good morning everybody it's a great private privilege to be here and let me begin by with an apology for putting a picture of london on the first slide of a presentation delivered in paris but but i'm from london and that is that is london um i want to talk about two things i want to celebrate teaching and teachers and i want to think about the challenge of improving the quality of teaching for the benefit of young people around the world so where to begin and on the next slide we'll begin in classrooms what are flying
under the screen are images of classrooms all around the world and you can look at them and they are similar and they are different they are all in different settings there are different walls there are different things on the walls there are different places some of the classes are small some are large but there is something there on each of those pictures which is instantly recognizable the classroom the place where learning happens for children around the world and the absolute dependence of the classroom on the teacher and what the teacher does now over the last
30 years we have seen waves of education research that have looked at schools in their social setting they looked at the internal effectiveness of schools and which is honed more and more on the quality of teaching in the classroom and the quality of teachers and on the next slide i've pulled off the front cover of the very influential you'll all recognize it mckinsey report from 2007 how the world's best performing school systems come out on top the best school systems say mckinsey have the best teachers they recruit teachers from the top echelon of graduates they
pay them well that's the bit of the policy prescription which governments most often ignore and they maintain a culture of inclusion and quality throughout teachers careers and fred tucked away in his address quoted another line from the mckinsey report a very widely quoted line the quality of a school system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers if you type that phrase into a search engine with quotation marks around it you will get hundreds of thousands of hits the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers widely quoted around the world and
wrong and that's an odd thing to say it's an odd thing to say i thought there was something wrong with it and i thought hard and the reason that it's wrong came to me when i read a phrase next slide by bob schwartz what is the most important next slide what is the most important school related factor in student learning the answer is teaching teaching not teachers and a moment's thought tells you that bob schwartz has to be right and mckinsey have to be wrong i spent eight years as a classroom teacher in secondary schools
i can tell you i taught some really good lessons and i taught some really bad lessons i can teach well and i can teach badly we can all teach well and we can all teach badly and we can all teach better it's teaching not teachers if you go down the road of teachers you go down the road of greater selectivity in admission you go down the road of performance related pay and hierarchy if you go down the road of teaching you go down the road of building the capacity of schools to improve building the capacity
of teachers to improve we can all teach better teaching matters why does it matter next slide stephen dinham from melbourne next slide thank you life isn't fair and it will not be fair it will never be fair but good teaching and good schools are the best means we have of overcoming disadvantage and opening the doors of opportunity the challenge for us is to ensure that our teaching does open the doors of opportunity so we know that teaching matters and we know it through study after study after study so the next slide is a reminder of
the impact that successive years of good teaching have on student attainment it's the very famous sanders and rivers study that looks at the impact of three successive years of very good teaching on student attainment moving up and three successive years of inadequate teaching teaching matters and on the next slide it appears to persist high value added teaching appears on the chetty and rockoff study to correlate with lifetime earnings teaching matters it impacts on cognition it impacts on life chances it is why teaching matters so practices matter next slide we know and it's been already been
referred to that teacher effects exceeds school effects and that no other in-school factor is as significant as the quality of teaching in improving the life chances and attainment of young people so the question is how do we secure better teaching next slide so we'll go back to the classroom we've heard already this morning that we face a global crisis in learning a global crisis around the quality number and supply of teachers we've heard that in some countries teachers are under siege in every possible respect we've heard of powerful non-state actors who are taking the most
despicable actions against schooling and teachers we know that governments are all of them reforming their education systems to secure improvement what i want to do is to think about the ideas that sit behind policies i want to think about how we create the conditions in which great teaching happens so i'm going to talk about ideas not policies it is for others to populate these ideas with policies and i should say that in the context of a global crisis in learning you can be an optimist or you can be a pessimist i'm an optimist i believe
in teachers i believe in teaching i believe that great things are possible and i think there are six things that we need to do to create the conditions for great teaching and i want to illustrate those six very quickly and i'll draw on a range of data and unesco evidence to do so so here's the first come to the next slide okay great teaching needs a sense of purpose all organizations schools education systems are essentially collections of individuals with their own values and their own goals the role of governments and the role of school principles
is to try to create the maximum alignment for those values and goals so that everybody pulls in the same direction that requires a clear inspiring vision next slide that teachers buy into and probably it requires a process that involves teachers in shaping the vision in the first place it is demotivating in the extreme to be asked to work towards goals you don't believe in it's demotivating in the extreme to be given tasks that you don't understand in fact it doesn't work at all so the question is wherever we work doing enough to forge a sense
