Man with a mission

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education and Skills

David Puttnam had a storied 30-year career as an independent film producer (The Mission, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, to cite just a few of his award-winning films) before he retired from film production to focus on public policy related to education, the environment, and the creative and communications industries. Lord Puttnam, who is now the UK Prime Minister’s Trade Envoy to Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma, the Republic of Ireland’s Digital Champion, and chair of Ireland-based Atticus Education, which delivers interactive seminars on film and other subjects to educational institutions around the world, quit school at 16. (“I was bored to tears,” he says. “It was night school that saved me.”) Marilyn Achiron, editor at the Directorate of Education and Skills, met with Lord Puttnam in early November when he was in Paris to give a keynote address to the CERI Conference on Innovation, Governance and Reform in Education.

Marilyn Achiron: In your keynote speech, you talk about creativity in using technologies in education. What do you mean by that? 

David Puttnam: Creativity, for me, is finding metaphors, finding ways of explaining things in an interesting manner. Innovation in teaching is more than just technique. It’s a way of getting teachers to understand that teaching is a wildly interesting, imaginative job; and the results you can get – as we used to call it, the “lightbulb moment” – when you find the right switch for that lightbulb, are absolutely remarkable. But unfortunately, because of curricula pressures, personal pressures, because of class size, etc., teachers find it increasingly difficult to individualise kids in that sense: one kid’s lightbulb is not going to be the same as that of another kid.

MA: In your travels, do you find that teachers are willing to learn new pedagogies, learn to use new technologies in the classroom, or is there resistance? 

DP: I chair the Times Educational Supplement advisory board. In 2008, we realised that we had a perfectly efficient social media site – TES Connect. And we wondered what would happen if we really opened it up to teachers, to try to encourage teachers to talk to each other instead of through us. Teachers place learning materials, lesson plans, ideas, questions on the site. We've now reached a point at which over a million teachers a day, from all over the world, are now accessing this one site. So the idea that teachers aren’t interested in talking to other teachers, or in learning from other teachers, or in passing on information to other teachers has been blown right out of the water. The day when you went to your classroom, closed the door, and jealously guarded your own pedagogy – those days are over, gone.

Having seen the extraordinary success of  social media sites – TES Connect, and others – one criticism I would make is of the overall quality of the resources that are available. Quantitatively, we’ve hit a gold mine; qualitatively, I think it’s operating at about 20% of what's possible. You need to make sure that the resources posted stimulate really innovative and interesting work. One thing we’re looking into is the concept of copyright-free classrooms, which would mean that teachers wouldn’t have to worry about what they can and can’t use – movie clips, clips from television, whatever it might be – so that we’d in effect be challenging teachers to take material and re-use it, rather than looking over their shoulders wondering if they can. It would create an environment of “permissibility” for teachers to find out what’s possible.

MA: As a film producer, you had direct control over the process and your product, you had relatively quick reaction time from the people you worked with. Are you frustrated now in your policy work on education and climate change?

DP: Oh deeply. I no longer believe, in my heart of hearts, that the political will exists to turn things around – until we are faced with an evidential, existential crisis.

MA: What will that be?

It’s going to have to be pretty catastrophic to create lasting behaviour change; and it’s going to have to be something with a clear “read across” to other nations. It can’t just be inundation of coastal Bangladesh, or the vanishing of the Maldives. It can’t just be that. It’s got to be a situation in which every farmer in the [US] Midwest says: “It’s game over”. It has to shatter complacency at the UN; it has to shatter complacency within the OECD.

MA: How do we convince aging populations, particularly in the West, that improving education and maintaining schools are important? 

Anyone who is sufficiently a fantasist to think that good education systems are not a prerequisite to the health care they want, and the pensions they want, and the social security they want as they get older is bonkers, just plain bonkers!

As we discussed during the conference, the difference between the [highly innovative] medical profession and the teaching profession is quite simple. If you’re a surgeon and I come to you with a serious health issue, and you say to me, “You really do have a problem; however, I was reading the other day about a procedure which is really interesting. It’s been used several times and it could – could – save you”, I’m going to say, “Where do I sign?”

What you have is a process that constantly incentivises innovation, because through a series of relatively short-term wins you get long-term gains. The default mechanism in the education world is the opposite, which is: “How do we be sure it will work?” Because the crisis isn’t acute – or isn’t perceived to be acute. That, I think, is why the medical world has developed at an extraordinary pace – and continues to – and why education languishes.

Links:
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation: Conference on Innovation, Governance and Reform in Education
David Puttnam's PowerPoint Presentation at the CERI Conference on Innovation, Governance and Reform in Education
Photo credit: © OECD/Marco Illuminati

What do we really know about teaching?

by Kristen Weatherby

Senior Analyst, Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

I have often heard it said that everyone thinks they are an expert on education simply because they went to school. This is an overstatement, of course, but it does seem today that more and more people have – and express – an opinion about teachers and the quality of their teaching.

But what do we really know about how the majority of teachers are teaching today? Data from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) show that on average across TALIS countries, 13% of teachers did not receive any appraisal or feedback on their teaching. In several countries, this number approaches a quarter or even half of teachers in the country. One can imagine these teachers as completely alone, teaching with the door closed and never receiving feedback on how to improve their practice.

The eighth Education Fast Forward online debate will take place today to discuss in more detail the development of new teaching practices, with the objective of driving deeper learning for every learner. Michael Fullan, the esteemed former Dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto will open the debate. Recognised as a worldwide authority on education reform, Michael will first explore the concept of new pedagogies and what they might lead to. He will then look at how teachers might use technology to develop and change the way students learn, and how changes in teaching over the coming decades could be greater than those that occurred over the past 2 000 years.

I will then take a closer look at what the TALIS data tell us about teachers’ practices today and what factors might contribute to how teachers are currently behaving in their teaching. Research shows that high-quality teaching is linked to the use of a variety of classroom teaching practices that include both student-led and teacher-directed approaches. I will look at what the international data say on whether today’s teachers are equipped to teach in this manner and what kind of support they are receiving to develop their practice.

Michael and I will be joined by education experts from all over the world who will contribute their insights and experiences to this global conversation. The debate will be streamed live to Promethean Planet from 12.00 until 14.30 GMT. Join us to get an inside look at what is really happening in classrooms around the world, and how this might change in the future.

Links:
For more information about Education Fast Forward, visit  www.PrometheanPlanet.com/EFF
To learn more about TALIS visit www.oecd.org/talis or follow @Kristen_TALIS on Twitter.

Photo credit: Classroom © Shutterstock