Teacher Education Partners Meeting
Vancouver, 28 July 2009
Attended by representatives of ComSec (Caroline Pontefract); Hewlett Foundation (Cathy Nicholson); TESSA (Freda Wolfenden, Jophus Amanuah-Mensah); UNESCO (Lucio Sia); UNICEF (Cream Wright); and COL (Asha Kanwar, May Li, Abdurrahman Umar, John Daniel, and Desmond Bermingham (on attachment)).
Teacher Education: Strategies for Success
Welcoming remarks by
Sir John Daniel
Colleagues:
It is a great pleasure to welcome you to Vancouver. Thank you for travelling significant distances north and west to get here. The good news is that we are having a run of magnificent weather, but the bad news is that today you’ll just have to enjoy it through the nice view from this room across the harbour to the mountains!
Our purpose in these two days is to update our views on teacher education by sharing experiences and perspectives. I hope that we can then identify a few areas where we can achieve more by working in partnerships – either bilateral or multilateral – than by working solo.
I confess to a very personal interest in the outcomes of this meeting. I am completing the manuscript of a book which focuses on two activities that seem to me essential for achieving Education for All.
The first is open schooling. We shall never cope with the surge of pupils towards secondary education, which is the direct result of the steady success of the push for Universal Primary Education (UPE), without using different methods. Of these open schooling is the most promising.
The second, of course, is teacher education. I argue that we will not complete the drive to UPE, still less make progress towards universal secondary education, without new approaches to teacher education. The numbers of teachers required are simply too big for business as usual.
This meeting is very timely for me because I am now finalising the part of the book on teacher education and look forward to being inspired by you.
My words today are grandly entitled a welcome address on the programme. Think of them more as welcoming remarks which, because I like alliteration, I shall group under four words beginning with ‘S’: scale, synergy, sharing and strategies.
Scale
You are at the Commonwealth of Learning, so I would be in dereliction of my duty if I did not start by saying that teacher education is a challenge of scale that requires a scale response. COL’s focus is on applying technology to education. Our motto is Learning for Development, which is a set of challenges of scale. We have little interest in initiatives where there are less than three zeroes after the number of learners and we prefer many more zeroes than that.
You know the figures about the need for more teachers. Estimates vary, but to say that the world needs 10 million more teachers by 2015 is probably to understate the challenge. I say ‘the world needs’ because this is not only a developing country problem. Not long ago California had 30,000 completely untrained teachers in its schools. At COL, however, we focus on the challenge in our developing countries. Africa needs 1.6 million more teachers to achieve EFA without taking account of imminent retirements, which takes the figure to 3.8 million. Putting it another way, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan require 5.7 million more teachers between them and there are 15 other countries with a shortfall of more than 100,000.
At COL we believe that there are two vital elements in the response to this crisis. The first is to exploit technology to the full. I mean particularly the technology of open and distance learning (ODL) which has been used with great success in teacher education for decades. I began my own career in ODL nearly 40 years ago working in Quebec on a programme called PERMAMA (Perfectionnement des Maîtres en Mathématiques) which had the aim of re-training all the province’s secondary school maths teachers in what was then called the new mathematics. That was a long time ago but PERMAMA continues to have a big impact. If you break out the performance of the Canadian provinces separately in the results of the OECD’s PISA survey, you find that Quebec’s 15-year olds are right up at the top of the table in mathematics, just after Japan and before Korea. The Quebec Ministry of Education attributes this stellar performance in large measure to the process of teaching reform that was sparked by PERMAMA.
PERMAMA also illustrates the second element of the response, which is much greater attention to in-service training or continuous professional development – what some of you prefer to call continuous professional learning. At the moment developing countries devote far too much energy and resource to giving a minority of teachers a long and theoretical initial training, while the majority are launched into teaching with little preparation and minimal provision for on-the-job training. This approach must be completely re-balanced to give less attention to pre-service training and more to in-service learning. This, of course, brings you back to technology because if you focus on continuous professional learning you have to reach the teachers wherever they are – all over their countries – and that requires ODL.
But that brings another advantage. My own reading suggests that the trend towards school-based teacher education is the key contemporary development in the field. Writing about the teacher education programme at the UK Open University, Jenny Leach and Bob Moon wrote: ‘No activity, reading or observation (is) set that (does) not relate directly to experience in schools’ and ‘the link has to be explicit’ (Leach &Moon, 2000:114). It is obviously much easier to do this if you actually reach the teachers in their schools – or in clusters of schools, as was the case with PERMAMA.
So to summarise the issue of scale, we have the happy situation where the scale imperative leads to ODL, which in turn leads to better approaches to teacher education that have more emphasis on continuous professional learning focused on classroom practice. Our challenge at this meeting is to ensure that the whole of our work towards the goal of scale is greater than the sum of our individual efforts.
Synergy
My second theme is synergy. To bring our work together we must put our ideas together. Between us we have a wide experience of influencing teacher education in a number of ways. We start from similar principles, so I do not see any risk of clashes of ideologies.
