Shaping, not predicting, the future of students

by Anthony Mann
Senior Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo is reputed to have once said that there’s no point making predictions because nothing is set in stone. It is hard to predict the future, but in education policy at least it is not altogether impossible.

We know, for example, from data accumulated over many years that people who exhibited certain attributes when young are more likely (sometimes very much more likely) to do better in work as adults. They are much more likely to find work after leaving school or university and to earn more than people who are otherwise just like them.

Studies have shown, for example, that youngsters can expect to do better in work as adults if they read well at 10 or gain higher levels of qualifications.  We know as well, not least from recent OECD studies, that the children of wealthier parents routinely do better than their classmates from poorer backgrounds, even if they show the same academic promise as children.

It’s unsurprising to learn that academic ability and social background have a big influence on how well young adults can expect to do once they leave education and get into work. This is unsurprising and, for school teachers, more than a little depressing as social background is pretty much fixed, and improved academic ability is a process that is slow and always comparative. Depressing too because the predictive qualities of doing better in school are irrelevant to huge numbers of lower achievers from more modest backgrounds.

But what if there were other, more practical indicators available? Indicators that are relevant to all young people?  Indicators that could provide teaching staff with useful information about which children needed more attention to help them prepare for their transitions into work?

These are questions addressed in a recently published report, “Indicators of Successful Transitions: Teenage attitudes and experiences of the world of work”,  from the research team at the Education and Employers charity based in London. (Full disclosure: I led the team before joining the OECD). Drawing on UK longitudinal datasets and statistical analyses that allow a like-with-like comparison of teenagers moving into adulthood, the study was designed to provide teaching staff with a practical tool for assessing how well their students were being prepared for their ultimate transitions into work.

Trawling through research literature which uses UK datasets which follow thousands of young people from childhood into adulthood, like the British Cohort Survey and the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, alongside new analysis of the same datasets, the research team found a number of significant associations between the attitudes and experiences of teenagers related to the working world – and what happened to those teenagers when they became young working adults. For example, studies link better adult outcomes to both teenage career aspirations that are more confident, realistic and ambitious, and the extent to which young people are involved in real workplaces, whether through their schools or in part-time work.  Other research highlights the ultimate value of teenagers’ social networks in helping them find employment or access information about jobs and careers.

In all, 15 such indicators were identified and grouped together into four themes within a questionnaire for young people: thinking about the future; talking about the future; experiencing the future; and thinking about school. The questionnaire was tested with careers guidance professionals in six English secondary schools with some 800 students aged 14 to 16. In this pilot, schools explored the effectiveness of the indicators as a tool for identifying students (at all levels of achievement) who require greater attention and determining the quality of activities undertaken by students.

In addition, the guidance professionals were asked for feedback on the details of the questionnaire and how the questionnaire could be most practically used in schools. They responded that they found the indicators to be effective in identifying students requiring more support. What this means in practice is that both high and low achievers can have poorly informed careers aspirations. Both groups of students might have given insufficient thought to the breadth of their career options and how their current education or training could best relate to their future selves. Practitioners with a good understanding of the needs of students reported that the questionnaire provided reliable results. The indicators were felt to work especially well for 16-year-olds who are approaching a key transition point in the English education system. Based on this feedback, the questionnaire and marking schedule were revised and confirmed.

We may not be able to tell the future with certainty, but we can draw on reliable evidence to make better judgements about the conditions under which young people can expect a brighter future.  The Education and Employers study harnesses great evidence to provide a new tool for schools determined to prepare their students well for working life.

Links
Educational Opportunity for All – Overcoming Inequality throughout the Life Course
Indicators of successful transitions: Teenage attitudes and experiences related to the world of work

OECD work on skills: www.oecd.org/skills

Photo credit: @Shutterstock

Succeeding with resilience – Lessons for schools

by Johanna Boersch-Supan
Director, Vodafone Germany Foundation – think tank 

Digitisation is expected to profoundly change the way we learn and work – at a faster pace than previous major drivers of transformation. Many children entering school today are likely to end up working in jobs that do not yet exist. Preparing students for these unchartered territories means that we not only have to make sure that they have the right technical capabilities but that we have to strengthen their emotional and social skills. Resilience, the individual capacity to overcome adverse circumstances and use them as sources for personal development, lies at the core of being able to successfully adapt to change and thus actively engage with our digital world.

