Global Teaching InSights: A video study of teaching

 

Global Teaching InSights: A video study of teaching

What does teaching look like? What practices are most impactful? By directly observing teaching in the classroom, this study trialled new research methods to shed light on these key questions for raising student outcomes around the world. This report provides a detailed account of classroom management, social and emotional support, and instructional practices in the classrooms of eight countries and economies, drawing upon the observation of lesson videos and instructional materials, the analysis of teacher and student questionnaires, and the measurement of students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

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Check out the Global Teaching InSights platform and share experiences with your fellow teachers!

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1276477196024064

The Platform

The Global Teaching InSights initiative aims to make quality teaching practices from around the world visible through classroom videos in a digital platform. Authentic classroom videos will provide tangible examples of teaching to stimulate a new and more effective international, peer-driven discussion around pedagogy, broaden national horizons by presenting diverse teaching approaches and settings, and support the teaching profession with a powerful resource to improve classroom practice. Its main goals are to: 

What’s the best way to teach science?

How do science teachers teach science - and does it matter?

Teachers often use a combination of practices to achieve the desired learning outcomes. Empowered with strong classroom- management skills and professional knowledge, teachers could guide students’ learning of science with explicit instruction on basic concepts, then encourage students to participate in enquiry-based activities to consolidate their knowledge. Adapting science lessons to meet the needs of individual students can benefit those students who struggle to understand a particular concept or topic. Flexibility and responsiveness to their students are the hallmarks of effective teachers.

How do science teachers teach science - and does it matter?

Preparing teachers for 21st century challenges

Preparing teachers for 21st century challenges

Valuing our Teachers and Raising their Status

How Communities Can Help

This report shows how education systems can support teachers to meet these new demands and encourage a paradigm shift on what teaching and learning are about and how they should happen. Education systems need to create the conditions that encourage and enable innovation. They need to promote best practice through policies focused on professionalism, efficacy and effectiveness in order to help build teachers’ capacity for adopting new pedagogies. Due attention should also be paid to teachers’ sense of well-being so that classroom learning environments remain conducive to students’ own well-being and development.

Enabling pedagogies for the future

What do science teachers find most satisfying about their work?

Hide / Show Abstract

Teachers play a vital role in the lives of their students. They impart knowledge, provide pastoral care, act as role models and, above all, create an environment that’s conducive to learning. But teaching is fraught with numerous challenges that could lead to dissatisfaction; some teachers might decide to leave the profession entirely. In fact, in many countries around the world, high attrition rates are considered to be the most important factor contributing to the shortage of qualified science teachers.

So what is it that science teachers find satisfying about their work – satisfying enough that they want to keep teaching, despite any challenges they might face?

Teacher satisfaction is positively associated with factors known to improve students’ performance, such as collegial and positive school environments.

In other words, teachers’ satisfaction with their job and with the profession is both an aspect and a consequence of the school environment. As such, improving the learning experience for all students should also boost their teachers’ professional satisfaction.

How primary and secondary teachers differ and why it matters

How primary and secondary teachers differ and why it matters

While policy debate is often focused on the whole teaching profession, primary and secondary teachers differ in more ways than one. While all countries require teachers to have at least a bachelor degree to enter the profession in primary or lower secondary education, the structure and content of the programmes vary and are less geared towards practice at secondary than primary level. Primary school teachers spend on average 10% more of their working time teaching, though their class size will be slightly smaller. Finally, primary teachers’ salaries are less competitive than their lower secondary peers in more than half of the countries. Improving the attractiveness and effectiveness of the teaching profession can only be addressed by recognising these differences and adapting a differentiated policy to address the challenges of each.

Lower secondary school teachers are older than primary ones, but the under-representation of men is less pronounced in teaching at that level

Teachers’ salaries are less attractive in primary education than in lower secondary education

Teachers in lower secondary education spend 10% less time teaching than primary teachers, and their classrooms are slightly larger

 

The bottom line

While policy debate is often focused on the whole teaching profession, primary and secondary teachers differ in more ways than one. While all countries require teachers to have at least a bachelor degree to enter the profession in primary or lower secondary education, the structure and content of the programmes vary and are less geared towards practice at secondary than primary level. Primary school teachers spend on average 10% more of their working time teaching, though their class size will be slightly smaller. Finally, primary teachers’ salaries are less competitive than their lower secondary peers in more than half of the countries. Improving the attractiveness and effectiveness of the teaching profession can only be addressed by recognising these differences and adapting a differentiated policy to address the challenges of each.

