may need to reconsider their stance on rebalancing employment protection for permanent and temporary workers. Enterprises need reasonably long trial periods to enable employers giving those youth who lack work experience a chance to prove themselves and facilitate a transition to regular employment. And some countries may need to review the minimum wage for younger workers to make it easier for low-skilled young people to get their first job and discourage early school leaving by lowering the opportunity cost of staying on at school.

Last but not least, if all of this is about more than getting young people temporarily off the street, we need to ensure that talent is used effectively. Skills mismatch is a very real phenomenon that is mirrored in people’s earnings prospects and in their productivity. Knowing which skills are needed in the labour market and which educational pathways will get young people to where they want to be is essential. High-quality career guidance services, complemented with up-to-date information about labour-market prospects, can help young people make sound career choices.

We also need to maintain and expand the most effective active labour-market measures, such as counselling, job-search assistance and temporary hiring subsidies for low-skilled youth; and we need to link income support for young people to their active search for work and their engagement in measures to improve their employability.

But none of this is going to work unless everyone is involved: governments, which can design financial incentives and favourable tax policies; education systems, which can foster entrepreneurship as well as offer vocational training; employers, who can invest in learning; labour unions, which can ensure that investments in training are reflected in better-quality jobs and higher salaries; and individuals, who can take better advantage of learning opportunities and shoulder more of the financial burden. This week OECD will launch an Action Plan for Youth to be presented at the Organisation’s annual Ministerial Meeting in Paris in order to step up government’s efforts to tackle high youth unemployment and strengthen their education systems to better prepare young people for the world of work. It’s time for all of us to take the lessons we learned through the crisis and turn them into a sustainable plan to get our young people back on the path to prosperity.

Links:
OECD Forum 2013: Give youth a chance
skills.oecd: Working with youth
OECD Skills Strategy Spotlight: Apprenticeships and Workplace Learning
OECD Skills Strategy
OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC)
Photo credit: Young adult looking for work / Shutterstock

The “urban advantage” in education

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

Nearly half the world’s population now lives in urban areas. What does that mean for education? Results from PISA indicate that that could be good news for students who go to school in those areas. As the latest edition of PISA in Focus points out, an “urban advantage” in student performance is evident in nearly every country and economy that participated in the PISA 2009 assessment. 

PISA has shown that while large cities can be a challenge to educators, they are mostly a boon, particularly when all students can take advantage of the wealth of cultural and social opportunities that big cities offer. PISA results also show that schools in urban areas differ from schools in less-populated areas – in ways that are usually associated with better student performance.

On average across OECD countries, students who attend schools in cities of more than 100 000 people perform better in PISA than students who attend schools in villages, rural areas, or towns with up to 100 000 inhabitants. This difference in performance translates to about 20 PISA score points – the equivalent of half-a-year of schooling. In many countries and economies, the performance difference between the two groups of students reflects families’ decisions about housing and employment, which, in turn, influence how students’ socio-economic status is distributed geographically.

In all countries and economies except for Austria, Belgium, Germany, Israel, Korea, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States, students who attend schools in urban settings come from more advantaged socio-economic backgrounds. In Denmark, on the other hand, students whose parents have high levels of education and high-status occupations are more likely to attend schools in rural locations or in towns of up to 100 000 people. 

But the socio-economic status of students is only one of the factors that is associated with the better performance among students who attend school in cities. These schools have certain characteristics that PISA shows are positively related to performance. Urban schools are usually larger, enjoy greater responsibility for resource allocation, are less likely to experience staff shortages, are more likely to have a higher proportion of qualified teachers, and have higher student-teacher ratios than schools in rural areas and towns, especially in partner countries and economies.

