by Lucy Crehan
Mainly though, the support offered is through additional one-to-one or small group attention with a teacher. In Finland and Canada these are additional qualified teachers who take students out of class for short periods of time, or help them at lunch or after school. In East Asia it is the subject teacher who makes use of the breaks between lessons and study periods after school, and communicates with the parents to suggest that children then receive further help from them (parents) or tutors after school if necessary.
Although it doesn’t happen much in the countries I visited (Canada being the exception), I think including gifted children in these small groups to extend them beyond the curriculum is only fair as well. These groups can be flexible, with different children receiving support or extension depending on the specific topic, therefore preventing children from developing a fixed mindset (i.e. ‘I’m in the gifted group, so I won’t take any intellectual risks in case they decide I’m not gifted after all’).
Provide small, flexible group support from qualified professionals before/during/after lessons.244
Principle 4: Treat Teachers as Professionals
Let’s look at what distinguishes jobs that are considered to be professions – doctors, lawyers and accountants – from jobs that are usually not. Entry into any of these professions requires a period of study of at least a few years, in which the prospective doctor/lawyer/accountant begins to become familiar with the body of knowledge with which her chosen profession works. This course is rigorously assessed, and passing it confers recognition upon the mini-professional as a junior member of the profession, registered with the national professional body. At this stage, our junior professional will begin to practise, but their level of responsibility will be limited, and they will be heavily supervised by more senior members of the profession who will guide them in how to get better in their role. They will gradually get more responsibility as they demonstrate their skill, and upon further study and the passing of another exam, they will move up the career ladder and begin to be responsible for the training of those less experienced than them. They are respected for their certified knowledge, as everyone knows how hard the courses are, and reaching the top of the career ladder can bring a substantial salary. As a result, the profession can take their pick of newly-minted graduates.
All of the top-performing systems I visited take a similar approach to teaching, and do most or all of the following: they are selective about who enters their teacher training programmes; their teacher training programmes are hosted in respected institutions and last at least a year; they only confer teacher certification on those who both successfully pass these programmes and an induction period and they ensure teachers are mentored in their first few years and remain in close collaboration with experienced colleagues beyond that through weekly planning sessions. This means they can then give teachers autonomy to get on with their work (supported by further professional development), which makes the profession attractive, and allows the teacher training programmes to be selective. It is a professionalising cycle, and it means that teachers have the three things – mastery, autonomy and relatedness – which enhance intrinsic motivation.
Require prospective teachers to undergo a rigorous teacher training programme of at least a year, which is recognised by a professional body and includes the study of pedagogical content knowledge.
Ensure newly-qualified teachers have a reduced teaching load, and time with a dedicated mentor who also has a reduced teaching load. Encourage teachers to plan and evaluate lessons in small teams, so that all teachers are pedagogically supported and learn from one another.
The alternative approach is to let in anyone who meets minimum standards; to let any institution run teacher training programmes with minimal oversight; to give certification to anyone who ticks all the boxes (or to not require certification at all) and to have little or no formal mentorship or collaboration. The trouble with this is that it then means you’d have to restrict autonomy in order to ensure minimum standards by controlling how these teachers taught, and because this will impact on intrinsic motivation, you might also try raising their performance using bribes or threats. This would make the profession unattractive, which may lead to a teacher shortage, making it very difficult to be selective and lowering the status of the profession further. Those that remained would be overworked and demotivated. I describe this alternative approach as an illustration of the converse of the above, a ‘deprofessionalising cycle’ if you like; any resemblance to real systems, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
It’s all very well describing what these systems do, but what if your education system is stuck in the latter cycle; where is the opportunity to steer it in a more professional direction? Finland went in at step number 2 – they closed down their teacher training colleges and moved all teacher training to eight highly-respected universities. Singapore made their teacher training programmes more attractive by paying for them (along with a stipend), in exchange for a return of service in teaching. In Canada teaching remains attractive because the unions have fought for good pay and conditions (teacher salary is one of the few things that correlate with PISA scores), though this varies between the provinces. China sought to increase the status of teachers in society by developing rigorous qualification requirements, and introducing a teacher career structure.
There are good reasons for requiring teachers to study in universities and pass rigorous training other than the positive effect it can have on the status of the profession: there are actually things that it is useful for them to learn there. It seems crazy that I have to say it, but like any other profession, there (increasingly) exists a body of knowledge, derived from research, that teachers ought to know: child development, cognitive psychology and subject didactics (also known as pedagogical content knowledge).245 This isn’t always taught in initial teacher training courses,246 which explains why teacher training doesn’t have a unanimously positive impact – but when teachers do have this knowledge, it makes a measurable difference to teacher quality.247 Interestingly but perhaps not surprisingly, some of the teaching practices observed in top performing countries are also the ones supported by research (see Box 6).