A special PISA analysis conducted by the OECD in collaboration with the Vodafone Germany Foundation shows that several countries were able to increase the share of academically resilient students with disadvantaged backgrounds over the last decade.* The increase was particularly pronounced –among other countries and economies– in Germany: while in 2006 only a quarter of disadvantaged students performed well in all three academic subjects tested in PISA, by 2015 a third did.

While resilience is foremost an individual characteristic, the in-depth analysis of PISA data from 2012 and 2015 suggests that the school environment can play a key role in mitigating the risk of low achievement among disadvantaged students. To this end, the study was able to identify attributes common to schools in which disadvantaged students succeed. Across the vast majority of education systems examined, the likelihood that disadvantaged students are resilient is higher in schools where students reported a good disciplinary climate, compared to schools with more disruptive environments. This holds even after accounting for differences in students’ and schools’ socio-economic profiles and individual characteristics associated with resilience. Attending orderly classes, in which students can focus and teachers provide well-paced instruction, is beneficial for all students, but in particular for the most vulnerable. 

By contrast, the likelihood of resilience among disadvantaged students is only weakly related to the amount of human and material resources available in their schools, measured through indicators of class size and student-computer ratios. Especially in Germany, however, disadvantaged students are more likely to be resilient in schools that offer a high number of extracurricular activities. The fact that no correlation exists between most resource indicators and the share of resilient students among socio-economically disadvantaged students does not mean that investments in education do not matter. Rather it suggests that resources help disadvantaged students to succeed only if they effectively improve aspects of their learning environment that are more directly linked to their opportunities to learn. Thus, the fact that extracurricular activities are associated with a greater likelihood of resilience may reflect the way in which these investments promote engagement among teachers, students and the students’ families, and can help develop a sense of belonging at school.

The PISA data also offer insight into some specific school policies and managerial practices which can help improve the disciplinary climate at the school level. First, students tend to report a better disciplinary climate in schools with a lower turnover among teachers. Unstable teaching teams may lack cohesion and limit the accumulation of experience that is necessary to establish an environment conducive to learning even in difficult conditions. Teacher turnover can be reduced by rewarding collaboration between teachers and by developing mentorship programmes to ensure that more experienced teachers can support new ones and help them quickly establish strong bonds with the school. A transformational leadership style adopted by principals is a second factor associated with a positive disciplinary climate experienced by students. Transformational leaders foster capacity development and work to promote a high level of commitment among teachers towards a common mission, strategic goals and high academic standards.

The 2017 edition of the OECD Employment Outlook shows rising levels of socio-economic inequality driven, among other factors, by automation in the labour market. Understanding how to support resilience in students is essential not only for equipping them to thrive in a digital future but also for creating more equal opportunities in education and thereby strengthening social cohesion.

*A German version of the study focusing on data from Germany can be found at: resilienz.vodafone-stiftung.de

Links

Vodafone Germany Foundation, Coding & Character – a representative study on skills for the digital future

OECD Education Working Paper No. 167 – Academic resilience: What schools and countries do to help disadvantaged students succeed in PISA

OECD Employment Outlook 2017 (also available in German)

PISA in Focus No. 80 – In which countries and schools do disadvantaged students succeed?

Follow the conversation on Twitter: #OECDPISA

Learning for careers: The career pathways movement in the United States

by Nancy Hoffman, Senior Advisor, Jobs for the Future
Bob Schwartz, Senior Research Fellow, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Over the last generation, it has become clear that something has gone awry in how the United States prepares its young people for life. In spite of millions of young people pursuing university education, fewer than one in three young Americans successfully attain a bachelor’s degree, while millions of good middle-skills jobs go begging because of our failure to build programs to equip young people with the skills and credentials to fill them. In a climate of “university for all” only 20% of young Americans enrol in career and technical education programs, the US version of Vocational Education and Training. This struck us as both a problem and an opportunity crying out for a public policy response.

