THE QUALITY OF TEACHER THE KEY OF THE REFORM IN EDUCATION IOSIFESCU ERBAN1

Analyzing the traditional ways of reforming education (enforcing and enhancing standards, upgrading school staff, their salaries and their working conditions, changing curricula including widening the choice possibilities for pupils, increasing funding etc.) the research in education of the last decades ascertain unsatisfactory results and even failure. On the other hand, the speed and the unpredictability of the societal changes and the new findings (including from neuroscience) regarding the ways people learn, impose radical changes in the formal education - from principles and philosophy to ways of building concrete learning experiences. Hence, the reform is a must, but the old ways are no more suitable. This paper, starting from recent research results and policy documents, outline some major trends in considering the educational reform: The quality of teacher is the most important factor (within school), which influence the educational outcomes at pupil/student level. The second is expressed by what John Dewey said: If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow. The societal changes impose a revolution in teaching and schooling. The reform should be redesigned as a cultural change: the technical changes (regarding curriculum, textbooks, system structure, financing etc.) are less important than changing values, rules, attitudes, prejudices and other cultural aspects. As a conclusion, improving the way we educate our teachers is the key for the improvement of the overall quality of education.

1. Introduction: Education? What for? It is an undisputed truth that education is one of the best investments (if not the best!) a society is able to endeavour, in order to increase the welfare and the quality of life for its citizens. In this field, the literature is vast and well acknowledged (even if not by our politicians!). For instance, is already common knowledge that each supplementary year of education increases the revenues of individuals with 10% [Psacharopoulos and Patrinos, 2004, p. 112]. At the general social level, the benefits of
1

Iosifescu erban, PhD, Chairman, Romanian Agency of Quality Assurance in Pre-University Education, siosifescu@yahoo.com)

education are more and more documented with hard data. For instance, a research prepared by McKinsey & Company [The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in Americas Schools, 2009, pp. 5-6 et passim], the impact of bad education on GDP is higher than the impact of the economic crisis: if the United States had, in recent years, closed the gap between its educational achievement levels and those of betterperforming nations such as Finland and Korea, GDP in 2008 could have been $1.3 trillion to $2.3 trillion higher. This means 9 to 16% of GDP (whilst the decrease of the GDP due to the crisis was less than 6.5%). If the gap between black and Latino student performance and white student performance, or the gap between poor and rich students, or the achievement gap among US States had been narrowed, GDP in 2008 would have been higher with 2 to 5% of GDP, for each kind of gap analysed. Coming closer (geographically), in Europe, a research published by the European Expert Network on Economics of Education (EENEE)2, estimates that the gain for Romania, due to improvement of education could be between 699% and 2056% of the current GDP (until 2090, depending on different scenarios), and, more important, the increase in the long-run growth of the GDP could be between 1% and 2.4% each year [Hanushek and Voessmann, 2010]. Fantastic figures, arent they? And even more: the level of education correlates positively with Life Expectancy and negatively with alcohol and tobacco consumption and with obesity; education correlates positively with civic and Social Engagement (expressed by political engagement, civic engagement, voting, trust - interpersonal and institutional -, tolerance and political knowledge) and negatively with crime3. For instance, in the USA, an increase with 1% in high-school graduation for boys will save 2 billion USD in the anti-crime budget (3000 USD for each graduate). We may say now, without any doubt, that education is good for individuals and society as a whole because if you think education is expensive, try ignorance (as Derek Bok said). And, even it seems that we tried, for the time being, too much ignorance, we may
2

http://www.eenee.de or http://www.education-economics.org/; the network is financed by the European Commission, DG Education and Culture 3 OECD, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation CERI at http://www.oecd.org/edu/socialoutcomes; Social Capital, Human Capital and Health. What is the Evidence?, 2010; Miyamoto, 2010