An analysis of questionnaires distributed among students participating in PISA 2009 also finds that in Australia, Dubai (UAE), Estonia, Iceland, Israel, Montenegro, New Zealand, Qatar and Sweden, students who attend schools in urban areas tend to enjoy a better disciplinary climate in their classes than students who attend schools in less-populated areas (in Brazil, Mexico, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Slovenia and Tunisia, the opposite is true). In 15 countries, students who attend schools in urban settings are more likely to be able to choose from among a greater number and wider range of extracurricular activities.

What this tells us is that some of the conventional wisdom about big city schools may be a little off. Given the heterogeneity of the student population, large schools might actually offer students more, not less, stimulation and inspiration; and with more autonomy in allocating resources, urban schools may be better able to meet the needs of all their students.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 28: What makes urban schools different?

Photo credit: Urban Globe/ Shutterstock

Grade expectations

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills 

They’re a source of both anxiety and pride, but school marks can also have long-term consequences for students. Most teachers reward student achievement, but also the skills, attitudes, habits and behaviours that are necessary for lifelong learning. However, as this month’s PISA in Focus  points out, the tendency of teachers to award higher marks to girls and socio-economically advantaged students than to boys and disadvantaged students – even if they perform equally well in school and have similar positive attitudes towards learning – is cause for some concern.

Marks help to promote student learning by informing students about their progress, alerting teachers about their students’ needs, and certifying the degree to which students have mastered the tasks and competencies valued by teachers and schools. Schools and teachers recognise this: more than 95% of students in the countries and economies that participated in PISA 2009 – except Korea – attend a school that measures student achievement through teacher-prepared tests, student portfolios or student projects. In most cases, students receive feedback on these assessments in the form of school marks.

As PISA results show, few countries and economies share the same marking schemes; in fact, even schools within a country may have different ways of marking. In addition, different education systems establish their own ways of informing students that they have failed a class or an assessment. In some countries, the marking scheme allows for only one possible value for failing. This means that students who fail do not know how far they are from meeting the passing criteria. This is the case in Austria, Croatia, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and the Slovak Republic. Other countries establish the passing mark somewhere in the middle of the marking scale, which gives students some idea of how far they are from passing. In Ireland, for example, the grading scale ranges from 0 to 100, but only scores below 40 are considered unsatisfactory or failing. In some countries, such as Austria, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic, the remaining values on the marking scale reflect the quality of the passing mark in clear and distinct labels, such as “sufficient”, “good”, “very good” and “excellent”; meanwhile Belgium (Flemish Community), Italy and Ireland use a wider array of numeric values (e.g. 50 to 100, 10 to 20 or 6 to 10).  Analyses suggest that countries and economies that have a grading system with a limited number of values and use labels that refer to clear categories of achievement (e.g. “sufficient”, “good”, “very good”, “excellent”) can better differentiate students’ performance.

Students often base their expectations of further education and careers on the marks they receive in school; and school systems use marks to guide their selection of students for academically oriented programmes and, later, for entry into university. So whenever teachers reward – or punish – certain student characteristics that are unrelated to learning they may inadvertently shape a student’s future according to factors that have nothing to do with the student’s abilities, talents and personal goals.

That’s why it’s a good idea for school systems to promote marking practices that reward the behaviours and attitudes that help students to learn – so that more students can make the grade.

Links:
For more information on PISA: www.oecd.org/pisa/
PISA in Focus No. 26: Grade Expectations
Grade Expectations: How Marks and Education Policies Shape Students' Ambitions 
Photo credit: Test score sheet / Shutterstock

Creativity in schools: what countries do (or could do)

by Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin
Senior Analyst and Project Leader, Directorate for Education

Are we really serious when we say that schools should nurture creativity and other skills for innovation? An increasing number of countries see fostering of creativity and critical thinking as the next educational challenge: traditional good grades may no longer suffice to equip the workforce with the skills needed to fuel innovation-driven economic growth.

The recent international OECD-CCE-Singapore workshop gave 30 education decision-makers from 12 countries the opportunity to share the lessons from Asian educational initiatives aiming to foster pupils’ creativity and critical thinking. While most of these initiatives build on project-based, research-based, and other active pedagogies, some start to use design thinking methods to scaffold the learning of innovation skills.