So when the opportunity arose to come to the OECD for three months in 2010 to participate in the last phase of the landmark Learning for Jobs study, we took leave from our respective jobs (Nancy, at Jobs for the Future, a national NGO; Bob, at Harvard Graduate School of Education) and headed to Paris. We had already had the privilege of working as experts on country reviews for OECD, and knew this would give us the opportunity to go deeper into how school-based VET operated around the world and in particular in northern European countries like Germany, Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Learning for Jobs highlighted the essential characteristics of school-based VET. Little did we know, however, that our decision to get involved would lead two years later to the creation of a national network of U.S. states and regions committed to reshaping vocational education and training in the US. We have chronicled the first five years of the Pathways to Prosperity Network in our book, Learning for Careers, published in October 2017 by the Harvard Education Press.

Back at Harvard, in 2011 Bob fed the big lessons from Learning for Jobs into a new report, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century. The Pathways report generated such strong interest among states that we invited a handful of states to come together in a mostly self-funded network based at JFF to act on the findings and recommendations in the report. Fast forward to 2017. The JFF Pathways team of 12 now works with 14 states and about 60 economic regions within those states to build pathways systems. A major initiative funded by JP Morgan Chase and led by the organization of chief school officers (state ministers) entitled, “New Skills for Youth,” is also strengthening states’ capacity to build career pathways, and myriad promising regional initiatives are underway to infuse greater career information and experience into the high school experience. Examples of Delaware and Tennessee’s pathways development and progress to date can be found here and here as well as in our book.

Most of the new initiatives, while inspired especially by the German and Swiss dual systems, do not now resemble these – and most likely never will. Nonetheless, some lessons from the best systems do influence the strategies states are implementing. Learning for Careers identifies three characteristics of strong European VET that can be translated into the US educational, economic, and cultural context:

• youth in VET take on adult responsibility in workplaces and demonstrate both maturity and technical skill - active learning outside of classrooms meets the developmental needs of adolescents to take “safe” risks, to be challenged, and to test out behaviour in an intergenerational setting; 

• employers act willingly in their self-interest and as partners to the state in building a pipeline of young professionals - employers willingly mentor young people as a social responsibility and as a contribution to social cohesion; and, 

• VET has a secret glue in the employer associations and chambers that aggregate employer need and train for a sector, not for a specific company - such sector organizations can play this role because of a common qualifications system which specifies competencies, behaviours, and knowledge required. (Non-governmental groups in the U.S. are haltingly attempting to build a qualifications system.)

If a European VET aficionado were to visit Delaware, Minnesota, Ohio, or Tennessee, she would see high schools and their tertiary partners building pathways in such fields as tech, advanced manufacturing, and healthcare and NGOs urging employers to open their doors to 16 and 17-year-old apprentices and interns. And perhaps most important, she would hear a difficult conversation about inequality and economic mobility. Our argument is that if through our Network we can enable many more low-income youth to enter the labor market equipped with the technical expertise, professional behaviors, and social networks now enjoyed primarily by children of privilege, we can put them on a path to economic mobility – a benefit for them, their families, and society at large.

Links
OECD Policy Reviews of Vocational Education and Training (VET) - Learning for Jobs
Learning for Careers - The Pathways to Prosperity Network

Join our OECD Teacher Community on Edmodo

Photo credit: @Shutterstock 

How to prepare students for the complexity of a global society

by Anthony Jackson, Director, Center for Global Education at Asia Society
Andreas Schleicher, Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

In all countries, rapidly changing global economic, digital, cultural, and environmental forces are shaping young people’s lives and their futures. From Boston to Bangkok to Buenos Aires, we live today in a VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

The world’s growing complexity and diversity present both opportunity and challenge. On the one hand, globalization can bring important new perspectives, innovation, and improved living standards. But on the other, it can also contribute to economic inequality, social division, and conflict.

How well education systems prepare all of their students to thrive amid today’s rapidly changing world will determine the future prosperity and security of their nations – and of the world as a whole. Global competence education is what will empower students to do just that. Globally competent students can draw on and combine the disciplinary knowledge and modes of thinking acquired in schools to ask questions, analyse data and arguments, explain phenomena, and develop a position concerning a local, global or cultural issue. They can retain their cultural identity but are simultaneously aware of the cultural values and beliefs of people around them, they examine the origins and implications of others’ and their own assumptions. And they can create opportunities to take informed, reflective action and have their voices heard.

On top of the complexity of our increasingly interconnected world, and the call of employers for better intercultural skills, we’ve watched in recent years as waves of nationalism, racism, and anti-globalism have swept across countries around the world. It makes global competence education that much more critical. To put it simply, the number-one solution to combating nationalist fervor is increasing global understanding.

