What about the Teacher Summit?
The Summit was initiated by U.S. President Obama together with his Education Minister Arne Duncan, in order to start a debate on the ingredients for the best teachers. The upcoming Summit will be the first one organized outside the U.S. The organization lies in the hands of the OECD together with the Dutch Education Ministry and Education International (global union federation of teachers’ trade unions).
The road to teaching excellence
The theme of this years’ edition of the Teacher Summit will be ‘professional standards and teacher appraisal’. Policy makers and professionals will share their good practices and develop new routes towards excellence in teaching against the backdrop of globalization and relevant technological developments.
Key note for Andreas Schleicher
An important role during the Summit will be reserved for Andreas Schleicher, Special Advisor for Education at the OECD and often called ‘teacher of the world’, as he is the main driver behind the famous PISA rankings.
In his study The high cost of low educational performance, Schleicher relates long term economic welfare to investments in education and teaching. An increase of 25 points in PISA-scores translates into a GDP growth of $ 115 billion in OECD countries over twenty years.
The Amsterdam Summit will start with a reflection of the conclusions from last years’ New York Summit. In brief the conclusions cover the following areas:
- The twentieth-century ‘knowledge transmission model’ of education is shifting towards a ‘twenty-first century learning environment-model’ of education. However, there is still a long way to go in understanding how to ensure that teachers have the capacity to teach them, and how to actually create twenty-first century learning environments.
- The teacher preparation programmes need to be substantially revamped to give teachers the skills and knowledge that enable them to feel prepared for the new learning environments. Meaningful mentoring for new teachers under supervision of a master teacher is particularly important in helping them to become effective practitioners.
- The issue of matching teacher supply and demand is complex, involving expanding the overall supply of high-quality teachers, addressing shortages in specific subjects, recruiting teachers to the neediest areas, and retaining teachers over time.
- High-performing systems rely on effective leadership at the school level, and have implemented policies to ensure professionalized recruitment, systematic and high-quality training and experiences, and ongoing support and appraisal of principals.
- Accomplishing changes of this magnitude will require the partnership of all the stakeholders in education—not just the ministers, teacher union leaders, and teacher leaders but also employers, schools of education, university professors, the media, parents, and students, who will be increasingly responsible for their own learning in the twenty-first century.
More information on the International Summit on the Teaching Profession can be found here.
The Summit hashtag is #ISTP2013