Singapore and Korea are two good examples of countries emphasising creativity, critical thinking and character building in their curricula. Since 2009, Korea expects its schools to foster creativity as part of quality subject-based learning – but also to devote almost 10% of overall school time to projects and other transversal activities that foster creativity. As for Singapore, their “Desired Outcomes of Education” include critical and inventive thinking as well as social and emotional competences. At the end of secondary school, among other things students are expected to be “resilient in the face of adversity”, “innovative and enterprising” as well as “able to think critically and communicate persuasively”.

A visit at Haig Girls’ School in Singapore showed that this is more than just words. Creativity and innovation are at the heart of the project of this elementary school. Teachers have developed common criteria to monitor their students’ progress in “critical thinking” and in “creative and inventive thinking”. Students also assess themselves and their peers by answering questions such as “I am able to brainstorm multiple ways to reach a solution” (critical thinking) or “I am able to connect ideas in an interesting and creative manner to create a unique idea” (creative thinking).

Among its multiple projects, the school also asks pupils to engage in genuine innovation activities. After a long collective brainstorming, a small group of pupils has imagined and prototyped an inventive way of closing an umbrella—a useful invention in a country where it rains almost every other day. Why use two hands to fold your umbrella and risk one of them getting wet when you could do it with just the one hand holding the handle? To keep you dry and speed up the closing process, the girls have replaced the press-stud on the small band that is generally rolled around the fabric to fasten the umbrella tight with a magnet. The magnet is heavy enough to make the band twist around the pole before adhering to the magnetic frame and keeping the fabric tight. Ingenious, no?

Including creativity and other skills for innovation in national curricula is a helpful starting point for them to be taken seriously in school. The next step is to also formally assess these skills. Singapore and Korea have thus changed their national exams and assessments to incentivise teachers and students to pay due attention to them in their teaching and learning.

Prototype tool for assessing pupils’ creativity in schools

Could we develop simple formative assessment tools to help teachers and students to pay more attention to habits of minds conducive to creativity in the school context? A recent OECD working paper,  “Progression in student creativity in school”, reveals how assessment helps specify and clarify what creativity really means, especially as there are many different views about what it is. A prototype tool for assessing pupils’ creativity in school maps the dispositions of creative habits of minds along 5 dimensions: inquisitive; persistent; imaginative; collaborative; disciplined (each dimension including 3 sub-dispositions). The findings of two field trials in English schools show that the assessment tool led teachers to be more precise and confident in developing their pupils’ creativity, and learners to be better able to understand what creativity entails and to record evidence of their progress. Such tools are an important step to raise daily awareness of skills in thinking and creativity and see them materialise in school learning.

While the journey ahead is still long, it is encouraging to see countries taking action and starting to share the tools and lessons that will eventually make all students and teachers reach the promised land.

Links:
For further information on CERI Innovation Strategy for Education and Training, please visit our webpage: www.oecd.org/edu/innovation
The following working papers should be of interest:
• Progression in student creativity in school: first steps towards new forms of formative assessment by Bill Lucas, Guy Claxton and Ellen Spencer
• Assessment and Innovation in Education by Janet Looney
• Bringing about curriculum Innovation by Kiira Kärkkäinen
View our video of Howard Gardner discussing creativity and 21st Century education as well as his interview.
Summary reports and presentations on education for innovation can also be found in our conference webpage.
Diagram: Lucas, Claxton and Spencer (2013)
Photo credit: Shutterstock / Girl with umbrella

OECD Education Today… and tomorrow

by Barbara Ischinger
Director for Education

If you want to know what we’ve been doing over the past year or so, I invite you to take a look at the latest edition of Education Today 2013: The OECD Perspective. It covers the most important results and policy recommendations that have emerged from our work in early childhood education, compulsory schooling, higher education and lifelong learning. It also discusses such overarching topics as equity of opportunity, the benefits of education, and innovation.