Do new teachers feel prepared for teaching?

Do new teachers feel prepared for teaching?

Results of the analysis suggest that teacher education institutions in many countries and economies may have been overemphasising content knowledge, to the detriment of other types of teacher knowledge. Through quality pre-service education and continuous professional learning, teachers can be well prepared in the pedagogy and practice of their subject area, as well as in the content. Then maybe one day, more new teachers may be able to smile, regardless of the season.

Systems that prioritise initial teacher preparation understand that a teacher’s initial education can help lay the foundations for teaching quality. However, improving the quality of initial teacher preparation in order to create ready-made professionals is neither realistic nor desirable. Rather, providing the conditions in which teachers can continue to grow and develop as professional learners – from their first days in the classroom and throughout their careers – is an important step towards improving the quality of education.

How well are teachers doing in solving problems using ICT?

How well are teachers doing in solving problems using ICT? 

The most recent Education Indicators in Focus brief compares teachers’ ICT and problem-solving skills with those of the working population as a whole and with other tertiary-educated professionals. 

New generations of teachers who are better trained and who participate in professional development activities throughout their careers will probably be able to adopt innovative practices that are more suited to 21st-century learning environments. Governments should not blame older teachers for having poor problem-solving and ICT skills; equally, they cannot afford to miss the opportunity to fill the teaching posts left vacant by retirees with younger, more tech-savvy problem solvers. -

Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning (ITEL) - Teacher Knowledge Survey

International Summit on the Teaching Profession - Framing the Issues

International Summit on the Teaching Profession - Framing the Issues from EduSkills OECD

 Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills, OECD. - If the quality of an education system can never exceed the quality of its teachers, then countries need to do all they can to build a high-quality teaching force. Teaching Excellence through Professional Learning and Policy Reform: Lessons from around the World, the background report to the sixth International Summit on the Teaching Profession, describes the knowledge, skills and character qualities common to the most effective teachers. It examines the education policies and practices that help teachers to acquire these tools, including through induction and mentoring programmes, ongoing professional development activities, student assessments, and collaboration with colleagues. The publication also discusses the importance of involving all stakeholders – especially teachers – in the process of education reform.

OECD BACKGROUND REPORTS

What makes great teaching?

Many popular teaching practices are ineffective, warns new Sutton Trust report:

The two factors with the strongest evidence in improving student outcomes are:

• Content knowledge. Teachers with strong knowledge and understanding of their subject make a greater impact on students’ learning. It is also important for teachers to understand how students think about content and be able to identify common misconceptions on a topic.
• Quality of instruction. This includes effective questioning and the use of assessment by teachers. Specific practices, like reviewing previous learning, providing model responses for students, giving adequate time for practice to embed skills securely and progressively introducing new learning (scaffolding) are also found to improve attainment.

The seven examples of strategies unsupported by evidence are:

1. Using praise lavishly For low-attaining students praise that is meant to be encouraging and protective can actually convey a message of low expectations. The evidence shows children whose failure generates sympathy are more likely to attribute it to lack of ability than those who are presented with anger.
2. Allowing learners to discover key ideas for themselves Enthusiasm for ‘discovery learning’ is not supported by research evidence, which broadly favours direct instruction.
3. Grouping students by ability Evidence on the effects of grouping by ability, either by allocating students to different classes, or to within-class groups, suggests that it makes very little difference to learning outcomes. It can result in teachers failing to accommodate different needs within an ability group and over-playing differences between groups, going too fast with the high-ability groups and too slow with the low.
4. Encouraging re-reading and highlighting to memorise key ideas Testing yourself, trying to generate answers, and deliberately creating intervals between study to allow forgetting, are all more effective approaches to memorisation than re-reading or highlighting.
5. Addressing low confidence and aspirations before teaching content Attempts to enhance motivation prior to teaching content are unlikely to succeed and even if they do the impact on subsequent learning is close to zero. If the poor motivation of low attainers is a logical response to repeated failure starting to get them to succeed through learning content will improve motivation and confidence.
6. Presenting information to students in their preferred learning style Despite a recent survey showing over 90% of teachers believe individuals learn better when they receive information in their preferred learning style, the psychological evidence is clear that there are no benefits to this method.
7. Being active, rather than listening passively, helps you remember This claim is commonly presented in the form of a ‘learning pyramid’ which shows precise percentages of material that will be retained when different levels of activity are employed. These percentages have no empirical basis and are pure fiction.

