Is physical health linked to better learning?

by Tracey Burns
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Mahatma Gandhi once said: "it is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold
and silver". And indeed, our physical well-being is key to how we live our lives. But while we don't always make the link between our minds and our bodies, physical health is important for learning, too. 

Children who exercise regularly, have good nutrition and sleep well are more likely to attend school, and do well at school. And the benefits are not just for children: good physical health is associated with enhanced quality of life, increased productivity in the workplace and increased participation in the community and society. 

However, children and young people across the OECD are not engaging enough in the behaviours they need to be healthy. Between 2000 to 2016, PISA data show that children and young people were less likely to reach the minimum recommended daily physical activity levels (>60 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity daily). They were also less likely to get enough quality sleep, and more likely to be overweight and obese and have poor dietary habits (including increasing overconsumption of soft drinks, sweets, salty snacks and fast food). 

These trends are extremely concerning. Unhealthy lifestyle behaviours are associated with higher rates of cardiovascular diseases and type II diabetes, and while historically considered to be diseases of adulthood, these are now evident in children as young as two years old. 

Education is uniquely placed to positively influence the health of students. A newly published paper on recent trends has identified two of the most effective types of school-based interventions:

• Building a healthy school environment: this includes educational interventions, health promotion, counselling and management strategies to promote health and physical fitness. These approaches need to include the whole-school community. Interventions associated with the play environment need to evolve and develop with children and young people as they grow. Building a supportive school culture is also key to effective, sustained behaviour change. For this to work, teachers need supportive school leaders and adequate training, time and resources.

• Changing attitudes towards risky behaviour: for example, universal school-based interventions for preventing drug use. Interventions incorporate knowledge-focussed curricula (teaching the risks associated), social competence curricula and social norms, and usually a component of behavioural modelling. A systematic review of the literature showed that overall, interventions combining social competence and influence approaches had sustained positive benefits. Interventions that focused only on transmitting knowledge, on the other hand, had the effect of improving knowledge, but did not affect behaviour.

In addition to school-based interventions, supporting, encouraging, and modelling healthy lifestyle behaviours in the home environment and in the community are also crucial. In fact, even the best school-based interventions benefit from the involvement of other actors, such as health care practitioners and family and community members. 

The report highlighted that interventions that involve the community, target several behaviours, use multiple behaviour change strategies are most effective. Involving stakeholders in the design and implementation and using technology where appropriate can also help change the behaviour of children and adolescents. This is especially important for disadvantaged communities, because not only is there a greater likelihood to engage in risky lifestyle behaviours in these settings, there is also a higher probability for reduced access to services (due to high cost, location, or lack of transportation), including safe facilities for physical activity such as green spaces. 

Educators, parents and communities and policy makers all have an important role to play in supporting the physical health and well-being of children and adolescents. By working together to embed health in education, we can make a big step in supporting the wealth that is physical health and well-being of children and adolescents in OECD countries.

Links
Working paper No. 170 – Physical health and well-being in children and youth: Review of the literature
Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI)

21st Century Children

Trends Shaping Education

PISA 2015 Results (Volume III) – Students Well-being

OECD Obesity Update 2017
The association of context-specific sitting time and physical activity intensity to working memory capacity and academic achievement in young adults
Universal school-based prevention for illicit drug use
Lifestyle Interventions to Reduce Diabetes and Cardiovascular Disease Risk Among Children

Photo credit: @Shutterstock 

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The importance of learning from data on education, migration and displacement

by Manos Antoninis, Director, Global Education Monitoring Report
Francesca Borgonovi, Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Migration and displacement are complex
phenomena which play an important role in – but can also pose challenges to – development. These phenomena also pose particularly important challenges for education and training systems. Firstly, they can rapidly increase the number of people that require education services, thus challenging both richer countries, which until now had been adjusting to shrinking student populations, and poorer countries, where provision is already stretched, especially in remote areas or slums where migrants and refugees often converge.

Secondly, migration and displacement make classrooms more diverse. This means that the range of strategies teachers need to deploy increases in order to cater for a student population with larger differences in background characteristics, such as the language they speak at home.

Thirdly, education is an important means through which migration and displacement can be managed since school often acts as societies’ main instrument for transmitting the social and cultural codes that forge a community spirit.

Information of good quality is crucial to develop the right policy responses, which is why the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 17.18 calls on countries to “increase significantly the availability of high-quality, timely and reliable data disaggregated by … migratory status … and other characteristics relevant in national contexts” by 2020. Yet, collecting statistics on migrants and displaced people to ensure that education and training systems have the capacity to meet their needs is complicated. Population movements take very different forms: international vs. internal; temporary vs. permanent; those moving in successive stages vs. those returning; documented vs. undocumented; voluntary vs. forced, including internally displaced and refugee populations; students vs. workers, and, in the latter case, skilled or unskilled, and so on. Migrants and displaced people themselves may be in different stages in their life cycle or may differ in their circumstances, for example adults vs. children or individuals vs. families.

