A Window into the classroom

Dirk Van Damme
by Division Head, Innovation and Measuring Progress (IMEP) and Head of Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)

An excellent teacher is what makes students learn and succeed in school. Everything else – standards, curricula, assessments, resources, school leadership – come second. Yet, what do we actually know about what teachers are doing?

Classrooms seem to be the ‘black boxes’ of the education system. There is not an awful lot of research on classroom teaching practices, but TALIS 2008 provides some self-reported data on teaching practices and professional activities including participation in collaborative learning with colleagues. The main TALIS report, published in 2009, compared the relative preference for three different teaching practices – structuring, student oriented and enhanced activities – across the 23 different countries that participated in the survey. The report showed differences between countries regarding the extent to which teachers are favouring directive and teacher-directed practices over more activating and learner-centred ones. These TALIS results were received as rather disappointing signals, suggesting that the teaching profession was relatively resistant to change in many countries.

In collaboration with the TALIS programme and as part of its Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning project the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) has just released a research report which delves deeper in the TALIS data on teaching practices in classrooms and schools. Based on some advanced analytical tools (multilevel latent profile analysis), this new book called Teaching Practices and Pedagogical Innovations: Evidence from TALIS  identifies underlying profiles in teachers’ classroom practices. A large set of variables about teachers, such as gender, training, subjects taught, but also their pedagogical beliefs, the degree of professional development, the amount of feedback and appraisal received, etc., were brought together and in each country different profiles of teachers were distinguished.

The scientific and policy implications of this research are huge. Many learning researchers and education policy makers strongly – and rightly so – believe in the benefits of more student-oriented, self-regulating approaches to teaching and learning. This suggests that a particular form of teaching is outdated and should be replaced by a more innovative one. Consequently, this report now suggests that we should not look at the quality of what happens in classrooms in an ‘either-or’ way. While it is true that the best teachers differ from their colleagues in their relative use of activating, student-oriented ways of teaching, they also use more structuring, teacher-driven forms of classroom practice. Teaching quality is a matter of diversity of practices, not of one set of practices against the other. Excellent teachers are those teachers who master a large repertoire of teaching practices, which they can deploy according to learners’ needs and varying classroom conditions. Those teachers are also the ones who actively advance their own professional competence by professional development and who feel more satisfied and effective about their own work.

A final important finding is that there is also a clear difference between these teacher profiles in the degree of co-operation with other colleagues and engagement in collaborative learning communities in and outside schools. Excellent teachers view teaching as a collective responsibility within the profession, not as an individualised thing happening behind closed doors. They open the doors of their classrooms, inviting colleagues to engage in what they are doing but also disclosing what happens in classrooms to the outside world. It is that kind of teachers we need to work with our kids.

Links:
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) Activities
OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)
Teaching in Focus Briefs

Photo credit: © By happy via

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

“Creativity” is spelled with a “why”

by Marilyn Achiron
Editor, Directorate for Education

Here’s a science experiment for you: Take a standard-issue van. Equip it with household items – coat hangers, balls of string, maybe even a few potatoes – with which you could demonstrate certain basic scientific principles. Find someone who knows how to drive the van and teach that person some of those basic principles of science (or find someone who knows those basic principles and teach that person how to drive the van…). Send driver and van out into remote, disadvantaged villages. Observe how children react.

While waiting to amass the funds he needed to realise his dream of building a school in the Himalayas to develop creative leaders, Ramji Raghavan performed that little experiment – and discovered a way to ignite creativity. Thirteen years after the first van was sent out into rural India in 1999, the Agastya International Foundation, chaired by Raghavan, now dispatches 62 vans, most focusing on general science, but two specialising in ecology and one in the arts, across nine states in India, runs a Creativity Lab in the state of Andhra Pradesh, and reaches more than a million children – and their parents – each year.

“Creative people tend to be very good observers,” Raghavan noted during a recent visit to the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation. “They are aware; they are able to associate different pieces of information, integrate them and apply them. These skills are all predicated on curiosity. But how do you spark curiosity?”

Raghavan, who was a banker in his early career (“when it was still a somewhat honourable profession”), found the answer to his question in hands-on, experiential learning. “People tend to remember things when they are personally engaged,” he says. That’s why the Agastya project also selects students with particular aptitude and interest and has them teach other children. Not only do these young teachers retain more of what they learn – some have even won special awards in national science competitions – but, through teaching, they also begin to develop other positive attitudes and behaviour – including, for example, empathy. “They begin to realise,” says Raghavan, “how difficult it is to teach.”

