Linda Darling-Hammond Offers an Unparalleled View of Teaching Quality Around the World in CIEB-Supported Study
Countries, states and provinces across the world, recognizing that teaching quality is the single greatest in-school determinant of student success, have molded their education systems around the objective of ensuring that high-quality teaching occurs in all of their schools. To better understand how these systems have successfully done so, the Center on International Education Benchmarking at NCEE funded and supported a three-year international comparative study of teaching quality systems led by world-renowned education researcher Linda Darling-Hammond.
Darling-Hammond launched the work from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE), where she is emeritus professor holding an endowed chair in teaching and teacher education, and recruited a team of international education experts and researchers to study seven education systems in five countries on four continents. Darling-Hammond, who now leads the Learning Policy Institute (LPI), and her research team found that these high-performing systems are successfully building a new profession of teaching in a way that the United States is not. Specifically, they have focused on building effective systems, opting not to chase silver bullets or short-term, narrow-focused solutions. Also, these systems have held at the core of their work a commitment to professionalizing teaching as an occupation.
Members of the research team included: Dion Burns, also of SCOPE and LPI; Carol Campbell from the University of Toronto; A. Lin Goodwin, associate dean and a chaired professor from Columbia University’s Teachers College; Karen Hammerness, director of Education Research and Evaluation at the American Museum of Natural History; Ee Ling Low, professor at Singapore’s National Institute of Education; Ann McIntyre, former Director of Professional Learning and Leadership in New South Wales, Australia; Mistilina Sato, a chaired professor from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; and Kenneth Zeichner, a chaired professor at the University of Washington.
The research team and leading voices in U.S. and international education policy and research will participate in CIEB’s June 6 national symposium in Washington, DC where policy and country briefs from the study will be released. Registration for that meeting is now open and a live stream of the event will be available on the NCEE and CIEB homepages. Beginning in August, CIEB will host a series of monthly webinars on the policy areas outlined above. A webinar schedule is available at the Empowered Educators website.
The centerpiece of the study is the new book Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around the World, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley. To learn more about the book and accompanying ebooks focusing on the individual systems studied, visit the Empowered Educators homepage.
In the video below, Darling-Hammond describes the study’s findings in detail and discusses the resources produced by the study for policy and academic researchers.