To address these issues, as part of the Strength Through Diversity project, a two-day forum on data about education, migration and displacement is being held in Paris, organised by the OECD and the UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report, whose next edition is focusing on migration and displacement. Such issues refer to at least two levels.

At the macro level, demographic data often do not capture the education profiles of migrants and refugees. The ideal data source, which provides information on both stocks and flows of migration by gender, age, and education, does not yet exist. These questions were addressed last month at the International Forum on Migration Statistics, which also looked at one other dimension of  the education-migration nexus: international student mobility.

At the micro level, which is the focus of this two-day event, a range of data sources are important:

• Multi-purpose household surveys that contain information on internal and, in high income countries, international migration via questions concerning the place of previous residence or duration of current residence, such as the World Bank Living Standard Measurement Survey and the European Union Survey of Income and Living Conditions. Longitudinal surveys provide further insights.
• School surveys of learning achievement which can link detailed student background to educational outcomes. For example, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) asks questions on the student’s country of birth, age of arrival in the host country, and language spoken at home. PISA also assess aspects of student well-being, such as integration and sense of belonging in the school community.
• Surveys on values and attitudes that can relate education to perceptions of the host population concerning migrants and refugees. For example, three waves of the International Social Survey Programme, six waves of the World Values Survey and two waves of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study tackled relevant questions on this topic. These studies can assess how education systems build values, attitudes, norms and beliefs that improve interpersonal trust and increase civic engagement, which are pillars of democracy.
• Teacher surveys, such as the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), and national surveys that ask questions on teacher preparation for diversity and attitudes towards a diverse student population.

Given the challenges of education systems, the complex forms of population movements, the differences in background characteristics of migrants and displaced people, the different outcomes of education, and the different sources of information available, there is a patchwork of issues, and this requires coordination between researchers and practitioners working in multiple different fields.

The idea of collecting data on education by migratory status that is comparable across countries may be an unattainable goal due to the extreme diversity of migrants and displaced populations. However, the need for documenting and understanding differences in participation, attainment, learning and attitudes between migrants/refugees and host populations for policy purposes remains urgent.

In this context, this two-day forum in Paris has the following aims:

• Provide an inventory of existing data sources and ones that are under development
• Showcase good practices in data and measurement that approach effectively particular aspects of the migration-education relationship and improve understanding of social phenomena
• Identify data and measurement aspects of the migration-education relationship that require urgent attention in order for social phenomena to be better understood
• Assess the merits of equity-oriented migration and education indicators, looking at both intra- and inter-generational issues
• Make recommendations on potential questionnaire items for key areas of interventions the migration-education relationship

Links

Strength through Diversity: The Integration of Immigrants and Refugees in School and Training Systems

Strength through Diversity - 3rd Policy Forum, 12-13 February 2018

International Forum on Migration Statistics

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

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What does teaching look like? A new video study

by Anna Pons
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Looking – literally – at how teachers around the world teach can be a game changer to improve education. The evidence is clear that teachers are what makes the greatest difference to learning, outside students’ own backgrounds. It is widely recognised that the quality of an education system is only as good as the quality of its teachers. Yet we know relatively little about what makes a good and effective teacher.

Our new research project, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) Video Study, aims to help us learn more about how our teachers teach. The study aims to provide a better understanding of which teaching practices are used, how they are interrelated, and which are most strongly associated with students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

The TALIS Video Study is based on a truly innovative research design. It uses videos to capture what goes on in the classroom, and also surveys teachers and students, measures students’ learning gains, and looks into instructional materials to get as complete a picture of teaching as possible. The study will not produce a comprehensive assessment of “the state of teaching”, a global assessment of teachers or a ranking of the quality of countries’ teachers. Instead, we’ll be gaining valuable insights into the practice of teaching and student learning.

We don't really know how teaching and learning unfold in classrooms across the globe. At the OECD, we have asked teachers and students about what goes on in class; we have measured students’ outcomes and teachers’ knowledge, and collected information about the resources at teachers’ disposal and their autonomy in shaping their lessons. But that doesn’t give us a complete picture of what teaching looks like and how it influences student outcomes. Watching peers in action, though, can help teachers become aware of their own teaching methods, reflect on other approaches, and understand what innovative pedagogies actually mean in practice.