For example, UNICEF focuses on scaling up the use of its ‘Child Friendly Schools’ (CFS) approach and COL is pleased to be helping it do that through teacher training. The CFS approach is entirely congruent with the strategies that all our organisations have adopted in pursuing the Millennium Development Goals: promoting inclusiveness; emphasising learning rather than teaching; and making the reality of the school the focus of teacher education.
We all have experience of a using technology in different ways and this is an opportunity to pool that work and build on it. Open Educational Resources (OERs) are a very important development for scaling up many aspects of education in ways that ensure consistent quality. I pay tribute to the Hewlett Foundation for the great work it has done in supporting the OER movement around the world.
Under ‘synthesis’ I also make the observation that successful projects for scaling up and innovating in teacher education are often the results of partnerships and consortia. I think of the PERMAMA programme I mentioned earlier, which brought together Quebec’s most dynamic teacher educators in Mathematics and gave them a pan-provincial framework in which to work. The programme made enemies in the traditional departments but got the chance to do its work successfully. Much the same applied to the CalStateTEACH programme of the California State University system, which has helped thousands of untrained teachers gain qualifications. TESSA is another very successful consortium approach. Here again it is true that no single institution could have begun to match the impact of TESSA in reaching close to half a million African teachers last year. The lesson I take from these three examples is that you need a critical mass of political commitment and diverse expertise to innovate at scale.
I am particularly interested in exploring synergies between teacher education and new types of schooling at scale. The other theme of my book is open schooling. At the simplest level the growth of open schools means that some teachers – perhaps most teachers – will need training in the areas of materials development, instructional design and eTutoring. But more broadly I see much synergy between the materials, networks and organisations needed for open schooling and those required to deliver teacher education and particular teachers’ continuing professional development at scale.
We can also do more to integrate into our thinking the research that we commission on important phenomena like the feminisation of the teaching force, teacher migration, and boys’ underachievement.
Sharing
Scaling up teacher education means that we must share ideas and resources. The revolution of the 21st century is that OERs have made this so much easier. Distance educators have been talking about the potential of sharing materials for years but with little to show for it.
There are two reasons for that. First, the not-invented-here syndrome used to be very strong, especially in higher education. I observe that Google has substantially reduced that instinct, since we all now take resources from everywhere. Second, it really was difficult and fastidious to share materials that were not in electronic formats because you always wanted to adapt them and that meant re-keying whole documents.
OERs have changed all that and TESSA is a wonderful of example of the scale and quality that can be achieved when the output of a global consortium can be fully versioned for local use.
Computing for children is another area where we can usefully share our observations. For my forthcoming book I researched three projects. The One Laptop per Child programme and the NEPAD eSchools Demonstration put computers in schools. The least I can say is that there is a long way to go before computers in schools really make a contribution to the goals of EFA. There is no sign yet of any of the substitution of capital for labour that should be the hallmark of a cost-effective technology project. The Hole in the Wall programme is in many ways more interesting because it did not put computers into schools but in public outdoor spaces. The results are fascinating but again, this approach needs to be integrated into a wider whole if it is to contribute to EFA.
Strategies
My final comments are on strategies for success. My book is about achieving EFA and addresses two crucial areas. The biggest challenge is now the secondary surge. But this leads us beyond the issue of education for children of secondary school age, daunting though that already is, to the neglected EFA goals of youth training, adult skills and literacy. New approaches are needed. I am arguing that open schools are an important part of the answer. However, I see them not just as alternative schools operating at scale, but as an integrative force for whole school systems that can get high quality locally relevant materials into the hands of all children. We are indebted to the Hewlett Foundation for supporting us to work with six countries to produce a whole school curriculum in the form of OERs.
OERs have a great role to play in scaling up teacher education. I already see links to our work with UNICEF, where we are helping them to get the concept of ‘Child Friendly Schools’ into the bloodstream of teacher education in a number of institutions. TESSA is an inspiring example for us all.
I suggest that we ought also to explore sharing our experience with Teacher Resource Centres and work together to re-conceptualise them for the 21st century. They could play a most useful role in support of in-service teacher education and the expansion of schooling. For such a purpose we need to think of them in a new and wider context as part of both open schooling and teacher education networks. They must be places of high connectivity and rich interaction; and, once they are, why not put a Hole-in-the-Wall system in the yard outside so that there are real children buzzing around too!
Concrete partnerships
I end by welcoming you again and encouraging us to develop concrete partnerships, both bilateral and multilateral, to take forward our agenda of transforming teacher education and taking it to scale. There is a huge task out there but between us we have global reach and strong networks in all regions. Thank you for coming to Vancouver to join us for this event
Reference
Leach, Jenny & Moon, Bob (2000) Changing Paradigms in Teacher Education: A Case Study of Innovation and Change, in Scott, Alan & Freeman-Moir, John (eds.) Tomorrow’s Teachers: International and Critical Perspectives on Teacher Education, Canterbury University Press, pp. 106-122