Preparing teachers and school leaders for the 21st century – Ministers and Union leaders meet on how to turn visions into reality
Publié par Andreas SCHLEICHER sur 17 mars 2012 20:58:06
Ministers, Union leaders and teacher leaders from 23 of the 25 highest performing and most rapidly improving education systems on PISA followed an invitation from U.S. Education Secretary Duncan, the OECD and Education International to discuss how to prepare teachers and develop school leaders for the 21st century. It was an unprecedented turnout of those in education who can make change happen. They met because they realise the urgency of raising the status of the education profession, because they know that governments and the profession are in this together, and no doubt also because they were convened by a Secretary who has demonstrated that bold reform can be successfully implemented even in the most challenging times.
It was amazing to see how much education, traditionally inward-looking, siloed and at times provincial, has become an international arena, with success no longer measured by national standards alone but by what the best performing education systems show can be achieved. Secretary Duncan may have surprised delegates when he explained how much of his reform agenda builds on the experience of the most successful educational systems and the outcomes from last year’s Summit. But no less so did Zhang Minxuan, mastermind of Shanghai’s school reform that helped to propel the province to the highest performing education systems on the most recent PISA assessment, when he recounted how he and his colleagues had toured the world in the 1990s to find out how countries as different as the United States and Switzerland were successfully addressing the policy challenges his province had faced at that time, not to copy what they were doing but to learn from them and put together a design for Shanghai that would be superior to anything that they had seen anywhere. Though one can always question whether policies that are successful in some place will succeed in another place - and surely no country can simply adopt another nation’s system or policies – comparative data and analysis seem to rapidly expand the scope for learning from the successes and failures of education policies and practices around the world.
Where important things are happening in schools there are people that makes these things happen. A consistent thread through the discussions was the central role that leadership plays in high performing education systems. This was all about supporting, evaluating and developing teacher quality; about vision for results, equity and accountability and a culture of commitment rather than compliance; and about aligning pedagogical goals with strategic resource management.
I also took away from the discussions how important it is to take a system-wide perspective and to connect school leaders so that their work is coherently aligned with the larger goals of the systems. Ministers and Union leaders stressed the need to distribute leadership effectively so that school leaders can take on this larger system-level role. As the Swedish Minister put it, if there are too few people involved in leadership, things will simply not change because there are so few people promoting change and so many against it. Or, in the words of the Slovenian Minister, in the age of Twitter, your effectiveness as a leader depends so much less on your administrative powers than on your capacity to attract followers. But it became equally clear that there can be a tension between leaderships and leaders; between structures and coherence, on the one hand, and visionary and entrepreneurial individuals, on the other. And there can be a tension between the need to pinpoint responsibilities in schools and avoiding autocratic school leadership that undermines the profession and precludes the teaching of 21st century skills.