The importance of observing real teaching can only increase as the job becomes ever more challenging. Teachers are being asked to move away from teacher-centred methods and to cater to the different learning needs, styles and pace of their students. They are also expected to meet the demands of rapidly changing environments, from being able to use new technologies to assist them in their lessons, to understanding how to teach students from increasingly diverse backgrounds.

Observing how teachers around the world deal with similar challenges in different ways can offer useful new insights. Differences in teaching practices are greater between countries than within countries, particularly when it comes to student-centred and innovative teaching practices. This is because teaching practices are strongly influenced by national pedagogical traditions and do not travel easily. Opening up peer observations to the entire world can provide fresh ideas about how teachers can improve their own practice, no matter where in the world they teach.

Links
Teaching in Focus No. 20 - What does teaching look like? A new video study
Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

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What matters for managing classrooms?

by Francesca Gottschalk
Consultant, Directorate for Education and Skills 

Teaching is a demanding profession. Teachers are responsible for developing the skills and knowledge of their students, helping them overcome social and emotional hurdles and maintaining equitable, cohesive and productive classroom environments. On top of their teaching responsibilities, they are also expected to engage in continued professional development activities throughout their careers. The demands of the job are many and varied, and teachers tend to report some of the highest levels of workplace stress of any profession. This contributes to the loss of many talented and motivated individuals from the teaching workforce.

Teachers, especially the least experienced, tend to report that student disengagement and misbehaviour is one of the biggest stressors. In fact, terms like “reality shock” or “shattered dreams” are sometimes used to describe what happens when teachers are first put in front of a classroom.

So, what can be done? There are a number of ways to soften the sometimes harsh contrast between their expectations and what really goes on in the classroom. Specialised training and practicum during teacher education programmes can help prepare new teachers for the realities of teaching, while protective factors, such as teacher self-efficacy or confidence in their skills, can also make a big difference. When teachers are capable and confident in classroom management, ensuring that lessons are run smoothly in an organised classroom environment, student learning and positive social and emotional outcomes can be enhanced.

How can we establish if teachers have this “protective factor” and are confident in their abilities? The Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning Teacher Knowledge Survey offers a unique opportunity to better understand teachers’ professional competence and how this is developed. The pilot study assessed teachers’ pedagogical knowledge (or, in simple terms, what teachers know about teaching and learning), their opportunities to learn, and other professional competences, such as self-efficacy. Teachers’ knowledge of classroom management is part of their “toolkit” of instructional processes, which also encompasses elements like teaching methods and lesson planning.

The pilot results suggested that in-service and pre-service teachers have a relatively strong knowledge of classroom management, especially in comparison to other areas of pedagogical knowledge. Teachers who reported being confident in their classroom management skills also reported being provided with lots of opportunities to learn how to manage classrooms and tended to be more experienced teachers. As there is a link between teacher confidence and retention, the relationship uncovered between learning opportunities and self-efficacy in this pilot study is quite promising!

Furthermore, since experienced teachers tended to show higher self-efficacy than their pre-service counterparts, it could be helpful to build more field experience into teacher education. Many countries across the OECD, such as Estonia, Hungary and Israel, are already doing this. Similarly, longer induction sessions before entering the teaching workforce could also help bridge the gap between expectations and reality – this approach will be important to explore further, especially as teachers find classroom disturbances to be one of the most stress-inducing parts of their jobs. If left unchecked, it can eventually lead to burnout.

The pilot project was an initial exploration of teacher knowledge and competence that has laid the groundwork for future work on a larger scale. Its purpose was to provide evidence that can help shape policies to improve teacher preparation and education, but it can also help to attract (and retain) high-quality individuals to the profession.

Strong education systems depend on having an effective teaching workforce. It is therefore essential to equip them with the knowledge and skills for them to be effective and confident in the classroom. In order to keep them there, countries need to focus on piecing together the “shattered dreams” of teachers, and supporting them as much as possible along the way.

Links
Teaching in Focus No. 19 - How do teachers become knowledgeable and confident in classroom management? Insights from a pilot study
Innovative Teaching for Effective Learning Teacher Knowledge Survey
Understanding teachers' pedagogical knowledge: Report on an international pilot study

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Why teaching matters more than ever before

by Stavros Yiannouka, CEO, WISE – World Innovation Summit for Education and Andreas Schleicher, Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Teaching and learning lie at the heart of what it means to be human. While animals teach and learn from each other through direct demonstration, observation and experience, humans are unique in their ability to convey vast quantities of information and impart skills across time and space. We are also, as far as we know, unique in our ability to engage in and convey our thinking around abstract concepts such as governance, justice and human rights.