When we think of innovation in education these days, we immediately think of technology: getting more computers into more classrooms, offering online courses to students in higher education. But as Education Today points out, while the industry for digital educational tools is growing, fewer than half of the specialised companies in that industry operate in the formal primary and secondary school sector. The report also notes that just because there are ICT devices in the classroom, it doesn’t mean that either teaching or learning strategies are changing. And while there are great expectations that online learning will attract those who have left – or have been left behind by – the education system, namely students from disadvantaged backgrounds or unmotivated students, so far there is no proof that this is happening.

New evidence (see the presentation by Patricia Kuhl here) shows that young children learn best when they make eye contact with their teachers – which means that they will never learn as much, or as well, sitting in front of a device. We’ve also found  that students’ attitudes towards using new technologies in school is far from what we might expect: they are more reluctant to use them than their image as “digital natives” suggests. And PISA  results show that the best-performing students are those who are motivated by their teachers.

What this evidence tells us is that no technology can replace the best teacher. But it also suggests that the best way to integrate new technologies into the classroom is to get the best teachers involved in developing the right pedagogical approaches to using them – and to include students in researching which strategies are the most effective. (This is how it’s done in Finland, a consistently high-performer in PISA.) New teaching approaches that incorporate these technologies should then be monitored and evaluated, and the results of those evaluations widely disseminated to avoid duplication of effort and begin promoting best practices. I plan to raise many of these issues in my keynote address to the LearnTec convention on “Future Learning” in Germany next month.

Looking further ahead, and towards potential lifelong learners, in late 2013 the OECD will oversee an Education and Skills Online Assessment that will help adults to identify their individual strengths and weaknesses in literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments. This assessment is linked to our Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), which will issue its first set of results in October 2013. The fact that the individual assessment will be conducted exclusively on line is an acknowledgement that the ability to read and navigate through digital texts is now essential if we want to participate fully in society. All the more reason – if any more were needed – to begin developing these skills today, in our youngest students, to give them one of the basic tools for learning throughout the rest of their lives.

Wishing you peace, prosperity and inspiration through learning…

For more information about OECD work on education:
www.oecd.org/edu

Photo credit: Little golden students with laptops /Shutterstock

Implementing educational reform in China

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

On the invitation of China's National Institute for Educational Sciences (NIES), I spent some days in Beijing to learn more about education policy and practice in China. As always, this was a very rewarding experience. I met with various teams of educational policy-analysts, researchers and educators in Beijing to provide advice on their work and discuss global trends in education policy and practice. They do not seem to get tired of learning from other countries and cultures as systematically as possible, with strong and consistent efforts not only to do discipline-based international benchmarking but also to incorporate the results of that benchmarking into policy and practice. The Institute is just finalising an impressive study on reform trends in the G20 members, and that work is no longer about emulating what other G20 nations are doing but about learning from them and putting together a design for China that can be superior to anything their researchers have seen anywhere.

While they look carefully at the World’s leading economies and education systems, they are all too aware of the widening income gaps and the uphill struggle they face in providing children in rural areas with a foundation for success, not to speak about the massive skill gaps in the adult population. A significant part of their policy and research agenda is geared towards education in rural transformation, quality, social inclusion and the social welfare of children. Efforts since 2001 to consolidate schools in sparsely populated areas, with the aim to create learning environments that are sustainable and of higher quality have run into real difficulties in the implementation process and the handling of the political economy, to the extent that the Ministry just announced suspending further mergers. This, however, is an area where time is working against them; the rapid demographic changes will make it harder and harder to provide an adequate schooling experience for the most disadvantaged children, not to speak of depriving students of opportunities to see a bigger part of the world - and their teachers of much-needed opportunities to improve pedagogical practice through learning from a more diverse range of colleagues and facilities that come with larger school units.