These unintended outcomes “can be more important than the original goal,” says Raghavan. “These children learn different ways of thinking and looking at the world.” For Raghavan, those different ways of thinking also need to be adopted by traditional teachers and schools. “We need a shift from ‘yes’ to ‘why?’ in school systems,” he says, “from looking to observing; from being passive to exploring; from textbook-bound to hands-on; from fear to confidence.”

Although the school in the Himalayas is still a dream, Raghavan has managed to change the reality for millions of young Indians who live a little closer to sea level. “There are magical moments in all our lives,” he says. “We may have found a way to deliver these kinds of transformational moments on a mass scale.”
Links:
Visit the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)
See related blog posts:
The “extra” in extracurricular activities
Skills revolution will come from the grassroots
Photo credit: Mobile Lab / © Stephan Vincent-Lancrin

Educating for innovative societies

Professor Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, answers questions posed by educationtoday's editor Cassandra Davis during his visit to OECD to present at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation conference on Educating for Innovative Societies.

Cassandra Davis: In your book “Five minds for the future”, you call for the development of five types of thinking: the disciplined, synthesizing, creative, respectful and ethical. In your opinion, are schools equally responsible for the development of these minds? How could schools best develop these skills?

Howard Gardner: The traditional role of school is to develop minds that are disciplined—both in the sense of mastering the major disciplinary ways of thinking and in the sense of working steadily towards the development of any intellectual skill.  Synthesizing and creating are also intellectual/cognitive capacities, and thus within the purview of school, and they are more important in the 21st century than ever before. But educators have less experience in training these ‘habits of mind’ and unless teachers themselves have these latter skills, they will not be able to inculcate them effectively in students.

Ideally, the challenges of respectful and ethical minds would be taken up by the larger society—political leaders, media creators, parents, and workers. But in countries like the United States, we cannot count on much help from these individuals and institutions. Respect and ethics cannot be conveyed didactically—they have to be embodied in the behaviors and attitudes of the adults and older children in schools.  The creation of ‘common spaces’, where members of a school community can discuss challenging issues is one  step that can and should be taken.

CD: If you could change one thing in school practices, what would it be? Why?

HG: In psychology, we distinguish between the Figure and the Ground. The Figure is the dominant focus in a graphic presentation—for example, a portrait of a royal figure—and the Ground consists of the background shadows and patterns which support, rather than divert attention from, the Figure.  Throughout the developed and developing world, the Figure in recent years has become scores on standardized tests—and OECD has contributed to this focus. There is nothing wrong with having good test scores, but there is something VERY WRONG when societies prioritize scores over everything else.

And so, if I could change one thing, it would be to put another Figure at the center of our educational landscape: the kinds of human beings we want to nurture and the kind of society we want to create.  Everything in the background—including test scores—should contribute to those overarching goals.  Most of the problems in the world are not created by teachers or students with low test scores. They are created and magnified by individuals with high test scores—and that includes those of us who are reading (and in my case writing)  those words—who push self aggrandizement and power  ahead of the creation of a healthy society populated by ethical individuals. In the United States, we refer ironically to ‘the best and the brightest’—the Harvard and Yale graduates who brought us into the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the financial crises of 2001 and 2008.

If you think I have strong opinions about these matters, you are right!

CD: In your latest book "Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed," you stress that, with technological advances, factual information has become readily available, and the need to memorize is no longer that important. How can students today develop critical thinking, and understand what is true and why?

HG: Yes,  when the answers to factual questions are available at the movement of a mouse or the click of a button, there is no point in spending time committing the information to memory. Recently, a talented student said to me “Why bother to go to school, when the answers to all questions are contained in my hand held device?”  I responded to him, rather pointedly, ‘”Yes, the answer to all questions, except the important ones.”

The student reflected an increasingly widely held view that either a question can be answered by a computer or it is not worth asking or it cannot be answered decisively and so should not be tackled at all.  But as your question indicates, we cannot and should not accept all information obtained ‘online ‘ or ‘offline’ as true—even if the authority is thought to be reliable.