Technology has always played an indispensable role in this process. Starting with language and then writing, humanity was able to separate the process of teaching and learning from the constraints of direct demonstration, observation, and experience. The invention of paper and ink, and then the printing press, exponentially increased the quantity of knowledge that could be captured, stored, and disseminated. In this context, modern information and communication technologies are no more than extensions of a trend that began several millennia ago.

Technology however was not solely responsible for advancing teaching and learning amongst humans: abstract thought has perhaps played the most important part through the development of concepts such as education and knowledge. Formal education may have begun as an exercise in training royal accountants and scribes but it very soon expanded to incorporate literature, if only so that those accountants and scribes could, in their writing, emulate the great authors and poets of their time.

Much has changed in how we think about and practice education. Although in theory we still expect education to serve the dual purpose of imparting useful knowledge and skills, and instilling values, in practice most modern education systems place far greater emphasis on the former over the latter. The reasons for this are manifold. In large part it has to do with the pressures placed on education to support social development and thus to demonstrate ‘a return on investment.’ But it also has to do with the rise of moral relativism in some countries, the belief that values systems are inherently subjective and therefore best left to parental and cultural upbringing.

This overtly utilitarian view of education lies at the heart of the modish idea that information and communication technologies can to a large extent replace teachers. If education is viewed solely as a process for imparting useful knowledge and skills then it is likely that technology will render traditional teaching redundant in the not too distant future. But education is always more than this, if its purpose is also to impart values, to inspire, and to socialise, it is one of the most enduring relational activities. It is no accident that high performing education systems from Finland to Singapore, all place the teacher at the heart of the enterprise. Much is expected from teachers but much is also given in the form of professional development, autonomy, and respect.

Technology alone cannot perform this role. But technology can amplify great teaching. And it can build communities of teachers to share and enrich teaching resources and practices. Imagine the power of an education system that could meaningfully share all of the expertise and experience of its educators using digital technology. What if we could get our teachers working on curated crowd-sourcing of educational practice, wouldn’t that be so much more powerful than things like performance-related pay as an approach to professional growth and development? Technology could be used to create a giant open-source community of teachers and educators outside schools and unlock the creative skills and initiative of its teachers, simply by tapping into the desire of people to contribute, collaborate and be recognised for it.

Throughout history, teaching was viewed as a noble and even spiritual calling. In the age of accelerations, it can be even more so.

Links
2017 WISE Summit: "Co-Exist, Co-Create: Learning to Live and Work Together"
For more on education and education policies around the world, visit: http://www.oecd.org/edu
PISA 2015: Compare your country

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo


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Schools at the crossroads of innovation

by Dirk Van Damme

Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

In a not so distant past, it was seen as one of the defining features of schools that they isolated learners – and the learning process itself – from the surrounding environment. As so brilliantly described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his account of the modern machinery of discipline and power, schools must be secluded time/space settings, far away from the impurities of the contemporary world which would poison the minds and character of children. But also in a more enlightened and emancipatory sense, separating young learners from an often depressing environment was perceived to be the best way to guide them to higher levels of knowledge, skill and wisdom.

Schools and schooling have changed a lot in recent years, but they are still well-defined in terms of the time and space boundaries that separate them from their environment. Some modern progressive pedagogies have gradually opened up schooling by moving children out of the school and into the surrounding natural and social environments, introducing a new learning process based on realistic and relevant challenges. But in most cases, schools are still isolated spaces, defined by concrete walls and iron fences, where life is dictated by the rhythm of the school bell.

How different this mindset is from the realities of today‘s world! The separation of school time from the wider world, characterised by borderless networking and communication, may seem rather alienating to young people. Isolating schools from their environment does nothing to help the process of incremental change, nor the innovation of education and learning. No modern institution changes solely from within, but rather does so in reaction or interaction with an environment which continuously challenges its processes and outputs. In today’s world, these pressures challenges and demands towards schools seem to accumulate, be it in the form of employers asking for more relevant skills and offering workplace learning arrangements to move learners into the reality, or in the form of citizens and civil society claiming all kinds of changes in the curriculum in order to align education with what they perceive to be the common good.

These issues are further developed and expanded in a new OECD/CERI publication Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions, and will be discussed with education ministers, high-level policy makers and industry leaders in the upcoming Global Education Industry Summit, which takes place in Luxembourg on 25-26 September, hosted by the OECD, the European Commission and the Government of Luxembourg.

Too often the answer from the world of education is defensive and self-protective. It is time to radically rethink schooling in terms of openness and networking, or in other words, as nodes in wider ecosystems of innovation and learning. Schools are among the most important knowledge institutions of modern societies and they have such great potential to play a critical role in processes of knowledge production and dissemination, vital to innovation in the local and regional economy. Many accounts of innovation would agree that human capital plays a crucial role, but they tend to look first at the knowledge and skills of educated individuals, and not at the active engagement of schools as learning environments where innovation also occurs. Similarly, schools can – and should –play a very important role in building the social capital of local communities, by offering services that improve the well-being and social cohesion in local communities.

