Oecd Education & Skills Topclass Podcast

You’re no doubt hearing a lot about education these days, with the release of the latest results from PISA. Over the two decades of its existence, the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment has convened a growing number of countries – now around 80 – to participate in its triennial assessment of what 15-year-old students know and can do. But PISA has also attracted some criticism along the way. Yong Zhao, professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas, and Aaron Benavot, professor of Global Education Policy in the School of Education at the State University of New York at Albany, discuss the value of a test the whole world can take with Director of the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher.

The world that today’s students will enter after leaving school is volatile, complex and uncertain. Things have changed dramatically in just ten years, and the rate of change shows no signs of slowing. Students will need to adapt to new ways of working, socialising and participating in society. Overcoming these challenges will require a generation of innovators, and a new approach to education. But how can educators foster innovation among their students? And why are schools struggling to do this today? To discuss this, we caught up with Geoff Mulgan, CEO of Nesta, and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, a senior analyst in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills.

Teaching, like any other profession, will need to adapt to the new challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. But unlike some other professions, innovations in teaching are unlikely to come in the form of the latest gadgets or software – it will instead be a matter of refining and reshaping practice. But are our current education systems ready to accommodate this? Steven Farr, Director of Classroom Leadership at Teach For All, and Noémie Le Donné, analyst for the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), discuss what innovation in teaching actually is and why it’s important, also touching on the landscape of the profession and how systems today support new approaches. For more information on Teach For All visit https://teachforall.org. Note: TALIS results discussed in this podcast are taken from TALIS 2013.

Teachers’ own learning is an integral part of their practice – after all, it is said that to teach is to learn twice over. But understanding which kinds of in-service training are effective for teachers and which aren’t can be complex, and many countries have yet to find the perfect formula. Data can provide some guidance. Edmund Mission, Deputy CEO of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), and Pablo Fraser, an analyst for the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), discuss the importance of professional development for teachers and the direction systems should be heading in to get the most out of their professional development programmes.

We’ve heard a lot about adolescent girls showing less interest than boys in technology studies and about the dearth of women in tech industries; but in the United States, women were among the vanguard of programmers in the early days of computing. What happened? We talk with Francesca Borgonovi, a senior education analyst, and Luca Marcolin, an economist, both at the OECD, about why girls shy away from tech studies, why careers in technology are not attractive to more women, and what can be done to improve the gender balance in the tech world.

Technology has changed the way societies function, and schools will need to adapt in order to prepare students for the technology-rich environments they will face. But the gadget-filled modern world is still relatively new, and understanding how education should respond to it is still a work-in-progress. The influence of artificial intelligence, in particular, deserves serious consideration from educators. In this episode, we sit down with Yuhyun Park, founder of the DQ (Digital Intelligence Quotient) Institute, and Ruben Laukkonen, Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, to discuss the effects technology and A.I. might have on schooling worldwide.

Since 2000, some 80 countries and economies – including 40 middle-income countries and 4 low-income countries – collaborate every three years to compare how well their school systems prepare young people for life and work. As more countries joined the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it became apparent that the test needed to evolve to successfully cater to a larger and more diverse set of countries. In response to this challenge, the OECD and a number of partners launched the PISA for Development initiative in 2013. In this episode, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s Director of the Directorate of Education and Skills, and Jaime Saavedra, the World Bank’s Director of Education, speak about how this initiative further develops the PISA instruments to better support evidence-based policy making in middle- and low-income countries.

Education is not only a desired end in itself, it can also help people move up the social ladder. But results from international assessments of students and of adults’ skills show that disadvantaged students often find themselves stuck on the bottom rungs – both at school and later on in life. In this podcast, OECD analysts Daniel Salinas and Pauline Givord discuss what OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data reveal about equity in education and breaking down the barriers to social mobility. They discuss the obstacles disadvantaged students face as they progress through school, and how education policy can help dismantle them.

