Evaluate own skills, knowledge and teaching practices…..

…….against needs of current and future role

Description of the Unit: Maintain Professional Practice

• The environment in which teachers and trainers undertake their role is constantly changing. Teachers and trainers in all settings need continuously to evaluate their own practice and identify opportunities for personal and professional development. They need to recognise the importance of, and engage in, evaluation of their own professional practice within the context of internal and external factors that influence their work. Teachers and trainers need to reflect on their own practices, knowledge, skills and competencies within their own work role. They are encouraged to identify targets and plans for their professional development. They are expected to carry out an analysis of professional practice expectations and to identify any legal and statutory requirements. Finally they need to undertake a self assessment of their own behaviour against professional codes of practice.

Own Skills, knowledge and teaching practices:

• Subject Specific• Industry Specific• ICT skills• Communication Skills• Presentation Skills• Interpersonal Skills• Tutoring• Mentoring• Generic Problem Solving Skills

Own Skills, Knowledge and Teaching Practices:

• Programme Objectives, mission, policies,local,national and international

• Teaching Practices: Session Planning• Teaching and learning strategies• Assessment strategies• Time Management• Learning environment and resource management• Learner diversity: backgrounds and experience

and learning styles

Evaluate:

• Self reflection• Feedback: audits• Appraisal system• Learner Feedback• Learner achievement

Areas for improvement

• Skills• Knowledge• Teaching Practices• Teaching approaches

Create a personal development plan

• Self directed research and Study• Training on the job• Training off the job• Mentoring• Peer observation• Quality improvement• Conferences • Secondment/Deputation

Some examples of emerging cross-disciplinary domains

• Applied Linguistics• Astrobiology • Biomedical Robotics• Biophysics• Cognitive Sciences• Cybernetics • Decision Sciences • Nano-technology

The noble act of teaching…once a calling

• Teachers are always a boon to society.• They not only hone the learner's intellect and

aptitude but also, create a well-rounded personality.

• Teaching influences the mind and character and gives the satisfaction of sparking the light of knowledge and dispelling the clouds of ignorance.

Challenging and satisfying as well

• Teaching is an interesting and challenging activity. It is not for the meek or faint of heart.

• You can choose to teach very young children from pre-school through the elementary grades;

• You can work with middle and high school students and specialize in the arts, sciences, math, or special education.

A teacher vs. a mere expert

• An expert can do it;• A teacher can do it but also knows what it

takes to progress from ignorant to novice to expert

• Those who can do, do.• Those who understand, teach.

OS for the human brain?

• “There are hundreds of companies and thousands of people writing software for computers. What about the human computer? What about the human brain? ….We have got so used to our existing mental software that we see no fault or limitation in it….”. Edward de bono in ‘New thinking for the new millennium’

Some present day challenges

• Inclusive education: imparting quality education to increasing numbers…developing learning metrics

• Moving from the art of teaching to the science of learning

• Building in the students the capacity ‘to learn how to learn’

• Adopting 21st century communication tools for enhanced learning experience

Criticality of educational research

• Without a science base to support existing practice, the future of teaching as a profession may be in jeopardy

• We need to conduct research that will directly improve teaching and learning

• Document the effectiveness of our strategies

Goals of learning

• Knowing the syllabus• Mainly recalling information• Application in predictable areas• Some laboratory work• Exams of several hours with a variety of

question types• All paper and pen/pencil type

Examination performance

• Mainly a Bell curve• Debate on whether we evaluate using marks

or grade them• The examination can find out some of the

things the child does not know, but not all of the things that the child knows

Potential for improvement

• A student can demonstrate what he knows and where he stands on the developmental scale

• He can attain the desired goals (Grade A) given a longer time to learn and ways and means to achieve mastery

• The Bell curve can be History

Multiple roles of a teacher

• must be content expert,• a diagnostician,• a rescuer,• a patient communicator,• a manager and leader,• a student of human behavior.