By developing an ecosystems view of schools and opening up schools to the surrounding economies and societies, many important stakeholders would feel empowered to support and contribute to them. Local employers, who already play a role in apprenticeships and workplace learning arrangements in vocational education, could easily expand their role towards other dimensions and sectors of the educational system. Opening up schools will generate a completely different governance system for education, one where vertical command-and-control steering and accountability is exchanged for more horizontal relationships and a networking system made up of various stakeholders. Such developments would strengthen the relevance of what is learnt in schools, and contribute to the social and emotional learning that is essential for fostering good citizenship and engaging human beings.

Innovative schools challenge the boundaries – in time, space, and also in curricula and learning processes – that tradition seems to impose on schools today. They often have different approaches to the learning process and especially how its pedagogical core is organised. It is true that deep learning sometimes requires concentration, silencing the noise from the surrounding environment. And a networking world can be a very noisy world. But the era when isolation and separation were necessary to define the learning environments for our children has passed. Schools are at a crossroads of innovation: they are becoming partners and actors in processes of innovation in the surrounding economy and society, and taking benefit of the world around them to innovate their own existence.

Links
Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions
3rd Global Education Industry Summit, Luxembourg, 25-26 September, 2017

Follow the conversation: #GEIS2017

Photo credit: The Global Education Industry Summit

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How education can spur progress towards inclusive growth

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

Costa Rica is recognised across Latin America as a leader in education. The country was among the first in the region to enrol all children in primary school and combat adult illiteracy. Today, one in two young adults has completed secondary education, up from one in three among their parents’ generation. But, the demands placed on the skills of people have evolved as well. The overall context has become more challenging too: Economic growth has slowed, inequality is rising and productivity is weak in a labour market that shows a growing divide between a well-paid, high-skilled sector and a precarious informal economy. The OECD report, Education in Costa Rica, looks at how education can help Costa Rica turn these negative trends around.

The first step is to build strong foundations. Pre-primary education has become nearly universal in most OECD countries; but in Costa Rica, only 63% of children benefit from two years of preschool, and very few children under three have access to any form of early care and education. Strong, sustained support to promising initiatives, such as the new policy framework for early childhood and the preschool curriculum, will ensure that more children start school with the socio-emotional and cognitive skills that they need to learn. More flexible community-based services can accelerate the expansion of early education into rural areas.

The quality of education can never exceed the quality of teachers. Costa Rica is working towards ensuring minimum standards in the teaching profession by requiring private universities to accredit initial teaching degrees. The challenge  now is to advance from recruiting those candidates with the greatest potential for effective teaching towards promoting continuous professional development through regular feedback and more opportunities for peer learning within and across schools.

If all students are to complete at least secondary school, then the content, structure and certification of learning at this level need to respond to an increasingly diverse student population. Nearly one in three 15-year-olds is not in school, and among those who are, another one in three lacks core competencies in science, reading and mathematics. The programme Yo me Apunto, which allocates more resources to disadvantaged schools to prevent students from dropping out, should be supported and combined with an expansion of vocational courses and alternative forms of certification to help more students make a smooth transition from school to employment.

Costa Rica’s tertiary sector also has an important role to play  in fostering inclusive growth. Just one in ten students from a disadvantaged background makes it to university, and only 12% of tertiary programmes have been accredited. It is time for Costa Rica to embrace comprehensive reform of the governance, funding and quality-assurance systems of both private and public universities to respond to changing social and economic needs. This, in turn, requires much better data on tertiary performance so that students can make informed choices about their future, and institutions can be held accountable for meeting their own and their country’s objectives.

Costa Rica is rightly admired for making education the cornerstone of its development. It invests 7.6% of its GDP in education – a larger share than that of any OECD country. But those resources need to be invested strategically. If it does so, Costa Rica will be able to spur more inclusive growth and build on its remarkable achievements in human development and well-being.

Links
Reviews of National Policies for Education: Education in Costa Rica
Brochure: Education in Costa Rica, Highlights 2017 (English) and (Spanish)
Press release: Costa Rica should ensure that all children have access to quality education (English) and (Spanish)
Slides: Avances y desafíos de la educación en Costa Rica: una perspectiva internacional (Spanish)

Photo credit: MEP (Ministerio de Educación Pública)

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How to transform schools into learning organisations?