agree that improving education means a better life, for all of us and from all points of view. Now, we may go to the next (obvious) questions: Now that we know education is important, do we need to reform it? And how to do this? 2. Questioning the educational reform 2. 1. Reform in education? Why? To answer these new questions we must, first, define and measure the results of education because all the top-performing systems also recognize that they cannot improve what they do not measure (Barber i Mourshed, 2007, pp 35-36). So, we need to define the learning outcomes4. We mention, only, the increasing consensus in defining the results of education as learning outcomes, aggregated in competencies (understood, mainly, as systems of knowledge, skills and attitudes, resulting from the involvement of the learner in a particular set of educational experiences). On one hand, learning outcomes are about what a specific5 learner should know, feel, will and is able to do, subsequent to a formal learning process - i.e. the goals and objectives of the formal curriculum, delivered in a defined school system and assessed. On the other hand, the learning outcomes refer to what a specific learner actually knows, feels, will and is able to do, mainly if the accomplished results are the expected ones and fit to the identified needs of individuals and of society. In this respect, it is always a gap between the planned learning outcomes and the actual ones, and one of the functions of the evaluation and quality assurance systems is to narrow and even to close this gap. But, nowadays, both sides of this coin are subjects for debate. First, the traditional educational outcomes are challenged because the evolution of the human society
4

See, for instance, UNESCO (http://www.uis.unesco.org/Education/Pages/observatory-oflearning-outcomes.aspx), The European Commission (http://ec.europa.eu/education/lifelonglearning-policy/doc/eqf/note4_en.pdf), The World Bank (http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/EXTEDUCATION/0,,contentMDK :21911176~menuPK:5495844~pagePK:148956~piPK:216618~theSitePK:282386,00.html) or EHEA (http://www.ehea.info/article-details.aspx?ArticleId=119) 5 In terms of age, previous education or experience, his/hers situation on the labour market etc.

became faster than ever and, besides this, unpredictable: we dont know, now, how the society will look like not in 25 years, the regular length of a generation, but not even in 5 years. In this context, no information, no skill, no work place or profession is granted to be useful for good. Thus, the debate6 on these learning outcomes is vivid, passionate and it began to shake the classroom practices, established by tradition (including its architecture and design7). On the evaluation side of this issue, we mention only the debate (at least as passionate as the previous mentioned one) on the results at PISA, TIMSS or PIRLS testing: most of the systems of education began new reforms on the basis of the pupils results at international testing. So, if we agree that education means a better life, for all of us (as individuals and societies), improving education is a must because the needs (of individual and societies) changes very fast and, besides this, the existing learning outcomes are, obviously, unsatisfactory. Consequently, the reform should embrace both sides of the coin: to redefine the expectations and to change, accordingly, the way the outcomes are evaluated. In this context, we may formulate a new question: Now that we know education is important and we must reform it, how should we define the new learning outcomes and how to proceed in order to get them? 2.2. Reform in education? How? Starting from the existing social needs, the debate regarding the (new?) desired outcomes of education produces its first results. For instance (the inventory is not exclusive), the future education should: Be life-long and life-wide. Be focused on learners, not on teachers. Develop critical thinking and problem resolution.
6

See, for instance: Robinson (2009, 2010), Gardner (2005, 2007, 2011), Veen (2006) or Ian Jukes, Ted McCain et alii (2010); websites like http://www.21stcenturyfluency.com/ , or http://www.fieldingnair.com/Publications/. 7 The Third Teacher. 79 Ways You Can Use Design to Transform Teaching and Learning, 2010; Beadle, 2011; The 30 ways of innovating in education proposed by Prakash Nair (http://www.fieldingnair.com/Publications/EdInnovationNair5.pdf), including the way these ideas are put in place in a school transformed in a learning center (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ojBaxxdPz4)

Focus on analysis, synthesis and transfer of information not on information itself. Develop autonomy, flexibility of mind, creativity and adaptability, the divergent thinking (K. Robinson) and lateral thinking (E. DeBono), and not conformity. Enhance communication skills and, generally, the key competencies, including the capacity to use of the new technologies for information and communication. Develop social, moral, civic and intercultural competencies.

