For teachers in Singapore to advance in their career, they must make sure their students learn. And they also have to help their fellow teachers get better, too.
This model of collaborative professional development is one way countries abroad are doing a better job than here in the United States at improving the skills of educators. While the US spends billions of dollars a year for occasional workshops on the latest technology or curriculum trends, there's almost no evidence to suggest that the model works.
A new study from the National Center on Education and the Economy, explores teacher professional development in three countries with excellent education outcomes -- Shanghai, Singapore, and British Columbia.
The report found that unlike in the United States, in these countries teaching is much more like other careers, where advancement is expected and interaction with other professionals is expected for growth.
If the US were able to imitate these systems, experts have argued for years, it could help attract more qualified teachers, raise test scores, and have a lifelong impact on students.
How teaching is different than other careers — and why it's a problem
There are two ways that teaching doesn't look like other jobs in the United States: The job stays pretty much the same for as long as a teacher is in the classroom and there's little interaction with other adults. Experts argue that both are a problem when it comes to helping teachers improve.
If you started out teaching third grade 35 years ago and retired this year, your last day in the classroom easily could have looked a lot like your first. You might have been getting paid more for more years of experience, but the expertise you'd developed after decades in the classroom wasn't formally recognized.
Most professions don't work this way. Lawyers move up from first-year associate to managing partner; nurses can deepen their specialization in branches of medicine. Experts have argued for years that the lack of a similar path in teaching makes it harder to retain good teachers. The clearest path up is becoming a principal — which is essentially an entirely different job.
Teachers' skills, perhaps as a result, improve quickly in the first five years they're in the classroom. Then the research disagrees on what happens next. Some studies have found teachers plateau completely, others that they continue to improve, but not as dramatically.
"There’s no reward for getting better at it," said Marc Tucker, director of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which released the report today exploring how teachers' professional development works in Shanghai, Singapore, and British Columbia. "There’s no career in teaching. There’s no high amounts of responsibility to aspire to."
And although teachers are rarely alone, teaching in the US is a solitary profession: they spend most of their time with students, not other adults.
Compared to teachers in other countries, teachers in the US spend far more time in front of their classes, which means they have less time to work on lesson planning or collaboration. Teachers in the US teach about 27 hours per week, compared with 19 hours per week in Korea and Shanghai.
That means they have less time to discuss problems and techniques with each other and improve their skills.
"Teachers have no time to think, no time to learn, no time to study the kids, no time to study the curriculum," Elizabeth Green, the author of Building a Better Teacher, told me last year. "They have no way of seeing anything that's happening outside their own classroom."
Research has found that collaboration is key to helping teachers improve — or at least that teachers think it is. A 2007 study found a link between teacher collaboration and higher student test scores in Tennessee.
Read more
http://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10773592/teachers-singapore-shanghai-professional-development
No comments:
Post a Comment