Are We Giving Teachers Enough Room to Innovate?
By Nandita Vij Tandan (WISE Team) With the beginning of the school year fast approaching, the global online community is abuzz, predicting trends for the new academic year. This summer, the hot topic of conversation is teachers. Recently, global think-tanks, independent experts and leading international organizations have published a plethora of fresh content. In-depth research and surveys delve into the everyday lives […]
Train Teachers for Skills
Let teachers be learners too. Let them be supported in their teaching and learning journey. Teaching is a skill, so why not teach it as a skill, writes Meeta Sengupta. Ms Sengupta is a Moderator at the 2014 WISE Summit in Doha. Every conversation about improving education comes to a stalemate when someone brings up the problem of teachers. […]
Assessing Students’ Thinking With Questions
This article examines how teachers can use questioning as an instructional tool to facilitate richer inquiry and for assessing students’ thinking. Education systems all around the world are in search for evidence to identify gaps to help us move forward and essentially to show progress. But the heart of it is, what are we measuring? […]
Nine Skills That Will Help Make Our Children Future-Ready
Leading futurist John B. Mahaffie looks at the personal and learning skills that will make our children successful in the future. Please bring to mind a child of today, a boy or girl who is eight, nine, or 10 years old. Cast their life forward 20 years. It will be the year 2034. That child will be […]
What We Can Learn About Teacher Motivation From TALIS
In this article, Janet Looney analyses the factors associated with higher levels of teacher motivation and job satisfaction. What motivates teachers? This question is central to much education policy. Teachers who are motivated are more likely to stay in the profession, to participate in professional learning and to innovate. Yet teachers themselves are seldom asked about what motivates them. […]
A Little Less Evaluation, A Little More Feedback, Please…
According to Alejandro Ganimian, performance evaluations would be more effective if they focused less on “grading” teachers and more on providing teachers with constructive feedback. Over the past decade, rigorous research has shown that teachers are the most important school-based determinant of student achievement. In fact, “effective teachers” (i.e., those whose students consistently make gains in standardized tests) can not only […]
Should All Students Learn How to Code? Pros and Cons
“Coding”, it is said by some, is the “new literacy”. The ability to write and understand computer code, such folks argue, is increasingly fundamental to understanding how to navigate one’s way through, to say nothing of succeeding, in a modern society where more and more of our lives are enabled and/or constrained by the actions […]
Teaching Lessons from Finland
In this presentation, Pasi Sahlberg argues that just having better teachers in schools will not automatically improve students learning outcomes. Lessons from Finland and other high-performing school systems suggest that we should also protect schools from prescribed teaching, toxic accountability, and unhealthy competition, so that all teachers can use their professional knowledge and skills in […]
Decoding “Everyone should learn to code”
“Everyone should learn to code.” Over the last few years, this has become a popular slogan, invoked by “learn to code” companies and organization interested no doubt in drumming up business. It’s a slogan that comes with some urgency, coinciding with a narrative about he supposed shortage of programmers and other “skilled workers” in STEM fields. More broadly […]
Coding to Become Creative Thinkers
Let me start with a story…. A few years ago, on the day before Mother’s Day, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t gotten a gift for my mom. So I started thinking about last-minute gifts. Instead of buying a gift, I decided to make an interactive Mother’s Day card for my mom, using the Scratch programming […]