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

Schools nowadays are required to learn faster than ever before in order to deal effectively with the growing pressures of a rapidly changing environment. Many schools however, look much the same today as they did a generation ago, and too many teachers are not developing the pedagogies and practices required to meet the diverse needs of 21st-century learners.

In response, a growing body of scholars, educators and policy makers around the world is making the case that schools should be re-conceptualised as “learning organisations” that can react more quickly to changing external environments, embrace innovations in internal organisation, and ultimately improve student outcomes. Despite strong support for and the intuitive appeal of the school as a learning organisation, relatively little progress has been made in advancing the concept, either in research or practice. This lack of progress partly stems from a lack of clarity or common understanding of the school as learning organisation.

The OECD-UNICEF Education Working Paper, “What makes a school a learning organisation?” should be seen as a first step towards building a shared understanding of the concept that is solidly founded in the literature and is recognisable to all parties involved, i.e. scholars, educators, policy makers, students and parents.

Based on an in-depth analysis of the literature and informed by a small network of experts, the paper identifies and operationalises an integrated model that consists  of seven over-arching ‘action-oriented' dimensions which show how to transform schools into learning organisations:

1. Developing and sharing a vision centred on the learning of all students.
2. Creating and supporting continuous learning opportunities for all staff.
3. Promoting team learning and collaboration among all staff.
4. Establishing a culture of inquiry, innovation and exploration.
5. Embedding systems for collecting and exchanging knowledge and learning.
6. Learning with and from the external environment and larger learning system.
7. Modelling and growing learning leadership.

In short, a school as learning organisation has the capacity to change and adapt routinely to new environments and circumstances as its members, individually and together, learn their way to realising their vision.

A set of themes flows through all seven dimensions: the four Ts: trust, time, technology and thinking together. Although some of these themes may seem more pertinent to one action than to another, all four have an impact on the whole. For example, trust underpins the kind of relationships needed internally and externally for learning organisations to thrive; and all aspects of school development require the provision of time.

The OECD Directorate for Education and Skills aims to help countries transform its schools into learning organisations by gathering evidence from a wide range of countries on how to develop schools into learning organisations. The school as learning organisation model’s dimensions and its underlying characteristics, referred to as “elements”, form the starting point for the development of an instrument to (self-) assess the school as learning organisation. The SLO model and assessment instrument under development are intended to provide practical guidance to policy makers, school staff and other stakeholders that wish to develop theirs schools into learning organisations.

As also noted in the Guide for policy makers, school leaders and teachers further guidance and support will be provided to schools and local and system-level stakeholders for catalysing the desired change and innovation, and developing professional learning cultures across their school systems. Through this work the OECD intends to further explore the policies and capacities needed at other levels of the education system to help schools blossom and thrive as learning organisations – and ultimately equip students with the knowledge and skills they’ll need to succeed in an uncertain, constantly changing tomorrow.

Links:
Kools, M and L. Stoll (2016), “What makes a school a learning organisation?”, OECD Education Working Paper, No 137, OECD Publishing, Paris.
What makes a school a learning organisation? Guide for policy makers, school leaders and teachers
UNICEF
Figure source © OECD

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Time, working and learning

by Viktoria Kis
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Seven years is the right length for apprenticeships – thought Queen Elizabeth I of England as she lifted her feather to sign the Statute of Apprentices in 1563. Seven years would ensure that everyone benefits: apprentices would receive good training and masters would gain from their apprentices’ labour – although it must be admitted that back then, many apprentices died before finishing their training or ran away from masters who starved them.

Today policy makers, employer and employee representatives have different considerations in mind, but the dynamics of costs and benefits matter just as much. Those dynamics need to be built into the design of apprenticeships and other work-based learning to make it attractive to both employers and learners. A new OECD study funded by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, entitled Work, train, win: Work-based learning design and management for productivity gains casts a spotlight on these issues.

At the beginning of work-based learning programmes employers make an investment. This pays off later on when, after receiving high quality training, skilled trainees achieve higher productivity and contribute to production. That final period when trainees are more productive than they cost is essential, as it helps employers recoup their initial costs. But if it is too long, then trainees will find it unattractive. Of course, not all occupations are the same. For example an apprentice in retail can quickly become productive so a work-based learning scheme for this occupation should be shorter, while a person training to be an industrial mechanic typically needs more time to become competent at their job and longer duration would be appropriate.

What exactly trainees do while in the workplace also affects the balance of costs and benefits for both parties. A restaurant benefits both when an apprentice cook peels potatoes (unskilled work) and when they bake a soufflé (skilled work), but gains no immediate benefits when the would-be cook is doing practice exercises that are non-productive, even though they are developing their skills. The good news is that there is often room to build learning into productive work, in ways that benefit the firms and are neutral for the trainees. For example, after observing their supervisor a trainee might practice the skill either through simulations or by doing real work. They improve their skills either way, but doing real work also generates benefits for the firm. Indeed research found that German firms with apprentices reduced the share of non-productive activities by half between 2000 and 2007, and increased the share of productive work – and they did that while maintaining training quality.

