This blog was originally published on the GPE site.

Qualified and motivated teachers are the single-most important school-based determinant of quality education. That’s why the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 is calling on national decision makers and international funding organizations to choose the best investment they can make in today’s teachers for tomorrow’s future.

Investing in education is critical to reach the world’s agenda for sustainable development, as well as to recover from the COVID-19 crisis and foster citizens who can tackle future global challenges.

At a time in which so many voices are coming together to support the Global Partnership for Education’s replenishment campaign, the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 is making a plea: let’s put teachers at the center of education investments.

Funding and training gaps for teachers

Around the world, education systems are facing massive challenges when it comes to teachers.

In many low and lower-middle income countries there are not enough teachers, and large numbers of them have not received sufficient training and support. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, only two-thirds of primary teachers have been trained to practice at this level, and this proportion falls to only half of secondary teachers.

The Global Partnership for Education estimates that it costs, on average, US $371 dollars to train a teacher in its partner countries. Its ambition is to train 3.5 million teachers, who could reach 140 million students. This will represent about 1 in every 6 dollars – about 16% - of the budget the partnership hopes to spend over the next five years.

This will make an incredibly important contribution to meeting the trained teacher gap, which we believe is one of the cornerstones of reaching the other education goals and the SDGs.

Investment is particularly needed so that teachers are prepared for the challenges that the COVID-19 crisis has caused, notably to enable remedial and adaptive teaching and to ensure that a generation of learners is not lost.

Yet, teacher professional development is just one aspect for which funding is urgently needed if we are to sustainably build a teacher workforce that is motivated, supported and protected.

A call to action for more financing for teachers

For this reason, the members of the Teacher Task Force have come together to launch a campaign calling on governments and the donor community to #InvestInTeachers and increase funding, to:

• maintain teachers’ salaries and enhance their working conditions to attract quality candidates
• improve teachers’ initial education and continuing professional development
• ensure health and safety and provide socio-emotional support for teachers and students.

Students who are already disadvantaged – living in remote or conflict-affected areas, for example – are disproportionally affected by teacher shortages. In many countries, there are concerns about the impact on teachers of low salaries, heavy workloads, high levels of stress and poor working conditions.

The COVID-19 crisis added yet another layer of complexity, with teachers bearing the brunt of the massive upheavals that nearly every education system faced once schools moved to total or partial closures.

During the pandemic, special training to help deal with the crisis was offered to teachers in less than half of all countries and only about 15% in sub-Saharan Africa and Oceania.

Qualified and motivated teachers are the single-most important school-based determinant of quality education.

When teachers are better paid, their students have higher test scores, in high-income countries as well as in sub-Saharan Africa. Teachers play a critical role in fighting gender stereotypes and promoting inclusion within classrooms and beyond.

During the COVID-19 crisis, teachers not only adapted swiftly to online and distance learning, but also provided crucial socio-emotional support for students and their families, and shared vital health information within communities.

A campaign for teachers to ensure a better future for all

Just over a year ago, the members of the Teacher Task Force came together to shine a light on the teaching community’s role in tackling the education disruptions brought on by the pandemic.

In our Call for Action on Teachers, we identified six target areas where action is necessary to ensure that teachers can support learning continuity. These included preserving wages and salaries, protecting teachers’ and learners’ well-being, ensuring teachers are included in decision making, improving and accelerating teacher training, ensuring responses had a strong equity lens, and including teachers in recovery packages.

One year later, we can see many positive advances. While teachers have been recognized for their role in ensuring learning continuity, there has been a renewed acknowledgement of the importance of face-to-face teaching and the safe space that schools provide. In particular, teachers have innovated in spectacular ways, finding solutions to ensure that students keep learning, within both online and offline environments.

There are countless examples of teachers who have spontaneously come together to create learning groups and peer support, often across borders. One teacher in Indonesia created an online community, which grew to over 800 teachers, and in the Maldives, a parent-teacher support group was created to guide teachers and parents dealing with distance learning for special needs children.

However, the crisis has clearly shown the need to sustain and increase domestic and international investment in teachers and teaching. Our “InvestInTeachers” campaign has already begun on social media, and you can sign up to receive updates on new research and events on our website.

Join us in calling on national decision makers and international funding organizations to choose the best investment they can make – in today’s teachers for tomorrow’s future.

For more information visit the campaign’s webpage.

By Maria Teresa Tatto, Arizona State University.