Both the United Nations and OECD have prioritized global citizenship and global competence education in recent years, with good reason. Globally competent individuals are aware, curious, and interested in learning about the world and how it works, beyond their immediate environment. They recognize the perspectives and worldviews of others and are able to interact and communicate with people across cultures and regions in appropriate ways. And most critically, globally competent individuals don’t just understand the world (which is no small thing in and of itself)—they are an active part of it. They can and do take action to solve problems big and small to improve our collective well-being.

At the end of the day, it is globally competent individuals who will be able to solve the world’s seemingly intractable problems. And it’s up to our world’s educators to prepare those individuals for their global futures.

Schools can make an important difference. They are the first place where children encounter the diversity of society. They can provide students with opportunities to learn about global developments that affect the world and their own lives. They can teach students to develop a fact-based and critical worldview and equip students with an appreciation of other cultures and an awareness of their own cultural identities. They can engage students in experiences that facilitate international and intercultural relations. And they can promote the value of diversity, which in turn encourages sensitivity, respect and appreciation.

But how to do that? In a new publication by the Center for Global Education at Asia Society and OECD, Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world, we set forward the PISA framework for global competence developed by OECD, which aligns closely with the definition developed by the Center for Global Education. Based on Asia Society’s extensive experience supporting educators in integrating global competence into their teaching, the publication also provides practical guidance and examples of how educators can embed global competence into their existing curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

As the publication demonstrates through its myriad examples, teachers from around the world have already recognized the importance of teaching for global competence. In one example from a political science teacher in India, students visited a nearby refugee camp to learn about the complexity of the global refugee crisis; in another, a social studies teacher in Mexico guided her students to make recommendations for reducing corruption that they then presented to local officials.

But it also shows that for all students to develop global competence – regardless of their wealth, ethnicity, gender, or background – we need to create access to high-quality professional learning for every teacher in the world. Teachers prepared to develop students’ global competence is a requirement for a sustainable, livable future.

Professional learning for teachers is key, and that requires leveraging digital technology to rapidly build capacity at scale. The challenge now is providing access to these types of professional development resources for all teachers, to transform their teaching methods, their classrooms, their schools – and, eventually, each and every one of their students.

Links
Teaching for global competence in a rapidly changing world
Preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world - The OECD PISA global competence framework
PISA 2018 Global Competence

Photo credit: Asia Society 

Drawing the future: What children want to be when they grow up

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, Directorate for Education and Skills

The next generation of children will need to create jobs, not just seek jobs. They will draw on their curiosity, imagination, entrepreneurship and resilience, the joy of failing forward. Their schools will help them discover their passions and aspirations, develop their potential, and find their place in society.

But that is easier said than done, and good reading, math and science skills are just part of the answer. To develop their dreams and invest the effort it takes to realise them, children need, first of all, to be aware of the world and the opportunities it offers them.

We often take that awareness for granted, perhaps because schools tend to be designed and run by people who succeeded in them. But this report paints a different picture. Statistics showed previously that more than one in five teenagers are looking to secure the 2.4% of new and replacement jobs in the UK economy that are predicted to be found in culture, media and sports occupations. More generally, over one-third of 15-16 year-olds career interests lie in just 10 occupations. And 7 out of the ‘bottom 10’ young peoples’ occupation choices are actually well-paid jobs. The Drawing the Future survey shows that primary children’s aspiration is also concentrated around similar occupations.

It all starts early. When children between the age of 7 and 11 were asked to draw their future, the most popular job for UK children was a sportsman/woman, with 21% leading by a margin of over 10 percentage points over the next popular occupation; and the sportsman/woman was 10 times more highly rated than a nurse or health visitor (2%). Will these children invest the necessary effort to study tough subjects such as math and science when they don’t see them related to their own aspirations?

Perhaps the most worrying finding of the Drawing the Future survey is the myopic view that children from disadvantaged backgrounds have about the possibility set of their futures. Their sense of awareness remains often limited to the jobs of their parents, and that holds across all countries taking part in this study, except Uganda and Zambia, where teachers were the biggest influencers.

