Linda Darling-Hammond sees the recent PISA and TALIS results as a strong indictment of the direction of American education over the last two decades. Her answer, as she explains in an article for the Huffington Post Education, is to focus on teachers. Below is an excerpt from the article:
For years now, educators have looked to international tests as a yardstick to measure how well U.S. students are learning 21st-century skills compared to their peers. The answer has been: not so well. The U.S. has been falling further behind other nations and has struggled with a large achievement gap.
The results of the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), released recently by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), offer a stunning picture of the challenges experienced by American teachers, while providing provocative insights into what we might do to foster better teaching – and learning – in the United States.
In short, the survey shows that American teachers today work harder under much more challenging conditions than teachers elsewhere in the industrialized world. They also receive less useful feedback, less helpful professional development, and have less time to collaborate to improve their work. Not surprisingly, two-thirds feel their profession is not valued by society — an indicator that OECD finds is ultimately related to student achievement.
And here, in very brief form, are Darling-Hammond’s goals to change this situation:
- Address inequities that undermine learning
- Value teaching and teacher learning
- Redesign schools to create time for collaboration
- Create meaningful teacher evaluations that foster improvement
The last three on that list prioritize a clear vision of fostering teacher learning as key to improving student learning. This may mean that teachers have to hear some difficult critiques of their teaching, but Darling-Hammond advocates a collaborative model in which teachers would have more investment in their improvement.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-darlinghammond/to-close-the-achievement_b_5542614.html
To view the TALIS survey results, see:
http://nctaf.org/talis/talis-results/