And so, going forward, our focus in schools (and outside of school) should be on understanding the METHODS whereby assertions are made, the way that a question is posed, how relevant data and arguments are marshaled, what kinds of challenges have been considered, how have they been responded to, etc.  One should never read a single account of the causes of the French revolution or the role of heritability in the distribution of human traits.  Instead, one needs to probe deeply on how various accounts and graphics and data arrays have been created and used as a foundation for a conclusion.

Ironically, we live at a time in the history of the world where it is MORE POSSIBLE than ever before to determine what is true and what is not.  But one has to be willing to take the time to interrogate sources of all sorts and to change one’s mind if the data and arguments point in another direction.   In the future, we will pay increasing attention to those sources of information that are known to be DISinterested—not pushing a particular agenda, being ready to consider alternative points of view, to admit error and to publish corrections. Alas, these are not the first descriptors that come to mind when one considers the average blog!

Links:
For more information on Professor Howard Gardner visit his website: www.howardgardner.com
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation

Photo credit: Ammit / © Shutterstock

Let’s learn a new language

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

How many of you have experienced while travelling, in a country which hosts a foreign language and a different culture, the desperate need to wholeheartedly express yourself?  As frantically you watch your intrigued interlocutor return your inadequate efforts with blank looks of total incomprehension! Then, with the support of some friendly smiles, warm gestures and some very theatrical hand waving motions, suddenly the situation eases and you feel a connection, even if you’re still not completely understood!

The language assets of a country, as well as the language components of human capital of individuals, can provide to be of a comparative advantage in our globalising world. Visibly, globalisation transcends time and geographical barriers as well as political and social ideals. It also enhances the blending of cultural elements, such as music, languages and cuisine.

Currently, the use of more than one language is no longer exceptional - over six billion people in the world speak an estimated six thousand languages.  Moreover, as UNESCO explains, there are many endangered languages with the risk that the disappearance of these unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge.

Amazingly, for early infants simple gaze following is a crucial developmental component because it enables language learning and their acquisition of new skills via imitation and instruction, as explained by Dr. Meltzoff of the LIFE Center at a recent CERI and New Science Foundation (NSF) conference during his presentation on Social Cognition and the Early Years.  But it’s never too late to learn a new language; a current project on brain function investigates how mastering of multiple languages can have profound effects on our cognitive abilities, extending beyond social and communicative benefits. Bilinguals outperform monolinguals in a variety of tasks that are cognitively demanding, such as those drawing on executive processes such as inhibitory control and working memory.

Consequently, nothing is more fundamentally connected to education than language. And isn’t it just amazing how languages issues manage to arouse such strong emotional reactions? Positions in the various debates on languages in education can also have strong political consequences. Even in the scientific community research findings and scholarly arguments are transformed easily into causes that appear to need to be vigorously endorsed. The strong emotional and political loading of language issues in education can be explained by the rapidly changing social context in which old concepts seem to clash with the exigencies of newer ones.   For example, in the United States at the Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, located in Indianapolis, Indiana there are 59 languages spoken among the student body.  Here they have found that many children from other countries are quick to learn English, but communicating with their families is often a much bigger challenge.

The Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)'s upcoming book “Languages in a Global World: Learning for Better Cultural Understanding” demonstrates how issues concerning languages in education are undergoing profound transitions as a consequence of globalisation, migration and changes in modern societies.  This book will look at the big questions of language diversity around the world and its relation to education learning.  Since learning a new language is not only a means to improving communication, but more importantly a way to promote global understanding.

Given that culture and language are inextricably intertwined, learning a language necessitates familiarising oneself with a new culture. This gives us the unique opportunity to step outside our familiar scope of existence. It allows us to view culture's customs, traditions and norms as well as our own value systems through the eyes of others.  Does this understanding promote appreciation of cultural differences, which in turn creates more tolerance and thus a better appreciation of others? People often express a perceived positive and productive change in their identities as a result of experiences with other languages and cultures.

Learn more:
• OECD work on Globalisation and Linguistic Competencies
• OECD work on the brain and learning
• Activities in the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) 

Related blog posts and articles:

• Internet and Language Change, Macmillan Dictionary Blog 
• China's drive to teach English stalls in the west, The Guardian
• My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling, The New York Times
• Variety of languages challenges, enriches schools Indystar 
• How Language Affects Thought, Education Matters blogspot
• UNESCO International Mother Language day is on 21st of February 

Photo Credit © dihrespati