Quite in contrast to this stands the rather successful curriculum reform. This reform has not just been about updating and repackaging educational content, but aims at helping students find out who they are, where they want to go in life, and how they will get there, in a rapidly changing and increasingly uncertain world. Clearly, the new curriculum will not unfold its full impact on student learning and teacher behavior before China tackles its exam culture that remains narrowly focused on rote learning. But still, there seem signs that the reform is beginning to positively influence teacher development, institutional innovation, classroom culture, research culture and the management culture of Chinese education. It was interesting to learn about the trajectory from designing the reform at the end of the 1990s, through carefully piloting it and then progressively rolling it out (with much emphasis on training teachers and school principals), up to extending it to full implementation at the upper secondary level just this year. That’s a full 16 years to align policies and practices across the different aspects of the school system, ensure their coherence and build capacity for progressive implementation and refinement. Contrast that with most curriculum reforms in the West, where leaders feel they need to get this through in one electoral period, and where we often end up with wave after wave of curriculum reform passing above the heads of those who need to deliver them in classrooms at the frontline.

Read the second blog by Andreas Schleicher: China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled

Links:
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Video Series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education 
OECD Department for Education
Follow Andreas Schleicher on twitter: @SchleicherEDU
Photo credit: China blackboard /Shutterstock

China – what will remain when the dust around economic expansion has settled?

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

I recently met Vice Mayor Fu Yonglin of Chengdu, one of the key drivers behind the rapid educational transformation that his municipality has seen over the last years. I was struck by his take on how China’s power and role in the World would - when all the dust about economic expansion will have settled - not be primarily determined by what and how many goods China produces, but by what China will be able to contribute to the global knowledge pool and to global culture.

In a country where the average graduate takes home a salary of RMB 2900, roughly what a maid in the main metropolitan areas gets after three meals, money is clearly not the only motivator for the immense value which society places on education, and it seems China’s political and social leaders continue to be able to persuade their citizens to value education, their future, more than consumption today. Interesting were also the ways in which he consolidated the need to preserve and build on the past (‘nothing comes from nothing, everything has a history and evolves from there’) with the need to embrace change and prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve problems that we don’t yet know will arise. He was well aware of the learning curve the Chinese have in front of themselves here, the essential need for China to play an active role in globalization processes, and the importance of capitalizing on the potential of education as the key enabler to engage with different cultures, fields of knowledge and languages. He had seen the impact which PISA has had on educational reform and internationalization in Shanghai and was keen to get his province involved. His province is making big investments in other aspects of internationalization too (if you get yourself accepted as a foreign student in Chengdu and stay for more than 5 months, the municipality will take care of your expenses).

Read the related blog by Andreas Schleicher on Implementing educational reform in China

Links:
OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
Video Series: Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education 
OECD Department for Education
Follow Andreas Schleicher on twitter: @SchleicherEDU
Photo credit: Chinese schoolboy /Shutterstock

Breaking down the barriers to immigrant students’ success at school

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education 

Education is one of the best ways of integrating immigrant children and their families into their new home countries. But most immigrant students have to overcome multiple barriers in order to succeed at school. The latest edition of PISA in Focus shows that of all the obstacles to success these students must surmount, the concentration of socio-economic disadvantage at school is among the most strongly related to poor performance.

Disadvantage and immigrant status are closely linked. Most immigrants leave their home countries in search of better economic prospects. Once immigrants arrive in a host country, they often settle in communities where there are other immigrants who share their culture, their language and often their socio-economic status. Their children often attend the same schools – and those schools frequently have large proportions of immigrant students. As a result, immigrant students tend to be concentrated in certain schools. In most cases, these schools are generally more socio-economically deprived than other schools.