Giving children a better sense of the world of work is not just a matter of social justice. It is also a matter of bringing the potential of the next generation fully to bear. At a time when our economies count on everyone’s contribution, we cannot afford that disadvantaged youths rule themselves out of careers that they could successfully pursue. Having children know someone who did the job they aspire to turns out to be key, and schools can play such a powerful role in helping children meet more people from more occupations.

The drawings also show clear gender patterns. Boys have a preference for working with things, girls tend to prioritise working with people. Over 4 times the number of boys wanted to become engineers compared to girls, and nearly double the number of boys drew scientists as their future jobs compared to girls in the sample. To be fair, the UK has done a lot to level the playing field. For example, 15-year-old boys and girls in the UK achieved the same science results in the global PISA test. But also in this age group far more boys than girls said they wanted to become science and engineering professionals. So more science lessons may be missing the point. The question is rather how to make science learning more relevant to children and youths, including through broadening their views of the world by given them greater exposure to a wider range of occupations. Career counselling in secondary schooling comes far too late. It is clear from the drawings that children arrive in school with strong assumptions based on their own day to day experiences, which are shaped by ideas surrounding gender, ethnicity and social class. Those who still have doubts should watch the 2 minute Redraw the Balance film featuring 66 pictures of a firefighter, surgeon and a fighter pilot, of which 61 were drawn of men and just 5 with women.

So the future will need more primary schools with teachers who help children see their future and the value of learning beyond knowledge acquisition, who are designers of imaginative problem-based environments, who scaffold problem inquiry and nurture critical evaluation, and who bring in parents and volunteers from the world of work into instruction to show children the richness of life and work. Clearly, schools cannot do this alone, but they can play a key part, and the bottom line is that we owe all youths the education that wise parents want for their own children.

The Drawing the Future report will be formally launched at #Davos on the 25th January #WEF18

Links
Drawing the Future survey
Video: The impact of volunteers on children from disadvantaged backgrounds, interview with Andreas Schleicher, Director of OECD Directorate for Education and Skills
The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
OECD Skills Beyond School

Follow the conversation on twitter: #OECDPISA  and #DrawingtheFuture

What does teaching look like? A new video study

by Anna Pons
Analyst, Directorate for Education and Skills

Looking – literally – at how teachers around the world teach can be a game changer to improve education. The evidence is clear that teachers are what makes the greatest difference to learning, outside students’ own backgrounds. It is widely recognised that the quality of an education system is only as good as the quality of its teachers. Yet we know relatively little about what makes a good and effective teacher.

Our new research project, the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) Video Study, aims to help us learn more about how our teachers teach. The study aims to provide a better understanding of which teaching practices are used, how they are interrelated, and which are most strongly associated with students’ cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.

The TALIS Video Study is based on a truly innovative research design. It uses videos to capture what goes on in the classroom, and also surveys teachers and students, measures students’ learning gains, and looks into instructional materials to get as complete a picture of teaching as possible. The study will not produce a comprehensive assessment of “the state of teaching”, a global assessment of teachers or a ranking of the quality of countries’ teachers. Instead, we’ll be gaining valuable insights into the practice of teaching and student learning.

We don't really know how teaching and learning unfold in classrooms across the globe. At the OECD, we have asked teachers and students about what goes on in class; we have measured students’ outcomes and teachers’ knowledge, and collected information about the resources at teachers’ disposal and their autonomy in shaping their lessons. But that doesn’t give us a complete picture of what teaching looks like and how it influences student outcomes. Watching peers in action, though, can help teachers become aware of their own teaching methods, reflect on other approaches, and understand what innovative pedagogies actually mean in practice.

The importance of observing real teaching can only increase as the job becomes ever more challenging. Teachers are being asked to move away from teacher-centred methods and to cater to the different learning needs, styles and pace of their students. They are also expected to meet the demands of rapidly changing environments, from being able to use new technologies to assist them in their lessons, to understanding how to teach students from increasingly diverse backgrounds.

Observing how teachers around the world deal with similar challenges in different ways can offer useful new insights. Differences in teaching practices are greater between countries than within countries, particularly when it comes to student-centred and innovative teaching practices. This is because teaching practices are strongly influenced by national pedagogical traditions and do not travel easily. Opening up peer observations to the entire world can provide fresh ideas about how teachers can improve their own practice, no matter where in the world they teach.

Links
Teaching in Focus No. 20 - What does teaching look like? A new video study
Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS)

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