It is obvious the priority shift from pure knowledge to applied knowledge and to other components of the learning outcomes (defined as competencies): skills and, foremost, attitudes: "The need to know the capital of Florida died when my phone learned the answer, said a student in the US, in his personal blog8. The consequence of this shift, for the reform in education, is dramatic: the old fashion ways of reforming had shown their limits9: Enforcing and enhancing standards (we are not expecting enough or the right things from the students) led to drill for exam, pressure for cheating and diminished motivation for learning, whilst there is little evidence that this concern for standards has resulted in better teaching, more favourable learning opportunities, or increased skills in problem solving and higher order thinking skills. Upgrading school staff (hiring new teachers or mass retraining of teachers) demotivate teachers (they feel they are seen as incompetent and go up against the reform measures) and, often enough, instead changing the practices, reinforce them, because the school hire teachers who fit the existing culture and practices (see, for instance, in the Romanian education system, the open classes and the usual refresh courses in didactics, which reinforce the traditionalist practices). Reorganizing and restructuring (restructuring the school day, redesigning learning sites, changing governance and management, building partnerships and networks, increasing the participation of parents and the community etc.) may provide the occasions for change, but they do not ensure it. Besides the opposition
8 9

http://www.chivetta.org/2008/01/22/21st-century-education-thinking-creatively/ Maehr and Midgley, 1996, pp. 6-11, make a critical analysis of the traditional ways of reform, highlighting their negative side effects and the sources of their failure. We make, here a synthesis of their findings.

at school level (What does know about education the illiterate / uneducated parent / mayor?), granting authority do not guarantee commitment. Because of this, it was naive to assume that classroom quality would improve just because we changed our structure [Barber and Mourshed, 2007, p. 11]. Improving the work environment for teachers (including salary raise) led to huge expenditures, which poor countries are unable to sustain. Moreover, what may be good work environments for teachers not necessarily translate directly into better learning for students: studies in education economics demonstrate that there is no correlation between increased funding or better teachers salaries, on one hand, and the students results at national or international testing, on the other10. Changing the curriculum: the schools were not teaching the right things. The experts, in different areas claim that the children learn less physics / history / geography than they need. But changing the content (what is learnt) is meaningless without considering the learning process (how students learn), without changing the teaching itself. Increasing choice (developing a system responsive to consumer demand and choice by school based curriculum and competition among schools, for instance) may influence negatively the fairness of education provision: if choice depends on the availability of transportation, then some families will "choose" to send their children to the neighbourhood school. On the other hand, the differences in the resources may increase, and equity in education provision may decrease. Improving financing of education may seem a way to attract and retain good teachers, to have better equipped schools and to reduce the class size. But, again, it is already demonstrated that the amount of per capita funding is not correlated with the quality of education. Besides this, impact of class size on students learning outcomes is, still, a subject of heated discussion11. So, more money for school means, in a lot of cases pouring new wine into old bottles [Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p.11].

10

Hanushek, 2003. See also Pink, 2009 for the influence of financial reward on individual performance. 11 Regarding the impact of class size reduction on learning outcomes, see http://www.classsizematters.org/research-and-links-2/ for pros, and Hanushek, 2003; Barber and Mourshed, 2007, for cons.