While it has long been recognised that teachers require adequate qualifications and training, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted as never before the critical role of highly qualified teachers. In particular, the crisis brought to light teachers’ need for distance-based pedagogical skills, digital and ICT skills, socio-emotional skills, and greater capacity for self-directed learning, innovation and creativity. To improve teacher quality, however, it is vital to be able to measure it. The development in 2021 of a new classification system of teacher training programmes (ISCED-T) is an important step forward in measuring teacher quality.

Let’s take a look at current global measurement of teacher quality, which is based on Target 4.c of the Sustainable Development Goals: “By 2030, substantially increase the supply of qualified teachers, including through international cooperation for teacher training in developing countries, especially least developed countries and small island developing States.” To assess progress against SDG4.c, two kinds of indicators are currently used. One type sheds light on remuneration and incentives, Indicator 4.c.5 (i.e., salary relative to professions with similar levels of qualifications) and Indicator 4.c.6, teacher attrition rates, which are often related to the former. The other type focuses more directly on teacher quality including the following concepts:

• Trained teachers (Indicator 4.c.1) - “Proportion of teachers with the minimum required qualifications”, defined as those who have received at least the minimum organized pedagogical teacher training pre-service and in-service required for teaching. It is also the global indicator for tracking target 4.c;
• Qualified teachers (Indicator 4.c.3) - “Percentage of teachers qualified according to national standards”, defined as those who have at least the minimum academic qualifications required for teaching their subjects at the relevant level; and
• Supported teachers (Indicator 4.c.7) - “Percentage of teachers who received in-service training in the last 12 months.”

In addition, indicators 4.c.2 and 4.c.4 measure the ratios of pupils to trained teachers and qualified teachers, respectively, providing a measure of students’ relative access to teachers and thus shining additional light on educational quality.

The problem with these global indicators is that there are no international definitions of “trained”, “qualified” or “supported” teachers – only national standards. For instance, “trained” primary teachers in Niger complete an upper secondary education diploma in teacher training, whereas in South Africa they complete a tertiary-level degree in education. Similarly, many teachers receive in-service training, but the length and quality of training varies. Lastly, if countries find it difficult to comply with ambiguous notions of minimum training, they might tend to report a larger proportion of teachers as trained than that which reflects the actual situation.

The “qualified” teacher definition has similar limitations and related indicators require additional metrics showing whether teachers have been exposed to and have acquired the needed knowledge, skills, values and beliefs.

International Standard Classification of Teacher Training Programmes (ISCED-T)

High-quality teachers can only be developed through high-quality teacher education programmes. Building upon the International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), a framework designed to generate comparable statistics on education and training, the UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) has been developing a new classification of teacher training programmes as a contribution to tracking progress against SDG4.c. and shedding light on teacher training programmes.

Early analysis by UIS resulted in a list of ten potential criteria for classifying teacher training programmes:

1. ISCED level of the training programme,
2. the teaching level in which graduates are authorized to teach,
3. education pre-requisites for entering the programme,
4. duration of the programme,
5. pathway to the teaching profession (concurrent, consecutive, alternative),
6. type of institution,
7. content (proportion of academic and pedagogical content);
8. name of qualification or degree awarded,
9. teaching practice required for completion, and
10. probation/induction support.

The proposed new classification of teacher training programmes - or ISCED-T - and the proposed criteria should respond to current needs, but the number of criteria may need to be reduced to include only the four first indicators due to difficulty in collecting all the data and the need to balance detail with usability. However, while indicators 1-4 can shed much-needed light on critical aspects of teacher training quality, additional metrics are needed.

Reframing teacher education and development and opportunities to learn

The persistent gaps in information on teacher quality and the new spotlight on teachers due to COVID-19 signal an urgent need for creativity and international cooperation to collect data that measure key information about teacher training programmes. Given the variety in national standards, countries need to collaborate to develop universal standards and methodologies to measure teacher education quality.

Reframing teacher education and development standards is an important means to advance definitions, measurement and procedures to create sustainable indicators that provide valid evidence about SDG target 4.c. This effort may occur as part of the development of ISCED-T, the refinement of SDG4.c indicators or within alternative models to ensure the collection of a broader set of indicators that shed light on teacher qualifications and quality of their education and training.