Box 6: Effective pedagogy match-up
It’s very difficult to draw firm conclusions about the kinds of teaching going on in any country, as the sample sizes of studies and visits investigating them are usually small, and often not randomly selected. But I will tentatively suggest that some of the practices I observed and read about may have contributed to (although on a couple of occasions detracted from) these systems’ high scores in international tests. I don’t say this based on personal ideas about what ‘good’ teaching is, but based on the alignment between many of the practices I saw and have written about in this book, and what research has consistently shown to be effective.248(4) I include a list of evidence-based practices that are relevant to the descriptions in this book, along with a few that have been shown to be ineffective (which in the main, the countries explored in this book did not do).
Examples of evidence-based practices used by teachers in top-performing systems:
Reviewing previous learning: Review key elements of course content at the beginning of lessons, and after a delay of several weeks or months.
Modelling and examples: Make content explicit through carefully-paced explanation, modelling and examples. Alternate problems with their solutions provided, and problems that students must solve.
Posing probing questions: Asking students ‘why?’, ‘how?’, ‘what if?’ and ‘how do you know?’ requires them to clarify and link their knowledge of key ideas.
Motivating students: Students are more motivated if they believe that intelligence and ability can be improved through hard work. Teachers can encourage these beliefs by praising productive student effort and strategies (and other processes under student control) rather than their ability. Students are also more motivated and successful in academic environments when they believe
that they belong and are accepted in those environments.
Memorisation: Each subject area has some set of facts that, if committed to long-term memory, aids problem-solving by freeing working memory resources and illuminating contexts in which existing knowledge and skills can be applied. The size and content of this set varies by subject matter.
Low-stakes testing: Teachers can explain to students that trying to remember something makes memory more long-lasting than other forms of studying. Teachers can use low- or no-stakes quizzes in class to do this, and students can use self-tests.
Providing feedback: If teachers provide regular, clear, purposeful feedback to students, which is compatible with students’ prior knowledge, it can help students to understand, or develop their own strategies for understanding or mastering the knowledge or skills being taught.
Examples of ineffective practice:
Praising children for ability
Leaving learners to discover key ideas for themselves
Presenting information to learners in their preferred learning style
Ensuring learners are always active, rather than listening to the teacher
Where these countries differ from one another is where and when they require teachers to acquire that knowledge and master the accompanying skills. Finland front-loads its training, with a five-year master’s degree required of primary teachers, but this may not suit every country, especially those at a stage where bright young things might not want to commit such a long time training to join what they see to be an unfashionable profession (if they see it as a profession at all). Japan has all its formal certification at the beginning, but has ongoing informal professional development through mentoring and lesson study, and then formal training again before teachers can move into school principal roles. China and Singapore formalise this further, so that although they have a more limited period of initial teacher training than Finland, teachers are expected to develop both their knowledge and skills as they advance through the profession, receiving further certification and responsibilities for developing new teachers as they go up a career ladder of several steps.
For countries stuck in the ‘deprofessionalising cycle’, a ladder might be just what is needed to get them out, and up onto a route that requires more professional development, but affords teachers more respect.
Principle 5: Combine School Accountability with School Support (Rather Than Sanctions)
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel particularly strongly about this one. There were many times during my trip where I felt inspired by the sheer good sense of the approaches to school improvement taken by various governments, while at the same time, wanting to cry a little bit about the alternative approach to school improvement taken in my own country (which is to demand that they improve, and if they don’t, to change the school’s governance and/or management).
The difference isn’t in whether or not schools are held accountable. All of the systems I visited required their schools to submit nationally or provincially comparable data to local government, whether based on moderated teacher assessment (Finland), school-based exams (Japan, Shanghai, Singapore), or provincial examinations (Ontario and British Columbia in Canada). At an international level the existence of standardised external examinations is significantly associated with both PISA outcomes and equity in those outcomes (though is obviously not a necessity for these positive effects, as the case of Finland shows), and Singapore and some provinces in Canada also make these results public at the school level. Schools in all the places I went to also have some form of oversight through school visits, although these differ in their frequency and focus. In order to support schools to improve, you need to know which ones need support, and what kind of support they need.
Monitor school performance at a local or national level using school-level data or irregular national assessments.