What makes great teaching?

Review of the underpinning research

Robert Coe, Cesare Aloisi, Steve Higgins and Lee Elliot Major

October 2014

Report

What teachers know and how that compares with college graduates around the world

(...) we published results from our first Survey of Adult Skills, which tested the skills of countries’ workforces – including teachers – in key areas such as numeracy, literacy and problem-solving. With a back-of-the-envelope calculation (teachers are only a small group of the 5000+ workers in each country who were tested) it is possible to compare the numeracy and literacy skills of teachers with those of other college and university graduates (see the chart above).

(..) While, in each country, teachers tend to score similarly to college graduates on our numeracy test, the numeracy skills of the workforce themselves differ substantially across countries, and so the numeracy skills of teachers vary too: Teachers in Japan and Finland come out on top, followed by their Flemish (Belgium), German, Norwegian and Dutch colleagues, while teachers in Italy, the Russian Federation, Spain, Poland, Estonia and the United States come out at the bottom.

We will all find out on 3 December when results from the next PISA round, the global metric of student performance.

How much do teachers cost?

The salary cost of teacher per student is a combination of four factors: teachers’ salary, class size, the number of teaching hours in front of a classroom and the number of hours of instruction received by students

Between 2000 and 2010, increases in the salary cost of teacher per student were mainly influenced by changes in teachers’ salaries and class size.


During the same period, class size decreased, by 14% (primary) and 7% (lower secondary), but this was often the result of changing demographics and not of a change in education policies.
The bottom line is that in the past ten years, increasing teachers’ salaries and reducing class size have not led to better learning outcomes in the majority of countries. This raises the question: has all of the additional money been well spent?



Which factors determine the level of expenditure on teaching staff?

Education
Education

indicators in focus
Spain's skills snapshot


Spain’s top priority must be to tackle high youth unemployment by reinforcing its efforts, first, to ensure that youth leave school with the skills required by employers and, second, to remove labour market barriers preventing young people from finding rewarding and productive jobs.



Youth unemployment rates in OECD countries, December 2007 to March 2012
                                                Spain                           19,7                            51,1

Primero aprende y solo después enseña

Los malos resultados de los licenciados en Magisterio están relacionados con los desvaríos de la nueva pedagogía.

 

El profesorado interino

"¿A qué viene ahora este interés repentino por favorecer la nota de la oposición frente a la experiencia docente?"

 

 DESCARGABLE Examen de conocimientos

Así fue el examen de oposición a Primaria que suspendió el 86% de aspirantes

 

Félix de Azúa: Ni la O con un canuto

Wert afirma que las reválidas evaluarán también a los profesores


"La universidad mantiene a una cantidad de vagos impresionante"   (..))hay una frase que me pone enfermo es la de tenéis que hacer más con menos. Oiga, ¿con qué cree que lo estábamos haciendo? Es que ya estábamos haciendo más con menos, no me pregunte lo mínimo que necesito, porque lo mínimo que necesito es el doble que el año pasado. Y si cree que estoy malgastando el dinero, venga y hablaremos factura a factura.    

Talis 2013 -¿Reciben los docentes el reconocimiento que merecen?

Teaching in Focus es una serie periódica de publicaciones cuyo objetivo principal es ofrecer información sobre los procesos educativos a través de encuestas a los profesores y a los directores de los centros.

 Are Teachers Getting the Recognition They Deserve?

 More than one in five teachers say they have never received
appraisal and feedback from their school principal.




