As part of a new research initiative - Women in Learning Leadership (WiLL) -  education researchers from UNICEF Innocenti looked at the available research and data on school leadership and gender. Timed with International Women’s Day, their new blog shares how female head teachers could be an untapped opportunity to address the learning crisis, for both girls and boys. Read it here.

Photo credit: UNICEF Innocenti

To mark the 2022 International Day of Education, Linda Darling-Hammond* reflects on the challenges and opportunities for teachers brought about by the global pandemic.

The education systems of today are too often inherited from decades-old structures and procedures, born in the industrial era, which have not evolved to meet the educational needs of the 21st century. However, the disruptions caused by the global pandemic have created a wide range of opportunities to reinvent education by opening up new roles for teachers to recreate schools. The COVID-19 pandemic has also made clear the urgency of capitalizing on innovations that have emerged for creating child-centred approaches to foster 21st century education systems.

In many countries, schools are being reinvented under the leadership of teachers. During the pandemic, teachers joined hands to innovate and support each other during school closures - by exchanging technical assistance in using new technologies, curating resources, using digital platforms, and developing innovative pedagogies, including those that build independence and resilience in learning. Novel approaches to education are appearing in teaching, teacher preparation and development, and school design.

During the crisis, teachers around the world led the efforts to connect students and their families to schools digitally (and in other ways) by ensuring access, sharing ideas with other teachers and with parents, and by creating partnerships. Many teachers demonstrated resourcefulness during the crisis leading content design, facilitating capacity building as peer leaders, mentoring and readily adopting and catalysing change within their schools. 

Ashok Pandy wrote that “teacher leadership has been redefined, reflecting a shift from conventional positional roles – coordinators, faculty heads, headmistresses, or vice-principals – ascribing power and authority to the holder. Teacher leadership is now determined by the proactive roles that teachers play, initiatives they undertake, and the support they render to leadership, students, and parents.”

Countries are urged to support teachers to develop and share their innovations for the future of education, advancing the necessary change to build back better education systems.

Learning and development: a whole child approach to education

During this time there has also been a growing awareness of new discoveries in the science of learning and child development, including the ways in which relationships and contexts determine brain development and learning.  These insights emphasize the need for a whole child approach to education that takes into consideration each student's academic, social, and emotional development in learner-centred and culturally relevant ways.

When this occurs, students thrive, as innovative schools in the United States have demonstrated.  Educators in cities from New York to Los Angeles have created personalized school models that rethink the factory model we inherited, which produces large anonymous schools with high dropout rates. These schools, which are run democratically and organized around teaching teams and advisory systems, allow teams of teachers to plan interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum for a shared group of students, while supporting them emotionally as well as academically.  

Many of these sites that rely on teacher leadership are community schools which help make education more relevant to students’ lives through an aligned curriculum that provides experiential education rooted in community concerns.  Such schools engage in strong partnerships with families, along with connections to local organizations that partner on afterschool activities and a wide range of health and social service supports.  As schools have built their capacity to more fully meet student needs, their students – especially those in low-income communities -- have experienced stronger academic success, graduation rates, and access to college.

Teacher leadership: reinventing teaching as an innovative and collaborative profession

A key aspect of building this capacity is developing environments that foster teacher collaboration, leadership, and decision-making as core elements of the school design, while involving teachers themselves in the process. In countries participating in the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), teachers who reported opportunities to participate in decision-making at the school level had higher levels of job satisfaction and were more likely to see teaching as a valued profession in their countries. However, only 42% of principals reported that their teachers have significant responsibility over a large share of tasks related to school policies, curriculum, and instruction, and just 56% reported that teachers have a role in the school management team.

Professional and collaborative working environments proved to be vital building blocks for developing collective teacher efficacy, which research suggests is one of the most crucial factors influencing student achievement.  The TALIS survey data show that, around the world, opportunities for teacher collaboration are strongly associated with their sense of efficacy and effectiveness.  Such opportunities are also associated with teachers’ willingness and ability to implement innovative practices like project-based learning, the use of new technologies, and the higher order skills needed for 21st century economies and societies.

Preparing the next generation of teachers to support student learning

A growing body of research has established that effective professional development, which produces gains in student achievement, is intensive, collaborative, job-embedded and classroom focused. In the TALIS study, while three quarters of teachers globally reported that their teaching practice was positively influenced by collaborative forms of professional development, only 44% reported participating in such professional learning.

Successful education systems prioritise time and other resources for teachers to collaborate, share knowledge and practices, and engage in collective decision-making to enable innovation, improve effectiveness, and build shared knowledge and collective efficacy in their teaching. This requires change in how we conceptualise and invest in teacher preparation, working conditions, professional learning, career pathways, remuneration and evaluation systems.

Preparing the next generation of teachers, with the best knowledge and support that our systems can offer, is ultimately the most powerful approach to enable student learning and directly contribute to transforming education. This is particularly true when those teachers adopt whole-child education strategies and pedagogies. To ensure teachers can innovate and that these can be scaled up effectively based on a whole-child paradigm, education systems need to listen to teachers and provide them with the tools they need - including effective training and various means of support. This includes integrating the family, community, and societal dimensions into curriculum, pedagogy, and organizational design.  Systems will also benefit by enabling teachers to innovate and lead in schools organized for professional collaboration, with opportunities to connect across schools and communities to share what they have invented and learned.  It is only by building on and expanding the creativity and capacity of teachers that we can design 21st century schools that truly meet students’ and societies’ needs.