As a conclusion of this introductory chapter, even if we agree that improving education is a must, nowadays, the old ways of reforming education are no more suitable because they are not likely to generate the expected results. 3. A new pattern for reforming education: teacher centred cultural changes The main reason of the situation presented in the previous chapter is that there is, however, a growing awareness of a deeper underlying problem: philosophical or theoretical bankruptcy. Schools and school staff have lost a sense of what they are about. They have lost the "tie that binds." The "why" questions have been pushed aside by the "how" questions [...] Schools have lost sight of or perhaps are seriously confused about their purpose, their values, their role, and why they exist. They have a "culture crisis" [Maehr and Midgley, 1996, p.11]. In this chapter well try to suggest some answers, coming from the existing literature, for this new question: how to change the education in a way that learning outcomes (planned and measured) are suitable for the society in which our children will live (and about which we know almost nothing)? 3.1. "The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers" We begin this chapter with this quote12, because underlines the importance of the teacher, as the main lever for reforming education. And we continue with another quote, from the same report13: "The only way to improve outcomes is to improve instruction" because it expresses the impact of the concrete teacher on the students learning outcomes. For instance, the available evidences suggest that the main driver of the variation in student learning is the quality of teachers. Fifteen years ago, a famous research [Sanders and Rivers, 1996] demonstrated that, if two average eight-year-old students were given different teachers - one of them a high performer, the other a low performer -, their performance diverge by more than 50 percentile points within three years.
12 13

Barber and Mourshed, 2007, pp. 16-23 Barber and Mourshed, 2007, p. 17

Moreover, as teacher effectiveness increases, lower achieving students are the first to benefit. The top quintile of teachers facilitates appropriate to excellent gains for students of all achievement levels. Several years later, other researchers find out that teachers account for 4% to 30% of the variance in student achievement at standardized tests14. Since then, data began to accumulate. Other researches15 demonstrate that: student placed with high performing teachers will progress up to three times as fast as those placed with low performing teachers; in England, students that were failing at age 11, had only 25% chance of meeting the standard at age 14 and 6% when leaving school, at age 16; two years of effective teachers could not remediate the achievement loss caused by one year with a poor teacher; in just six years, Boston increased the number of its students meeting the standards from 25 percentile points to 74 percentile points in Math, and from 43 percentile points to 77 percentile points in English, only by changing the teacher training system; in England (where there had been little improvement in student outcomes for nearly half a century), by using government funded new national training programs which employed best-practice training techniques, the number of students meeting the standards in literacy, increased from 63 percentile points to 75 percentile points, in only three years. In the last decade, available data began to refine. For instance, it is known that teacher influence is higher for students coming from disadvantaged groups or with learning disabilities (gaining 50 percentile points, in three years, due to teachers) than for students coming from privileged families, and / or with high level of school achievement, (gaining about 10 percentile points, due to teacher). But, on the other hand, the low-achieving students were twice as likely to be assigned to ineffective teachers three years in a row [Babu i Mendro, 2003].

14

Bembry, Jordon, Gomez, Anderson, and Mendro, 1998; Teachers Matter: Evidence from Value-Added Assessments , 2004 15 See, a synthesis of these researches in Barber and Mourshed, 2007.

Starting from these results, there is an increasing number of initiatives aiming to bring excellent teachers where they are needed the most: in disadvantaged areas. We mention only two such initiatives: The New Teacher Programme16 and Teach for America17 (both in the USA). The second initiative becomes worldwide, with programmes and adepts in 25 different countries18, including Romania19. As a conclusion for this paragraph, the impact of effective teachers overwhelms almost every other intervention, at school level20, including class size reduction. 3.2. If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow It is obvious that every change we introduce in the educational system should have positive effects at student level, on learning outcomes. But, the main problem is that Many of the reforms we studied failed to deliver improvement because they had little effect on what happened inside the classroom. Cuban's analogy of the effect of many school reforms on teaching practice is that they have a similar effect to that of a storm on the ocean: the surface is agitated and turbulent, while the ocean floor is calm and serene (if a bit murky). Policy churns dramatically creating the appearance of major changes ... while deep below the surface, life goes on largely uninterrupted. [Barber and Mourshed, 2007, p. 32] Consequently, having in mind that the teacher has, at school level, the largest influence on the learning outcomes, the next step should be to define what this new teacher should do, what kind of learning experiences he/she must create, so that learners can demonstrate, at the end of a specific learning process, the required learning outcomes.

16 17

http://www.tntp.org http://www.teachforamerica.org 18 http://www.teachforall.org 19 http://www.teachforromania.ro 20 Having in mind that, according to all researches made in the last decades, the most important predictor for the school results is the students economical, social, personal and educational background, which explains (according to OECD) 85% of student achievement.

