How to Best Shape Teacher Policies

Editor's Notes

1. I want to conclude with what we have learned about successful reform trajectories In the past when you only needed a small slice of well-educated people it was efficient for governments to invest a large sum in a small elite to lead the country. But the social and economic cost of low educational performance has risen substantially and all young people now need to leave school with strong foundation skills. When you could still assume that what you learn in school will last for a lifetime, teaching content and routine cognitive skills was at the centre of education. Today, where you can access content on Google, where routine cognitive skills are being digitised or outsourced, and where jobs are changing rapidly, the focus is on enabling people to become lifelong learners, to manage complex ways of thinking and complex ways of working that computers cannot take over easily. In the past, teachers had sometimes only a few years more education than the students they taught. When teacher quality is so low, governments tend to tell their teachers exactly what to do and exactly how they want it done and they tend to use Tayloristic methods of administrative control and accountability to get the results they want. Today the challenge is to make teaching a profession of high-level knowledge workers. But such people will not work in schools organised as Tayloristic workplaces using administrative forms of accountability and bureaucratic command and control systems to direct their work. To attract the people they need, successful education systems have transformed the form of work organisation in their schools to a professional form of work organisation in which professional norms of control complement bureaucratic and administrative forms of control.
2. Figure 7.3
3. New graph for the PPT
4. Figure 6.8
5. Figure 6.2
6. In my view, one of the most important improvements in Japan has been the significant rise in the performance of Japanese students on open-ended tasks, the kind of tasks that require students to create an answer, rather than to just reproduce an answer from a multiple-choice task. In other words, Japan is advancing fastest on the kind of ‘new skills’ that I spoke about at the beginning.
7. Adapted from Figure 6.10
8. Figure 4.3
9. Figure 4.14
10. Figure 4.15
11. Figure 4.6
12. Adapted from Figure 6.12
13. New graph for the PPT – derived from tables 5.5.Web.2, 5.5.Web.3 and 5.5.Web.5.
14. New graph for the PPT – derived from Table 5.5.Web.6
15. Expended from Figure 6.7
16. New graph for the PPT – derived from Table 5.7
17. Expended from Figure 5.13
18. From figure 3.1
19. Figure 3.6
20. Figure 2.6
21. Figure 7.2
22. Figure 7.2
23. Figure 7.6 "For the international averages the data are more stable than for individual countries. Please use caution when presenting data that are in the extreme of the graph."
24. Figure 7.5 "For the international averages the data are more stable than for individual countries. Please use caution when presenting data that are in the extreme of the graph."
25. Figure 7.2
26. Figure 7.3
27. New graph for the PPT
28. Figure 7.4 "For the international averages the data are more stable than for individual countries. Please use caution when presenting data that are in the extreme of the graph."
29. Figure 2.4