Some of the most striking findings from Education at a Glance , our annual report on the global state of education, focused on the value of higher education today. Has the value of a university degree changed over time? And what impact does this have on the job market? OECD Director for Education and Skills Andreas Schleicher sat down with us to discuss these and other key issues from the report. www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/

Purely knowledge-based models of education – those that prize rote learning over all else – are slowly becoming relics of the 20th century. Education is now moving towards a more well-rounded, whole-child approach that puts greater emphasis on a student’s overall development than on the number of dates they can recite. In this version of education, social and emotional skills are as important as cognitive ones. But what exactly are these skills? How do we measure them? And are they really learnable? Miloš Kankaraš and Francesca Gottschalk, Analysts in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills, discuss the new value placed upon social and emotional skills, as well as the significance of emotional well-being as part of overall development.

Increasingly sedentary lifestyles and poor attitudes towards diet and nutrition are having hugely damaging effects on the overall health of the younger generation. This is not only bad for the body, but for the mind too – remember that children are now also confronted with an extremely complex world where the truth is a moving target and new lifestyle-altering technologies appear every other month. But what effect does poor physical and mental health have on the learning process? Dr. Uwe Pühse, Head of Sport Science at the University of Basel, and Tracey Burns, Senior Analyst in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills, discuss the potential damage that can be done to a student’s education, and what we can do about it.

Lucy Crehan, education author and former teacher, spent months visiting classrooms in countries and education systems that rank highest in the Programme for International Student Assessment (or PISA). She wanted to learn first-hand what teachers in these systems are doing differently for their students to perform so well. On this episode of TopClass, Lucy joins us to discuss her travels and the ways in which countries like Japan and Finland approach education.

With more people settling abroad than ever before, societies are becoming increasingly diverse. Nowhere is this shift more observable than in the classroom. But what effect does migration have on the students themselves? How should schools respond to the newly multicultural student body? Francesca Borgonovi, Senior Analyst at the OECD, and Jens Nymand-Christensen, Deputy Director-General for Education and Culture in the European Commission, discuss findings from a new OECD study (co-financed by the European Commission) on the performance of students with an immigrant background, analysing how these students fare in the education systems of their host countries. Despite challenges, some students succeed against the odds, and this is referred to as their “resilience.”

Is there an equal share of men and women working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or STEM)? Do girls and boys in school have preconceived biases about whether they should pursue these subjects? To celebrate International Women’s Day and as part of the OECD March on Gender initiative, Caitlyn Guthrie, Advisor in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills, and Raffaella Centurelli, Advisor in the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, discuss gender imbalances in the STEM fields, both in school and in the job market, suggesting workable ways to reduce gender inequity and promote equal opportunities for all.

How will new teachers and school leaders prepare themselves to face the complexity of the 21st-century classroom? And what do today’s teacher and school leader training programmes look like across the globe? David Liebowitz and Hannah von Ahlefeld, both former teachers and current OECD Analysts, talk about the challenges of training teachers and school leaders, drawing on their experience in schools and their work at the OECD to analyse a number of different approaches.

In a society that is becoming more and more interdependent, the next generation will have to use a brand new set of skills and a new level of understanding in order to work well with their peers from every nation - a set of skills known as "global competence". Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, Anthony Jackson, Director of the Asia Society’s Center for Global Education, and Mario Piacentini, an Analyst at the OECD's Education and Skills Directorate, discuss what these skills entail, their importance, and how we can integrate them into existing education systems worldwide.

Not every student’s brain works and learns in the same way. Classrooms are increasingly becoming more aware of what is known as "neurodiversity" among their students, a term used to describe neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and ASD. We talk to Tracey Burns, Senior Analyst in the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, about how neurodiversity affects classroom learning and what schools can do to accommodate children that learn in a different way.

The Teaching and Learning International Survey (otherwise known as TALIS) is a survey conducted every five years that asks teachers and school leaders from around the world about the working conditions and the learning environment in their schools. There have been two rounds of the survey so far, one in 2008 and one in 2013, with 50 countries scheduled to participate in the 2018 round of TALIS. We chat to Noémie Le Donné, an Analyst in the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, about how the survey works, what the results show us, and how the data affect the education world at large.

Do today’s students really know how to work well together? For the first time ever, the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 (otherwise known as PISA) examined students’ ability to collaborate to solve problems and the necessary social skills involved in that process. Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, and Jeffrey Mo, Analyst for the OECD'S PISA team, discuss the results of the survey and why collaborative problem solving was chosen as a new test criterion.