Higher Order Thinking Skills

• Problem Solving

• Learning skills strategies

• Creative innovative thinking

• Decision making

Affective Skills and traits

• Dependability/ Responsibility• Positive attitude towards work• Conscientiousness, Punctuality, efficiency• Interpersonal communication skills, co-

operation, working as a team member

Affective skills and traits…

• Self confidence, positive self image• Adaptability, flexibility• Enthusiasm, self motivation• Self-discipline self management• Honesty, integrity• Ability to work without supervision• Grooming, appropriate dress

Teachers as leaders in the knowledge economy…

• Teachers will play the central role.. following the earlier success of the shopkeepers, traders, contractors, lawyers…

• We need to be owners and creators of knowledge products not a mass market

• Needs creativity, innovation on a continuous basis and not conformity and repetition

Some fundamental changes

• WTO,GATS,TRIPS from January 1, 1995• Education is one of the 12 services• 4 modes of delivery of cross-border services• Mutual recognition agreements are critical• Importance of certifications

ICT and the future of the teaching profession

• A networked profession• Designing innovative learning experiences• Implementing personalized, mastery and

adaptive learning• Teachers as leaders in the Knowledge

Economy

What makes a teacher great?

Bill Gates on www.ted.com

How do you make a teacher great?

• It seems like the kind of question that people would spend a lot of time on, and we'd understand very well. And the answer is, really, that we don't. Let's start with why this is important. Well, all of us here, I'll bet, had some great teachers. We all had a wonderful education. That's part of the reason we're here today, part of the reason we're successful. I can say that, even though I'm a college drop-out. I had great teachers.

In fact, in the United States, the teaching system has worked fairly well.

• There are fairly effective teachers in a narrow set of places. So the top 20 percent of students have gotten a good education. And those top 20 percent have been the best in the world, if you measure them against the other top 20 percent. And they've gone on to create the revolutions in software and biotechnology and keep the U.S. at the forefront.

Now, the strength for those top 20% is starting to fade on a relative basis……..

• …….but even more concerning is the education that the balance of people are getting. Not only has that been weak; it's getting weaker. And if you look at the economy, it really is only providing opportunities now to people with a better education. And we have to change this. We have to change it so that people have equal opportunity. We have to change it so that the country is strong and stays at the forefront of things that are driven by advanced education, like science and mathematics.

When I first learned the statistics I was pretty stunned at how bad things are.

• Over 30 percent of kids never finish high school. And that had been covered up for a long time because they always took the dropout rate as the number who started in senior year and compared it to the number who finished senior year. Because they weren't tracking where the kids were before that. But most of the dropouts had taken place before that.

For minority kids, it’s over 50%

• And even if you graduate from high school, if you're low-income, you have less than a 25 percent chance of ever completing a college degree. If you're low-income in the United States, you have a higher chance of going to jail than you do of getting a four-year degree. And that doesn't seem entirely fair.

So, how do you make education better ?

• Now, our foundation, for the last nine years, has invested in this. There's many people working on it. We've worked on small schools, we've funded scholarships, we've done things in libraries. A lot of these things had a good effect. But the more we looked at it, the more we realized that having great teachers was the very key thing. And we hooked up with some people studying how much variation is there between teachers, between, say, the top quartile -- the very best -- and the bottom quartile.

Inter and intra-school variations…..

• How much variation is there within a school or between schools? And the answer is that these variations are absolutely unbelievable. A top quartile teacher will increase the performance of their class -- based on test scores -- by over 10 percent in a single year. What does that mean?

Improving the quality of teachers….

• That means that if the entire U.S., for two years, had top quartile teachers, the entire difference between us and Asia would go away. Within four years we would be blowing everyone in the world away.

So, it’s simple.

• All you need are those top quartile teachers. And so you'd say, "Wow, we should reward those people. We should retain those people. We should find out what they're doing and transfer that skill to other people." But I can tell you that absolutely is not happening today.

Is experience important for good teaching?

• What are the characteristics of this top quartile? What do they look like? You might think these must be very senior teachers. And the answer is no. Once somebody has taught for three years their teaching quality does not change thereafter. The variation is very, very small

Does a higher qualification make a better teacher ?

• You might think these are people with master's degrees. They've gone back and they've gotten their Master's of Education. This chart takes four different factors and says how much do they explain teaching quality. That bottom thing, which says there's no effect at all, is a master's degree.

What is rewarded financially?

• Now, the way the pay system works is there's two things that are rewarded. One is seniority. Because your pay goes up and you vest into your pension. The second is giving extra money to people who get their master's degree. But it in no way is associated with being a better teacher.

In maths higher qualification may matter…..

• For math teachers majoring in math there's a measurable effect. But, overwhelmingly, it's your past performance. There are some people who are very good at this. And we've done almost nothing to study what that is and to draw it in and to replicate it, to raise the average capability -- or to encourage the people with it to stay in the system.