In the first place, we need to establish the position of teacher as professional. The latest European Documents consider the quality of teacher as one of the main elements for improving the quality and efficiency of education and training: At the same time, there is a need to ensure high quality teaching, to provide adequate initial teacher education, continuous professional development for teachers and trainers, and to make teaching an attractive career-choice 21. That means, among other measures, to position the teaching profession at the highest level of qualification at levels 6, 7 or 8 within the European Qualification Framework22. For instance, this means, for EQF Level 7 (corresponding with the master degree, the required qualification for teachers as established by the Law of National Education): highly specialised knowledge, some of which is at the forefront of knowledge in a field of work or study, as the basis for original thinking and/or research critical awareness of knowledge issues in a field and at the interface between different fields; specialised problem-solving skills required in research and/or innovation in order to develop new knowledge and procedures and to integrate knowledge from different fields; manage and transform work or study contexts that are complex, unpredictable and require new strategic approaches take responsibility for contributing to professional knowledge and practice and/or for reviewing the strategic performance of teams. We quote extensively from these two European Official Documents to underline the level of complexity, creativity and autonomy needed for a teacher. On the other hand, teacher education must change, as well, in order to be consonant with the traits of the future education (some of them already mentioned in chapter 2.2.). The reason is
21

Council conclusions of 12 May 2009 on a strategic framework for European cooperation in education and training (ET 2020). Official Journal of the European Union, C 111 from 6.5.2008. 22 Recommendation of the European Parliament and of the Council on the establishment of the European Qualifications Framework for lifelong learning. Official Journal of the European Union, C 119 from 28.5.2009.

obvious: a teacher not demonstrating specific skills and competencies in these areas will not be able to teach them. Consequently, the teacher must: Be a life-long and life-wide learner himself/herself. Focus on learners, on learning processes and outcomes, not on his/hers own teaching. Be a critical thinker and a problem solver, and focus on analysis, synthesis and transfer of information (= processes) and not on information itself (= contents). Be morally and intellectually autonomous, have a flexible mind, be creative in the classroom, but adaptable to the different ways and styles of learning. Demonstrate high level communication skills and, generally, in all key competencies (including proficiency in using the new technologies). Be a moral person and demonstrate social, moral, civic and intercultural competencies. What does this means for teacher education? For instance: Instead of focusing on teachers behaviour (as in the existing Didactics or Methodology courseware), teacher education should focus on the understanding of the learning processes, by using the newest scientific data in this regard, including from neuroscience. In order to personalize the learning experiences for different learners, the teacher must be able to pluralize the teaching, by dealing, in specific ways, with different intelligences (H. Gardner), different learning styles (D. Kolb and others) or different sensory dominances (NLP). Thus, teacher education must approach, consistently, in theory and practice, the whole range of the ways people learn. Teaching means high level abilities for communication in mother tongue and in at least one foreign language, regarding the use of ICT and, as a matter of fact, regarding all key competencies. Consequently, the key competencies should be one of the main criteria for selecting the future teacher and cultivating them, a consistent part of the curriculum for teacher education. The teachers must be educated as researchers (including for producing and using statistics), and as knowledge managers (including by using the new information technologies).

Without any doubt, the teacher will teach in more than one cultural setting. Thus, he/she must be aware of cultural differences (national, ethnical, among different groups etc.) and to approach them consistently, in an inter-cultural way (bearing in mind that each culture has something to offer to another). Finally, teacher education will need to have a more consistent part of practice. Besides aptitudes and education, any professional needs to practice the competencies, in different situations and conditions.