The scope for learning through productive work does vary across occupations. An apprentice cook can have a go at their first beurre blanc on day one, but a would-be electrician must undertake substantial training before touching the wires. But whenever possible, learning should take place as part of productive activities and rigorous assessments at the end of the scheme can verify that learning has taken place – if an apprentice electrician is able to correctly install a branch circuit in front of an examiner, there will be no doubt about it.

Putting this into practice requires management capacity within firms, so that they can allocate trainees and supervisors to tasks that meet the twin goals of learning and production. In countries and sectors with a tradition of work-based learning firms have much tacit knowledge (as many employers used to be apprentices themselves) and there is a surrounding infrastructure, such as training for trainers and instructional resources. Developing the infrastructure and enhancing firms’ ability to manage work-based learning is a big job, but well worth the effort and not just for those involved in a work-based learning scheme. Keeping a workplace up-to-date means dealing with new machines, materials and software, so firms that know how to support learning while getting on with productive activities will have a competitive edge.

When Queen Elizabeth I put down her feather, the law she signed remained in place for 250 years. Today policy and practice regarding work-based learning changes much more rapidly – but the main challenge of getting the design of work-based learning schemes right remains just as important as it was in her day.

Links:
OECD Education Working Paper: Work, train, win: work-based learning design and management for productivity gains, by Viktoria Kis
Find out more about Work-based learning
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Learning by heart may not be best for your mind

by Alfonso Echazarra

Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills



PISA 2012 Released Mathematics Item (Proficiency Level 6)

Some of the greatest geniuses had remarkable memories. Mozart, according to legend, sat and listened to Allegri’s “Miserere”, then transcribed the piece of music, entirely from memory, later in the day. Kim Peek, the savant who was the inspiration for the blockbuster film, Rain Man, memorised as many as 12 000 books. But unlike Mozart, who composed more than 600 works during his brief life, Peek was unable to distinguish between the relevant and the irrelevant, or discover hidden meanings and metaphors in the texts he had committed to memory.

What do these stories have to do with learning mathematics? Or, put another way: in light of these stories, how would you encourage students to learn mathematics? By understanding what mathematics concepts, procedures and formulae mean and applying them to a lot of different maths problems set in a lot of different contexts? Or by learning them by heart and applying them to a lot of similar maths problems? Sooner or later, the method matters. Students who avoid making an effort to understand mathematics concepts may succeed in some school environments; but a lack of deep, critical and creative thinking may seriously penalise these students later in life when confronted with real, complex problems. As Albert Einstein provocatively said: “Any fool can know; the point is to understand”.

A similar message is relayed in this month’s PISA in Focus and a new OECD paper on education, “How teachers teach and students learn: Successful strategies for school”. The analyses show that students who mainly use memorisation when they study do well on easy questions. For example, “CHARTS Q1”, a multiple-choice question from the PISA 2012 test, refers to a simple bar chart and is considered one of the easiest questions in the mathematics assessment. Some 87% of students answered this question correctly. Students who reported that they use some type of memorisation strategy when they study mathematics, such as learning by heart, recalling work already done or going through examples again and again, had about the same success rate on this easy item as students who reported using other learning strategies.

But complex problems are a different matter; they require more than a good memory. For the most challenging question from the PISA 2012 mathematics test, “REVOLVING DOOR Q2”, students who reported using mainly memorisation strategies were much less likely than students using other strategies, such as connecting ideas or working out exactly what is important to learn, to answer correctly. Answering “REVOLVING DOOR Q2” correctly requires substantial geometric reasoning and creativity, involves multiple steps, and draws heavily on students’ ability to translate a real situation into a mathematical problem. Only 3% of participants answered this question correctly.

The findings also show that, contrary to received wisdom, East Asian students are not necessarily the ones who use memorisation strategies the most. Memorisation is used almost everywhere, but fewer 15-year-olds in Hong Kong-China, Japan, Korea, Macao-China, Shanghai-China, Chinese Taipei and Viet Nam reported using it than students in, let’s say, English-speaking countries to whom they are often compared. For instance, 5% of students in Viet Nam, 12% of students in Japan and 17% of students in Korea reported that they learn as much as they can by heart when they study mathematics, compared to 26% of students in Canada, 28% in Ireland, 29% in the United States, 35% in Australia and New Zealand, and 37% in the United Kingdom.