PISA finds that countries vary markedly in how immigrant students are accommodated in schools. In New Zealand, for example, 50% of immigrant students – well below the OECD average of 68% – attend a school that has a large proportion of immigrant students. In addition, the concentration of immigrant students in socio-economically disadvantaged schools is also relatively low in New Zealand: only one in four immigrant students – compared with the OECD average of 36% – attends a school that has a large proportion of students whose mothers have low levels of education. (Having a low-educated mother, that is, a mother who has not attained an upper secondary education, is a measure of socio-economic disadvantage among immigrant populations.) In Germany, the concentration of immigrant students in schools is around the OECD average, while the concentration of immigrant students in disadvantaged schools is higher than the OECD average. In the United Kingdom, high concentrations of immigrant students in schools are coupled with high concentrations of immigrant students in the most disadvantaged schools.

When analysing student performance through this prism, poor student performance, particularly among immigrant students, is most strongly related to the proportion of students in a school whose mothers have low levels of education. This finding indicates that immigrant students – indeed all students – face a major obstacle to success at school when they are concentrated in schools attended by students who face similar socio-economic disadvantage.

In contrast, the results suggest that it is not the proportion of immigrant students or the proportion of those who speak a different language that is most strongly associated with poor performance. In other words, being in a school with students from different countries or who speak multiple languages does not hinder learning as much as being in a school that has a high concentration of disadvantaged students does. In fact, there are many high-achieving schools that have large proportions of immigrant students. Many schools in the Canadian province of Alberta, for example, have just this kind of profile. Often, that high performance is the result of specific national or regional education policies designed to accommodate – and make the most of – heterogeneous student populations.

What these results tell us is that reducing the concentration of disadvantage in individual schools is a good first step towards helping immigrant students integrate successfully into school and, ultimately, society.

Links:

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

PISA in Focus No. 22:How do immigrant students fare in disadvantaged schools? 

Photo credit:  Colour figures / Shutterstock

The more the merrier

by Tracey Burns
Analyst, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education

Who is responsible for successes and failures of schools? A new Education Working Paper says  involving parents and students can help improve education systems by including them in accountability and school achievement processes. The traditional approach where central government provides the resources and made the majority of decisions has given way in many OECD countries to greater autonomy and control over decision-making for schools and local governments. This greater freedom has developed hand in hand with the rise of benchmarking and international assessments, and has made accountability a hot topic for policy makers and communities alike.

But what about other voices? Parents, community leaders, and others are taking an increasingly active role in governing their local schools. This trend, called “multiple accountability”, aims to provide more localized and nuanced feedback and guidance that schools and education systems can use in addition to standardized test results. It is a promising concept that builds on successes from other public policy areas such as environment and health. There is also fascinating evidence from the business world that suggests that enabling shareholders in private corporations to vote on the pay policy of the company’s executive officers appears to lead to large increases in the company’s market value, profitability and long-term performance. These “Say-on-Pay” regulations, promoted in the US and UK, allow more people within the corporation to have a say in decisions – and crucially, this shared responsibility can result in benefits to the whole company.

In education, multiple accountability is still a fairly new concept, and the amount of available research on how to make it work is modest. Three lessons, however, can be learned from existing models in The Netherlands and the United Kingdom:

1. You must identify the key stakeholders. This is more difficult than it sounds, and schools must make efforts to involve less powerful or inactive voices.
2. You must build capacity for this new role. Some stakeholders might not have the knowledge and language needed and may inadvertently be excluded in accountability processes. Providing them with the tools to interpret and analyse benchmarking data and other evaluation processes (e.g., value added measures) is an important part of giving them the expertise they need to take part.
3. You must be ready and open to assess your school’s quality and processes . School leaders play a key role in empowering staff to be involved and open to parents and members of the local community.  