of common purpose a belief that teaching matters that teaching shapes the lives of children that it reduces in this slide child death it creates life chances for children that they would not otherwise have it will not make life fair teaching on its own will not make a fair society but it will give us the opportunity for more to succeed so the first thing purpose secondly recognition it's key it's not just financial reward finance matters being decently paid matters pay is important but actually we can never pay teachers enough for the benefits that really great teaching
delivers recognition means something more what matters is often simply that their work is recognized acknowledged appreciated not taken for granted next slide it's why qualifications matter teachers need to know that the skills needed to teach are recognized it's where the public presentation of teaching matters it's why where there is a gap between the number of qualified teachers and the number of teachers it is bad for teaching there needs to be a culture where excellence is acknowledged on an individual basis and celebrated publicly not to create divisions but to identify where we have role models to
have exemplars for others to follow but it's also important to have a culture where teachers and teaching are recognized so there are my first two purpose and um recognition my next one is challenge and there's a goldfish facing an enormous challenge talented people thrive on high demand great teachers expect standards to be high around them they're demanding of themselves and of others rightly so great teaching needs challenges the challenge is two-way you push me i'll push you back we'll do a better job we need mechanisms to actively seek out opinions and ideas that lead to
improvement we should do all we can to sustain a culture where rigor high quality doing things properly pervades next slide great teaching needs tough challenges and the challenge of ensuring literacy around the world is a tough challenge teaching is challenging and teachers need challenges and next slide that's another great challenge the territory size on that map is proportional to the distribution of male over female enrollment in primary education the bigger the gap the lower the participation of girls a challenge purpose recognition challenge my first three building blocks fourth next slide teachers need autonomy they need
the ability to do things differently to stand out autonomy is something teachers crave i know what i'm doing let me get on with it and let me improve don't tell me what to do because i've already got enough ideas of my own it's the great joy of teaching the freedom to experiment to close the classroom door to perform to follow your whims to be yourself to be accountable but to use your judgment too anything that restricts inhibits deflects blocks restrains autonomy for no reason other than a perceived need for conformity will frustrate great teaching next
slide teachers need to be able to respond to individual children's learning next slide the next slide they need we need to attract the best into teaching by giving them the freedom to teach well click again which means that we need to improve teacher education so that all are able to teach well next slide to ensure that teachers are deployed best where they're most needed around the world the best teaching takes places in the takes place in the wrong schools we are not putting great teachers into the places where they're best needed we need to put
them into the right places and retain the teachers we want through the right schemes next slide and my next idea teachers need the scope for growth great teachers are learners they want to move forward usually they've mastered the basic skills in teaching and they're looking to refine their practice to explore innovations of various forms they want the space and the time to grow professionally and this in a context where levels of expertise will vary tailoring growth opportunities is tough but it pays dividends next slide we need teachers to grow we need teachers to feel that
they can grow because we're going to keep needing more of them we need to offer teaching teachers a vision of teaching as a profession in which they can grow so there are my first five challenges and now here's my sixth and it is a picture of migratory birds i'm afraid next slide i'm sorry i've gone inside can we skip that one and go to the next slide teachers need care it's important to create a culture where teachers are looked after as people but the skein of geese image matters everyone needs to be able to fall
to the back from time to time everyone needs if necessary to be nursed back to health before rejoining the flock high performing teaching high performing teachers are not immune to stress to health risks to personal setbacks we all get things wrong we all feel tired we all feel demotivated we all need support next slide so here are my here are my conditions for creating the conditions in which great teaching happens a sense of purpose autonomy and challenge in equal measure recognition the scope for growth a sense of care that's what we need for teaching to
flourish six things that will build the ecosystem for great teaching we need great teaching as much as we need the rainforests on the background of this slide the planet depends equally on both next slide next click we can all teach well and we can all teach badly i think this quotation was originally from judith warren little although i've never quite been able to trace it imagine a school in which you talked better simply by virtue of teaching in that school what would such a school be like and i think it is a school and it's
an education system with a strong sense of purpose a commitment to autonomy strong challenge in which success is always slightly out of reach with recognition growth and care we can all teach well we can all teach better next slide and we all know that we can improve the conditions under which teachers work teaching matters it matters to children in the short term it matters to children in the long term and we can make it matter more thank you very much