That is what this information was used for – to support schools. Accountability in these settings means responsibility and answerability, rather than culpability and liability. Let’s look at some examples. We discussed the set-up of schools in most provinces in Canada; they are grouped into ‘families’ under a school board, which employs school superintendents (usually ex-principals). If a school does badly in their provincial exams, the superintendent will sit with the principal, ask them what they think happened, work out with them what steps to take forward, and may link them up with other schools in the ‘family’ to learn from. Principals from different schools meet regularly to share strategies.
Singapore takes a similar approach – each cluster of schools is overseen by a cluster superintendent, who develops, guides and supervises the school leadership teams to see that they’re effectively run, and encourages collaboration between them. In both places though, schools are unlikely to be poorly run in the first place, because the systems invest in leadership training (cf. Principle 4) and succession planning.
Make use of or create a network of successful former school leaders, to visit schools regularly and provide practising school leaders with advice, support and connections.
In Japan, school inspections are made up of five members of the board of education, who are often ex-teachers and principals. Mr Hashimoto told me that in his prefecture, ‘they come to school five times over the course of the year, and watch lessons and talk to teachers, and at the end very of the year they make this,’ he reached out to the shelf behind him and took down a bound booklet, ‘which is the advice and recommendations for the school.’ I told Mr Hashimoto that in England inspectors came for just three days and he raised his eyebrows. ‘They can’t understand a school in three days!’
Another way that Japan, Singapore and Shanghai support weaker schools is by intentionally sending them strong teachers. In Shanghai, this is part of a bigger scheme called ‘commissioned administration’. One of the schools I visited there had been very successful at providing a holistic education along with high results in a relatively deprived area, and so was asked by the government to pair up with a weaker school. They were provided with the funding to enable them to send some of their teachers and one senior leader to work alongside the teachers and leaders in the other school, training up the staff and even taking over the management of the school for a little while, before returning to their original school and leaving those they trained to carry on the good work. This was beneficial for the recipient school, which subsequently improved its results dramatically, and for the teachers who were sent over for a while, who got to lead on teacher development.
Incentivise demonstrably good teachers and middle leaders to work in struggling schools, and provide pedagogical leadership to other staff.
There is an alternative logic of school improvement practised in some countries, which is formally called ‘administrative accountability’, but more commonly known as ‘high-stakes’ accountability. In these countries, accountability is based on Motivation 2.0 – the carrot and the stick. Mainly the stick. Schools that perform below a certain threshold are threatened with closure, takeover (permanent) or a financial sanction. School leaders are fearful for their jobs, and even if these are safe, they are fearful for their reputations. These schools are usually those doing the hardest work – working with the most disadvantaged communities, sometimes with the least money.
The logic, I believe, is that teachers and school leaders will be motivated to avoid these sanctions, and so work harder, or work differently. But being stressed doesn’t help you come up with innovative new solutions that you hadn’t thought of previously – it shuts down your creativity. Highly evaluative contexts decrease creative performance.249 A McKinsey study of top-performing systems quotes an ‘Asian system leader’ who gave this as a reason for not publishing school-level data: ‘Making results public demotivates staff and results in their paralysis... They stop being open to trying and learning new things.’250 So if you are working harder (if that is possible), you are just doing more of the same, which if it wasn’t working
in the first place, isn’t going to help much.
Alternatively, as suggested above, you might not do more of the same but change your behaviour for the worse, as the policymaker went on to say: ‘Instead, they would focus on protecting themselves and finding ways to make their students look good on tests.’ Research on high-stakes accountability in the United States and in England has found that it leads to teachers focusing narrowly on complying with policy demands,251 giving extra attention to certain ‘threshold’ students at the expense of others,252 putting low attaining students into special education programmes to exempt them from the tests,253 and in some cases – to cheating.254
What top-performing systems understand is that when schools are underperforming it is often because the teachers within them lack the knowledge, expertise or capacity to make that change, and so they support them in whatever way is required to make the school better for the children. In the unusual situation that a principal is unwilling or unmotivated to change their behaviour then it may involve moving them on, but this is an extreme case, not a general strategy.
All Together Now
Following just one of these principles may help to raise a system’s performance, but can be quite difficult in the absence of the others. For example, supporting children to reach minimum common standards is more challenging if these standards are unachievable for many children right from their first term at school, creating a core of students who are behind before they even begin. Treating teachers as professionals may be your intention, and you may get top graduates attracted by the quality of your new training offer, but if you then threaten to shut down their workplace unless they produce the grades, they will leave.