In some situations, memorisation is useful, even necessary. It can give students enough concrete facts on which to reflect; it can limit anxiety by reducing mathematics to a set of simple facts, rules and procedures; and it can help to develop fluency with numbers early in a child’s development, before the child is asked to tackle more complex problems. But to perform at the very top, 15-year-olds need to learn mathematics in a more reflective, ambitious and creative way – one that involves exploring alternative ways of finding solutions, making connections, adopting different perspectives and looking for meaning. So yes, you can use your memory; just use it strategically, lest Einstein call you a fool.

Links:
PISA in Focus No. 61: Is memorisation a good strategy for learning mathematics? by Alfonso Echazarra
PISA á la loupe No. 61: La mémorisation : Une stratégie payante pour l’apprentissage des mathématiques?
How teachers teach and students learn: Successful strategies for school.
PISA Try the Test: Explore PISA 2012 Mathematics, problem solving and financial literacy test question
Source: PISA 2012 Released Mathematics Items

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Opening up to Open Educational Resources

by Dirk Van Damme
Head of the Innovation and Measuring division, Directorate for Education and Skills

Technology has a profound impact on our lives. A few days ago, an inmate who spent 44 years
behind bars was released from prison and could not believe what he saw on the streets: people with wires in their ears using strange devices to talk to invisible friends. Maybe his confrontation with the modern world would have been less of a surprise if he had visited a school first.

Technology has indeed entered the classroom; but it has not yet changed the ways we teach and learn to the same extent that it has transformed our way of communicating in the outside world. In our private lives we freely share experiences, thoughts and feelings with friends all over the world; but in classrooms we tend to stick to the traditional carriers of knowledge – textbooks, which are certified for use by the bureaucracy and well-aligned to a prescribed curriculum.

But maybe this is about to change. Technology could give education access to the nearly unlimited teaching and learning materials available on the Internet, which are often in much nicer and pedagogically better-designed formats than can be developed by individual teachers. “Open Educational Resources”, or OER as we call them, are not new, but we are now seeing a real breakthrough in availability, usability and quality. In 2007, the OECD analysed the emergence of OER in its book, Giving knowledge for Free. A new publication, Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation, supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, takes stock of where we are in 2015.

The most immediate benefit of OER is the open (through open licenses) and free (in most cases at no cost) access to quality teaching and learning materials, often in multimedia formats. OER provide an alternative to costly textbooks and, hence, might lead to significant savings for both schools and learners. International organisations, such as UNESCO, and national governments, such as the federal government in the United States, see an enormous opportunity in OER to widen access to high-quality teaching and learning resources in poor countries or among disadvantaged communities of learners.

A few years ago, the development of free and accessible resources was stymied, partly because of some resistance among education publishers and ill-adapted intellectual property regulations. But over the past few years we’ve seen OER mainstreamed into several education systems.

But OER has an even much richer potential. As the title of the new book suggests, OER is also a catalyst for innovation in education. For example, we know from the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) how important teacher collaboration is for the development of professional practice, efficacy and job satisfaction. We also know how difficult it is to convince teachers to work together, even within the same school. One of the most interesting characteristics of OER is that, if licensed properly, they invite users to continuously improve and update educational resources. OER enables teachers to engage in communities of practice not only for exchanging resources, but also for modifying and developing resources collaboratively. Teachers willing and able to enrich their teaching practices beyond the prescribed curriculum and available textbooks will find OER to be a fantastic way to connect to colleagues all over the world to jointly develop new resources. The OER depositories are full of resources that have been developed by inspired teachers working together.

Some people and organisations fear that technology will lead to the de-skilling and disempowerment of teachers. Yes, there is a risk that the availability of an infinite wealth of information on the Internet may deprive teachers of their authority as being the possessors of knowledge, or that it may engender a laissez-faire attitude among teachers. But the professional responsibility of teachers goes well beyond asking students to look for information in Wikipedia. OER invite teachers to reinvent their professional responsibilities and add to their pedagogical expertise and experience to enable students to turn information and knowledge into real learning.

The potential of OER to catalyse change and innovation in education is not yet well understood by many governments. But that is changing, too. A small survey, the results of which appear in the book, found that most governments are now considering various policies to support the production and use of OER, such as indirectly or directly funding them, developing codes of practice or guidelines for the production or use of OER, launching information campaigns aimed at schools, legislating the use of OER, supporting the development of OER repositories and/or encouraging research into OER. In the end, perhaps OER will be one of the most significant and substantive ways that technology will transform teaching and learning.

Links:

Open Educational Resources: A Catalyst for Innovation

Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources
Open Educational Resources (OER) Web page
OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

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