*Linda Darling Hammond is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University and founding president of the Learning Policy Institute. You can access her full presentation at the following link: See ‘36:21.  

References

Pandey, A. K. (2021). Teacher leadership during COVID-19. Teacher India, 15(1): 10-12. https://research.acer.edu.au/teacher_india/39/

OECD (2020), TALIS 2018 Results (Volume II): Teachers and School Leaders as Valued Professionals, TALIS, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/19cf08df-en

OECD Education and Skills Today. (2020, January 22). Reflections on the Forum for World Education. OECD Education and Skills Today. Retrieved January 8, 2022, from https://oecdedutoday.com/reflections-forum-for-world-education/

As children returned to school after pandemic-related closures, many teachers found that play helped to ease them back into a learning routine. Their experiences add to mounting evidence from research on how learning through play can develop skills such as creativity and collaboration.

Teachers and experts shared their perspectives in a session at the 13th Policy Dialogue Forum on innovation organised by the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, in Kigali, Rwanda earlier this month. Watch the session on replay here.

What is learning through play?

Ruth Mbabazi, from Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO)’s Let’s Learn through Play programme, explained: “Play is joyful – children express themselves with pleasure. Play is socially interactive – children communicate, they build relationships, they can work together. Play is iterative – they test and retest what they know, by investigating different concepts.”

“There is evidence that these characteristics help children to learn better and deeper”, added Lieve Leroy from VVOB - education for development. “Learning is not just acquiring academic knowledge and skills, but stimulating the development of a diverse set of domains such as emotional, social, physical skills. Play facilitates such holistic development.”

During lockdowns, many children lost opportunities to play. In the session, teachers shared how play-based learning had been critical in rebuilding mental wellbeing, enabling them to express their imagination and curiosity again, and develop persistence and dispute resolution.

In the words of teacher Eric Ndayishimiye: “Play-based approaches created space for collaboration. They helped to encourage self-regulation by controlling one’s behaviour, emotions and thoughts in pursuit of long-term goals.”

But while parents instinctively understand the value of learning through play for very young children, not everyone understands that this applies equally across all levels of education. Parents often support play in preschool, but resist teachers’ attempts to introduce it at primary level and above. 

Bringing parents onboard

When schools were closed, play with parents helped children to continue to learn at home. As Hugh Delaney from UNICEF Rwanda explained, “As schools reopen, a shared understanding of learning through play can strengthen interactions with parents, and be an entry point to engage parents more in the education of their children.” 

This was also preparing children for future shocks. By playing with children, parents help them develop a breadth of skills such as planning, self-monitoring, self-control,  time management and self-regulation. These all help to contribute to the resilience of a child, so they are less affected by crises.

Finding the right way to reach parents is key. Lieve Leroy recounted VVOB’s experience of working with the Women’s Union in Vietnam to get communities to support teachers to introduce more play-based classroom learning.

Teachers also need the support of a wider policy environment – from local to national level, from curriculum development to teacher training to budgeting to inspection and assessment. This requires a shift in mindset, away from the traditional idea that teachers are masters of knowledge, and towards seeing them rather as facilitators of learning. It requires all actors to see children as competent actors in their education, rather than empty vessels.

Teachers at the session noted the importance of explicitly relating a shared vision of child development to the education system and curriculum. Support for participative processes to develop tools for learning through play that reflect local experiences and cultural heritage was also highlighted.

It's game time!

"Life Story" can be played with as few as two people, and teaches children how to build self-awareness and express themselves by sharing their life story in a creative way.

Find more educational games here: https://t.co/tE3SdZDbk1 pic.twitter.com/pdu8AmcPCa

— Right To Play (@RightToPlayIntl) October 26, 2021

Teaching the technique 

Key questions include whether to make play-based learning optional or compulsory, what in-service training is needed, and how to assess child competencies more broadly than literacy and numeracy.

As Lieve Leroy added: “Teachers need an environment where they can make mistakes, where they can try things out and feel safe to do so. Inspection and assessment need to be aligned with that approach.”

Session participants discussed the role of technological innovation, with consensus that it can be valuable in enhancing learning through play. Animations, multimedia and gamification can bring concepts to life and allow children to learn willingly and unconsciously.

Clement Kabiligi, of the Imbuto Foundation, noted how well-designed apps give children the right incentives: “The apps recognize and praise children for getting answers right, but even when they fail to get the right answers, they don’t get frustrated because the apps creatively motivate them to try again until the answers are correct.”

Back to the basics of play

However, there was also agreement that technology is not essential to learning through play. In the words of Emmanuel Murenzi, of the International Education Exchange (IEE): “You don’t have to have gadgets. I play hide and seek with my kids… . We help parents to understand, let’s go back to the basics – games, songs, sports, all that.”

Session participants identified the competencies teachers need to implement learning through play. Clement Kabiligi mentioned being funny, as “without fun, play-based learning would look like just a checklist of things, it wouldn’t be engaging at all”. David Rugaaju, of Right to Play, gave examples such as “the ability to create a playful environment” and “knowing how to allow the child to have agency to lead in their learning process”.

To develop these competencies, teachers need effective support and an enabling environment,which means everyone around them – from institutional stakeholders to parents in communities – must be sensitised to the importance of learning through play.

Photo credit: Save the Children