3.3. The educational reform as cultural change When I observe teaching, visit schools or look into the new textbooks, I feel young again: the teachers approach pupils and students like I was approached, as pupil, fifty years ago, or as student, thirty years ago. All the new solutions in teaching (pupils having individualized tasks or working in small groups, using multimedia, multidisciplinary teaching etc.) were in use when I was in high school, forty years ago. The relative weight of different subjects is the same: the math as the apex in the hierarchy of subjects, followed by mother tongue, sciences and humanities, with arts (bearing creativity as the main value) and technology (which grows at an astounding rate and of which we are, today, completely dependent), on the last place. Even the text fragments I (fifty years ago) and my children (ten to fifteen years ago) learned to read are the same. Even the Pedagogy and Didactics curricula and syllabi I used to graduate and to pass the exams for becoming teacher and, afterwards, permanent teacher (around thirty years ago) are, mostly, the same. On the other hand, we complain that education changes too often. But, despite the rhetoric, the changes in education of the last two decades did not produce major

improvement of the Romanian pupils results at international testing23, and the problems revealed by different analysis and studies24 did not vanish. So, the changes in the systems were only superficial, not reaching the teacher-learner relationship and not changing the educational practices, one of the reasons being, the lack of reform in teacher education. Analysing the content of initial teacher education, especially the main courseware, we may see that the content and, as well, the conditions for acquiring professional degrees are almost the same as 20-30 years ago. For instance, the teachers are requested to be, in the first place, proficient in a specific field of knowledge and, on the second place (or on the third, on the fourth or not at all...) to be proficient in communication, even if we know that knowing a thing is not enough to make others to understand and use it. We ask students to reproduce the pieces of information we gave them and we wonder why they copy them from the Internet. We live in a global, multicultural way, but our curriculum is obviously monocultural. School inspection promotes conformism and discourages innovation. Moreover, none of the new areas of interest mentioned above are in the mainstream of teacher education (being, best case, optional courses). It is easy to notice that all the problems mentioned above are not technical. They are related to the values we share, to the perceived social role of education, to the norms (explicit and implicit) and models of behaviour shared by teachers. They are related to the organizational cultures (at school level) and to the professional culture (at
23

TIMSS Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study administrated by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA http://timss.bc.edu/ ) 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007. PIRLS - Progress in International Reading Literacy Studies (IEA - http://timss.bc.edu/) 2001, 2006. PISA - The Programme for International Student Assessment (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD - www.pisa.oecd.org) 2000, 2006, 2009. 24 Reforma nvmntului din Romnia: Condiii i perspective (1993). Bucureti: Ministerul nvmntului - Institutul de tiine ale Educaiei; Reviews of National Policies for Education. Romania (2000). Paris: OECD; Reviews of National Policies for Education: South Eastern Europe 2003 - Volume 2: FYROM, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia (2003). Paris: OECD; Romnia Educaiei, Romnia Cercetrii - Raportul Comisiei Prezideniale pentru analiza i elaborarea politicilor din domeniile educaiei i cercet rii (2007). Bucuresti: Administratia Prezidentiala

teachers level. And this culture is passed on, from a generation of teachers to another, by teacher education. Thus, if we really want a reform in education, if we really want an improvement in our pupils and students learning outcomes, if we really want more confidence in schools and teachers at social level, we need a cultural change. It is obvious that this kind of change is feasible only on long term and having a real constancy of purpose. But, anyway, we have to begin the change, by learning from our own experience but also from others: the literature of the last decade had already disclosed some privileged reform interventions, which produce rapid improvement of quality in education (expressed by pupils / students results)25. So, my personal conclusion of this paper is: If we want to prosper, we need education and, moreover, a new kind of education. If we want a proper education, we need better teachers. If we want better teachers, we need to educate them differently. Before closing this paper, this conclusion was confirmed by a brand new press release of the European Commission26, announcing the creation of a High level group to focus on quality and excellence in teaching. As the Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, said: "Everybody remembers a teacher who inspired or motivated them. With the help of the high level group I want to ensure that every student, regardless of where they live or study in Europe, will benefit from quality teaching. This is a pre-condition for innovation, jobs and growth. Teaching excellence is also a fundamental requirement for identifying and supporting sustainable pathways out of the current crisis." BILBIOGRAPHY
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