Flight of talent….

• You might say, "Do the good teachers stay and the bad teacher's leave?" The answer is, on average, the slightly better teachers leave the system. And it's a system with very high turnover

An example worth emulating…

• Now, there are a few places -- very few -- where great teachers are being made. A good example of one is a set of charter schools called KIPP. KIPP means Knowledge Is Power. It's an unbelievable thing. They have 66 schools -- mostly middle schools, some high schools -- and what goes on is great teaching. They take the poorest kids, and over 96 percent of their high school graduates go to four-year colleges

Making teaching better…

• And the whole spirit and attitude in those schools is very different than in the normal public schools. They're team teaching. They're constantly improving their teachers. They're taking data, the test scores, and saying to a teacher, "Hey, you caused this amount of increase." They're deeply engaged in making teaching better.

The high energy levels of a good teacher…

• When you actually go and sit in one of these classrooms, at first it's very bizarre. I sat down and I thought, "What is going on?" The teacher was running around, and the energy level was high. I thought, "I'm in the sports rally or something

Involving all the kids in class…• What's going on?" And the teacher was constantly scanning

to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored, and calling kids rapidly, putting things up on the board. It was a very dynamic environment, because particularly in those middle school years -- fifth through eighth grade -- keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everybody in the classroom needs to pay attention, nobody gets to make fun of it or have the position of the kid who doesn't want to be there. Everybody needs to be involved. And so KIPP is doing it.

Lack of data on teaching quality….

• How does that compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that.

An (inappropriate) comparison to a factory

• So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment."

Lack of information and techniques…

• Even a teacher who wants to improve doesn't have the tools to do it. They don't have the test scores, and there's a whole thing of trying to block the data. For example, New York passed a law that said that the teacher improvement data could not be made available and used in the tenure decision for the teachers. And so that's sort of working in the opposite direction. But I'm optimistic about this, I think there are some clear things we can do.

Testing and teaching tools

• First of all, there's a lot more testing going on, and that's given us the picture of where we are. And that allows us to understand who's doing it well, and call them out, and find out what those techniques are

Including video clips of best practices that work..

• Of course, digital video is cheap now. Putting a few cameras in the classroom and saying that things are being recorded on an ongoing basis is very practical in all public schools. And so every few weeks teachers could sit down and say, "OK, here's a little clip of something I thought I did well. Here's a little clip of something I think I did poorly. Advise me -- when this kid acted up, how should I have dealt with that?" And they could all sit and work together on those problems. You can take the very best teachers and kind of annotate it, have it so everyone sees who is the very best at teaching this stuff.

Tracking and helping children

• You can take those great courses and make them available so that a kid could go out and watch the physics course, learn from that. If you have a kid who's behind, you would know you could assign them that video to watch and review the concept

Accessible even without Internet

• And in fact, these free courses could not only be available just on the Internet, but you could make it so that DVDs were always available, and so anybody who has access to a DVD player can have the very best teachers. And so by thinking of this as a personal system, we can do it much better.

Work hard, be nice….

• Now there's a book actually, about KIPP -- the place that this is going on -- that Jay Matthews, a news reporter, wrote -- called, "Work Hard, Be Nice." And I thought it was so fantastic. It gave you a sense of what a good teacher does. I'm going to send everyone here a free copy of this book.

Importance of investing in education

• Now, we put a lot of money into education, and I really think that education is the most important thing to get right for the country to have as strong a future as it should have. In fact we have in the stimulus bill -- it's interesting -- the House version actually had money in it for these data systems, and it was taken out in the Senate because there are people who are threatened by these things

Making a difference

• But I -- I'm optimistic. I think people are beginning to recognize how important this is, and it really can make a difference for millions of lives, if we get it right. I only had time to frame those two problems

More possible challenges

• There's a lot more problems like that -- AIDS, pneumonia -- I can just see you're getting excited, just at the very name of these things. And the skill sets required to tackle these things are very broad.

Who does it?

• You know, the system doesn't naturally make it happen. Governments don't naturally pick these things in the right way. The private sector doesn't naturally put its resources into these things.

It’s your task as well….

• So it's going to take brilliant people like you to study these things, get other people involved -- and you're helping to come up with solutions. And with that, I think there's some great things that will come out of it.

• Thank you.