  International Teaching Profession

• How is teacher quality defined by policy makers, the teaching profession and society? What standards are set and by whom?
• How is teacher quality evaluated? What systems are in place and how are the evaluations carried out?
• How do evaluations contribute to school improvement and teacher self-efficacy? What impact can be expected on teaching and learning from teacher evaluation?

Using evaluation to improve teaching  (Andreas Schleicher - Introduction to the 2013 International Summit of the Teaching Profession, 13-14 March)

“Es nefasto elegir a los profesores mediante un examen”

When Teachers Talk Out of School

Today, teachers can be suspended, and even fired, for what they write on Facebook.

Just ask Christine Rubino, the New York City math teacher who may soon be dismissed for posting angry messages about her students. Last June, just before summer vacation began, a Harlem schoolgirl drowned during a field trip to a beach. Ms. Rubino had nothing to do with that incident, but the following afternoon, she typed a quick note on Facebook about a particularly rowdy group of Brooklyn fifth graders in her charge.

“After today, I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class,” she wrote. “I hate their guts.”

One of Ms. Rubino’s Facebook friends then asked, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?”

“No, I wouldn’t for a million dollars,” Ms. Rubino replied. She was pulled from the classroom in February and faced termination hearings; the case is now with an arbitrator.

(...)
Outside school, meanwhile, teachers must also avoid public language that mocks, demeans or disparages the children they instruct. Cruel blog posts about lazy or disobedient students echo the snarky smackdown culture of cable TV talk shows. And they’re anathema to a truly democratic dialogue.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at New York University, is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”

Why top students don’t want to teach

Efforts to help US schools become more effective generally focus on improving the skills of current teachers or keeping the best and ejecting the least effective ones. The issue of who should actually become teachers has received comparatively little attention. Yet the world’s top-performing systems—in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea—recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes.



A McKinsey survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students confirms that a major effort would be needed to attract them to teaching. Among top-third students not planning to enter the profession, for example, only 33 percent believe that they would be able to support a family if they did. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that an ongoing achievement gap between US students and those in academically top-performing countries imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. To learn more, read “Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching” (September 2010).

Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top third graduates to a career in teaching

Teachers, Irakasleak, Profesorado

Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching

Only 23 percent of entering teachers come from the top third of their graduating class. What would it take to do better?.

Closing the talent gap: Attracting and retaining top-third graduates to careers in teaching, we review the experiences of the world’s top-performing systems, in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea. These countries recruit 100 percent (?) of their teacher corps from the top third of the academic cohort.

In the United States, by contrast, only 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third, and just 14 percent of new teachers who come from the top third work in high-poverty schools, where attracting and retaining talented people is particularly difficult.


Si se examina al profesor, sube la nota el alumno

La presión para evaluar a los docentes crece - Pero la iniciativa tiene un elevado precio político

Children can learn from bad teachers

Primeros datos comparativos a nivel internacional sobre las condiciones que afectan a los docentes en las escuelas

- In most countries, the large majority of teachers are satisfied with their jobs and consider that they make a significant educational difference for their students. Teachers are also investing in their professional development, both in terms of their time and often also in terms of money, an investment which goes hand in hand with a wider repertoire of pedagogic strategies used in the classroom. It is worrying that, on average across countries, three-quarters of teachers report that they would receive no recognition for increasing the quality of their work or for being more innovative in their teaching. In fact, three-quarters of teachers say that, in their school, the most effective teachers do not receive the most recognition and that their school principal does not take steps to alter the monetary rewards of a persistently underperforming teacher.


- Relatively few teachers participate in the kinds of professional development which they find has the largest impact on their work.

- Teachers in most countries report using traditional practices aimed at transmitting knowledge in structured settings much more often than they use student-oriented practices.


- Effective school leadership plays a vital role in teachers’ working lives and that it can make an important contribution to shaping the development of teachers.





La creación de entornos eficaces de enseñanza y aprendizaje.Síntesis de los primeros resultados.

El 16% de las clases en España se pierde en imponer orden.(..),la indisciplina dificulta las clases al 70% de los docentes.





(..)Los profesores responden por lo general de manera positiva a la evaluación y el retorno de información sobre su trabajo (Tabla 5.7a). Tienden a informar de que son justos y que les sirven de ayuda en su trabajo, que aumentan su satisfacción laboral.