Description

Preparing Teachers and Developing School Leaders for the 21st Century

Lessons from around the world

One of the toughest dilemmas teachers face today is the fact that routine cognitive skills, the skills that are easiest to teach and test, are also the skills that are easiest to digitize, automate and outsource. A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would be useful to their students over their entire lifetime ; today, education Systems need to enable students to become lifelong learners, to manage complex ways of thinking and working that computers cannot.

Teachers today need to be high-level knowledge workers who constantly deepen their own professional knowledge as well as that of their profession. They also need to be granted the status, pay, autonomy and high-quality education that are synonymous with professional work.

The second International Summit on the Teaching Profession, hosted by the US Department of Education, the OECD and Education International, brought together education ministers, union leaders and other teacher leaders from high-performing and rapidly improving education systems, as measured by the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Their aim was to consider how best to improve the quality of teaching, teachers and school leaders. To underpin the discussions, this publication offers available research about what can make education reforms effective and highlights examples of reforms that have produced results, show promise, or illustrate imaginative ways of implementing change.