Beginning in 2008, the TEDS-M and FIRSTMATH studies measured a comprehensive range of indicators of teacher education quality applicable at the international level in almost 30 countries. Such indicators have been linked to teacher education knowledge outcomes and with teacher success in the first years of teaching. The research has helped develop valid indicators of quality initial teacher education, practicum and induction. The following describes the main areas of teacher education and development and potential indicators and metrics needed to measure them.

Initial Teacher Education

Providing quality initial teacher education (ITE) is a critical step in developing effective teachers. Beyond some of the proxy criteria considered for inclusion in ISCED-T to shed light on programme quality (e.g., ISCED level of programme, minimum entry qualifications and duration), further unpacking ITE can yield several other important metrics. Indicators can help explore standards on programme content using information on the specific topics covered. This analysis can reveal, for example, whether teachers have had comprehensive training in subject-matter and the subtopics of different fields of knowledge. For pedagogical content knowledge and other pedagogical skills, it is possible to employ scales asking whether teachers had opportunities to learn about lesson planning, practicing and evaluating instruction, teaching students from a diverse range of ability and cultural backgrounds, providing feedback, and assessing student learning.

Practicum

The practicum or internship experience typically occurs as part of formal teacher training programmes and is designed to help students connect theoretical knowledge of teaching to a practical setting under supervision by more experienced teachers. In assessing teacher quality, it is important to know whether teachers received opportunities to learn to manage in real school settings, the demands of the curriculum and compliance with school norms. Moreover, the practicum period can lead to critical opportunities for change when pre-service teachers undergo learning experiences with interpretation assistance by mentors. Scales can be used to indicate the proportion of teachers who report opportunities to reflect on and improve their practice and engage in situational problem-solving. Scales can also be used to assess the quality of the feedback received. Additional data could include the duration of practicum in notional hours and when it was introduced (i.e., mostly at the end of the programme, during theoretical training or sandwiched between).

Induction

Induction occurs once teachers are hired and helps them as new professionals to learn about school norms, regulations and procedures. Scales can also be used to indicate the proportion of teachers who report having a quality induction experience including their success in mastering skills and procedures.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

CPD is critical to ensure teachers have opportunities to learn knowledge and skills required to remain up to date with evolving curriculum and administrative norms. Beyond the SDG target on percentage of teachers receiving in-service training within the past 12 months, additional indicators could shed light on the type of CPD including different subject-matter areas, pedagogical skills, use of ICT or on TPACK, which explores the intersection between content, pedagogy and technology; it could also include indicators related to notional hours of CPD during the academic year. Another key indicator of a high-quality CPD is whether it results in the formation of a learning community where teachers can meet in person or virtually to share knowledge of practices and other general information.

Learning outcomes

Finally, indicators of teachers’ levels of competence could be developed from low-stakes formative assessments of the knowledge, skills, values and beliefs that teachers need to be effective. This would help monitor the quality of the education/preparation that teachers have received during and at the end of their programmes, and whether further support is needed. Teacher CPD frameworks based on teachers’ expected competencies can inform national-level indicators that can be developed and used to assess whether teachers have attained expected outcomes for their level and rank in the national structure, as well as other expectations based on subject matter specialization, educational level, and other criteria. The TEDS-M and FIRSTMATH studies have provided a useful international framework that can be adapted to measure whether ITE and CPD are meeting their objectives.

Conclusion

ISCED-T will provide a much-needed classification system to shed more light on the quality of training programmes and therefore teachers; it should however be complemented with new measures of opportunities that teachers have to acquire the knowledge, skills, values and beliefs that allow them to be effective. ISCED-T can be complemented by a broader scope of indicators reflecting the lifespan of teacher preparation and professional development. It can also be complemented by low stakes formative assessments that measure the levels of knowledge acquired by teachers during and after the end of their education and/or training. This more comprehensive perspective on teachers’ lifelong learning will increasingly be important to effectively develop, measure and benchmark teacher quality at the national and international levels.

The author of this blog is Dr Maria Teresa Tatto, an expert in the field of comparative education with a focus on teacher education systems. As Executive Director and lead principal investigator of the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics (TEDS-M)—the first global international study of educator preparation in mathematics—she created a theoretical framework to analyze the relationships between teacher preparation research, policy, and practice. Dr Maria Teresa Tatto is a Professor of Comparative Education at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College in the Division of Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University.

For more information and data related to teachers, see the Teacher Task Force information related to SDG4.c indicators as well as additional international sources of data and statistics on teachers and teaching.

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