TALIS, which stands for OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey, final report 2013 was released yesterday. was first brought to the attention of it via some fb shares of the CNA report.
TALIS 2013 has an interactive webpage which allows users to make comparison between two countries, and the overall average. after making some chart comparisons between SG and Finland, i am glad our system is doing significantly a lot more (not sure statistically so or not) in terms of teachers’ PD. MOE’s belief that PD can improve our teachers and education as a whole is strongly reflected in the charts; this also matches my personal experience and belief (not sure how much belongs to MOE’s influence in this). CNA’s headline “Teachers in Singapore are … among the best-trained worldwide” rightly captured this gist.
another piece of writing related to the TALIS 2013 report is a blog post by Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills. for those of us who dun have time (which is most of us and i confess i am one of us) to read the 442-page report, Schleicher has shared some of his takeaways which could be useful for us too. cut-n-paste a few quotes that i find meaningful [personally]:
- “if a teacher is convinced that students learn better when they are encouraged to think through and solve problems on their own, then they are likely to use more active, student-centred approaches to teaching and learning” [this touches on the importance of teachers’ beliefs]
- “constructive and fair teacher appraisals and feedback have a positive effect on teachersβ job satisfaction and on their confidence in their abilities as teachers” [teachers, students, we are all alike, aren’t we?]
- “they should also work with other teachers to develop a system of peer feedback on all aspects of teaching, from lesson planning and classroom practice to student evaluation” [this requires a very open-mind about feedback. is strongly culturally related.]
- “While in many countries there is a lot of debate about the ideal class size, TALIS finds that class size has no measurable impact on teaching efficacy. But teachers who reported that they teach classes where more than one in ten students are low academic achievers or have behavioural problems also reported significantly lower levels of confidence in their abilities to teach, or what is known as self-efficacy.” [work on our students’ self-efficacy, and the classroom size issue may just be no issue anymore?]
- “Since TALIS finds that teachers who participate more in decision making in their school are also more likely to believe that society values teachers, they should be open to work together with colleagues and school leaders.” [ownership, buy-in … reminded me somewhat of SDL]
