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These days, education is no longer just about teaching students something, but about helping them develop a reliable compass and the tools to navigate with confidence through an increasingly complex, volatile and uncertain world. We live in this world in which the kind of things that are easy to teach and test have also become easy to digitise and automate, and where society no longer rewards students just for what they know – Google knows everything – but for what they can do with what they know. Today’s teachers need to help students think for themselves and work with others, and to develop identity, agency and purpose.
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Most of us will interact with teachers during at least two stages of our lives, first as students, and later on as parents. It is no surprise, then, that societies worldwide often feel heavily invested in the teaching profession and its development. Indeed, few professions are as debated, examined and re-examined as teaching, especially by those who are not themselves practitioners. But teachers, in turn, are also invested in the societies they serve: 90% of them say that the chance to contribute to society and influence children’s development was an important reason for becoming a teacher, according to the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS).
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The OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) is an international, large-scale survey of teachers, school leaders and the learning environment in schools. TALIS uses questionnaires administered to teachers and their school principals to gather data. Its main goal is to generate internationally comparable information relevant to developing and implementing policies focused on school leaders, teachers and teaching, with an emphasis on those aspects that affect student learning. It gives a voice to teachers and school leaders, allowing them to provide input into educational policy analysis and development in key areas. It is also a collaboration between participating countries and economies, the OECD, an international research consortium, teachers’ unions and the European Commission.
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The international report on the results of the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey focuses on the notion of professionalism and examines its various dimensions. This first volume, Teachers and School Leaders as Lifelong Learners, explores the knowledge and skills dimensions of professionalism for teachers and school leaders. This chapter, an overview of the main findings presented in the first volume, offers policy pointers emerging from these findings and discusses trade-offs that policy makers need to consider in designing teacher policies.
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Reviewing and analysing a rich set of subjective and more fact-based indicators, this chapter describes what teachers do in their classrooms and how teaching has changed over the past five to ten years. It also examines the extent to which teachers and school leaders engage in related activities to support student learning. Finally, it describes the extent to which teachers and schools are able to innovate in their methods of teaching and working together.
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This chapter describes the age, experience and gender distribution profiles of lower secondary teachers and school principals in countries and economies participating in TALIS and examines how their demographic characteristics and experience have evolved since 2008. It explores how teachers deal with societal changes that have created new contexts for teaching, with increasingly diverse classrooms and schools. It also explores the practices implemented in schools to respond to student diversity, as well as teachers’ preparedness and confidence to teach in these more diverse environments. The chapter then turns to school and classroom climate as an important lever within the school for students’ learning and well-being, as well as for teachers’ confidence and commitment to teaching. Finally, it sets the scene for the remainder of the report by identifying school resources issues that, according to teachers and school leaders, particularly require action.
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This chapter examines the process through which in-service teachers were attracted to the profession and describes how teachers and school leaders were prepared for their roles. After analysing the prevalence and features of training programmes identified as effective in the research literature, it examines the relationship between the features of these programmes and a range of quality indicators, including teachers’ sense of preparedness, self-efficacy in teaching and job satisfaction. Adopting a model that considers teacher education as a continuum, the chapter also explores the support provided to new teachers in their early career years.
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Continuous professional development is a vital element of the career path of teachers and principals, providing training that can affect both classroom and school practices. This chapter examines participation rates in in-service training for teachers and principals and discusses the different types of development opportunities available to them. It also reports teachers’ views on the characteristics of impactful training. After exploring the content of training activities attended by teachers and principals, it contrasts levels of participation with needs for further training. The chapter concludes by examining barriers to participation in training and the support received by teachers and principals to overcome them.
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