Including the voices of parents and other stakeholders could be one of the most relevant shifts for education policy today. But unforeseen challenges may arise: it turns out that market mechanisms such as school competitiveness and parental choice in education can actually be disincentives for making multiple accountability work. In a competitive market, transparent discussion of the weaknesses of a school can threaten the image and competitiveness of the institution. In such contexts, it is strategically important to highlight the successes and avoid talking about room for improvement. The real question is: which approach is best-suited to improving our schools and education systems?


Links:
Education Working papers
OECD'S Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Governing Complex Education Systems (GCES)
Photo credit: Talk in colours speech bubbles /Shutterstock

It's high time to fight corruption in education

by Mihaylo Milovanovitch
Policy Analyst, Non-Member Economies, Directorate for Education

A modern day Bulgarian proverb says “What money can’t buy, a lot of money can”. Sadly, the truth of this popular wisdom holds well beyond the country it comes from. Sadly too, it seems to work well in schools and universities. Year by year Transparency International (TI), an international anti-corruption NGO, publishes data on the perceptions and experience of people from around the globe with corruption and in 2011 it reported that 35% of the world population considered education in their respective countries to be extremely corrupt.

There is no lack of individual examples. A media outlet in Serbia, a country in which more than quarter of the population this year is officially without a job, recently reported that getting one as a teacher would cost you 7000 EUR - the equivalent of around 22 average salaries. Students are ready to pay too. To succeed in school in Kyrgyzstan, they better be ready (and able) to pay their teachers. In 2006 (the last year for which there is data), 64% of all secondary students in the country were regularly paying for one-on-one private tutoring to teachers from their own schools.

Numbers are important. If you are a student or parent, however, would it really make a difference if in your country 10%, 25% or 30% of the education institutions are corrupt? Probably not. Even one corrupt school, and one fake doctor, engineer or teacher is just one too many.

Indeed, no matter how much of it there is, corruption is always a problem and corruption in education is particularly destructive. Corrupt schools and universities replicate tolerance for malpractice, undermine public trust, waste the human potential of nations and raise the cost of education (which is as an already costly sector anyway).

But, what can be done? What is it that corrupts education institutions and makes them do the opposite of the very mission they were founded to fulfil – to instil values, promote knowledge, and serve the society and its citizens? What makes parents and students initiate or agree to corruption? What policies work in preventing and eradicating corruption in education and how can they be replicated beyond national borders for the benefit of all interested countries and their students, teachers and education stakeholders? Finally, how to inform policies on preventing a problem which the ones involved have all reasons to hide?

In the course of the past year, the OECD Directorate for Education initiated the Integrity of Education Systems (INTES) project to find answers to these questions and use them in a novel approach to the problem. At its core is a focus on the causes of corruption in education – on identifying what gives individuals and education institutions the possibility, the motives and the reasons to engage in malpractice, and on how policy decisions influence corruption risk. The project is driven also by the genuine concern of countries-members of the OECD Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia for the integrity and efficiency of their education systems and by their request for policy support
.
The INTES project already bears promising fruits. The first INTES country report – on Serbia – was released some days ago. It uses the new methodology to provide an assessment of the integrity of the Serbian education system, supplies evidence on its shortcomings and strengths, formulates forecasts of corruption incidence, points out areas in need of attention, and identifies solutions for closing the gaps.

Even the best of reports and the most reliable of evidence are useless without national follow-up and without ownership for subsequent policy decisions, by all sides concerned. This is particularly true for highly sensitive topics such as the one at hand. In Serbia, the report triggered considerable policy response already in its drafting phase, and led to action by the national Parliament which amended the laws on primary and on secondary education to address some of the preliminary findings, in particular those related to recruitment procedures for teachers.

It can only be hoped that further countries - OECD members and non-Members alike - will follow the Serbian example and open up their national education to an integrity “health check” and afterwards invest in a meaningful follow-up. Their students, families and education professionals deserve nothing less.

Links:
Strengthening Integrity and Fighting Corruption in Education: Serbia
Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia
Public Sector Integrity Reviews
Bribery in international business
Photo credit: Shutterstock/iofoto