Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement

More documents

Recommendations

Info

Section 4: Innovations Around The Globe While the specific nature of jobs may differ between low- and high-income countries, the challenge of skills mismatch and the resulting youth employment gaps exists across the globe. Research has shown that across Latin America and the Caribbean, Central Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the OECD and North American regions, students on the whole are not entering the workforce with the skills needed to obtain employment. 17 A number of models are successfully preparing students for 21st-century jobs in Europe and North America through systemic, pedagogical, material, or other innovations. The following section outlines a selection of those important initiatives that may be replicable or offer lessons for LMICs. Changing the Way Schools Are Managed: Academy Schools in the UK Nearly half of all secondary schools have opted to become academies under a government scheme to change the way secondary schools are managed in the UK (UK academies). As academies, secondary schools have greater independence and can access additional resources directly from the central Ministry of Education. Academies have greater freedom over pay and conditions for teachers, and managers can also make adjustments to the curriculum, although they are still bound by national minimum standards and are subject to government inspection in the same way as mainstream schools. For example, the University Technical College in Reading is a collaboration between a local college, Microsoft, Network Rail, Cisco, and other major local employers to provide state-of-the-art training in engineering and IT skills to secondary-aged students. Changing the Way We Recruit Teaching Talent for Secondary Schools: Teach for America, Teach for All, and Teach First There have been a number of successful innovations in the United States to recruit high-quality graduates to teach in challenging schools in deprived areas. There are now more than 20,000 alumni of the Teach for America program entering their mid-thirties, and similar programs are being trialed in poor countries. Norman Atkins, president of Relay School in New York, says that the disadvantage of many developing countries is that there is a lack of incentives to attract and retain top talent into the schools. New incentives and shortterm contracts possibly linked to supporting continuing university studies could be introduced in African countries with lessons learned from the successes and failures of the Teach for America programs in the United States. Changing a Teacher’s Supply Closet: Integration of Blended Learning Technologies There have been a large number of high-profile innovations that use technologies to give teachers new resources and new ways of teaching in and out of the classroom. The most successful interventions are those that take a “blended approach” to use existing or new technologies and find ways of integrating them into the school structures. One example of this is the Flip School in Arizona, which has used inspiring Internet lectures such as TED talks and the Khan Academy lectures by leading experts in their fields as the main source of “input” to learning. Class time is then dedicated to discussions and guidance from the teacher. The traditional model of the teacher as the main provider of knowledge has been “flipped” to reflect the increasing trend of students accessing information for themselves from a wide variety of sources. Three main insights emerge from practitioners in the field. First, innovation in education through technology can provide increased access to student-relevant material and processes of learning. Second, technology has revolutionized the way we can collect and analyze data. Programs are inviting students and teachers to be collaborators in a particular student’s progress, finally lifting the veil behind the grading system. One teacher emphasized that this would be accomplished through more team-based, formative assessments. Third, mobile phone technology is providing an exciting opportunity for many students and parents in the developing world to leap-frog the traditional mediums for accessing and interacting with content. MPrep and eWalimu are concrete examples, but they are only the beginning of a wave of innovation in the mobile phone space for learning, assessing, and sharing information for secondary education. 17 This section draws heavily on Cunningham (2012) 58 Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement (ISESE)
Changing the Expected Outcomes for Secondary School Students: 21st-Century Skills and Beyond It is widely acknowledged that the basic skills that formed the foundation of 20th-century education systems will not suffice for future schools. The so-called 3Rs of arithmetic, writing, and reading, though still important, have been supplemented with the 4Cs of collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creativity (Robinson 2010). Students are being pushed to become prepared for college, careers, and citizenship in the 21st century. To be collegeready and work-ready, schools must find ways to equip their students with the skills and knowledge necessary for success in information, media, and technology as well as traditional roles in management and teamwork on large, longitudinal tasks with strict deadlines and specific objectives to be met. New literacies that we must develop in the 21st century include global awareness, financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial, civic, health, and environmental literacies. The skills synthesis paper confirms the importance of these skills for employers. Finding a way to develop them more effectively in schools remains a challenge in developed as well as developing countries. Beyond the School Walls— Open and Distance Learning Millions of students around the world are accessing secondary education through various forms of open schooling that allow them to study in their own time and at their own pace. John Daniel’s visionary book Mega-Schools, Technology, and Teachers (Daniel 2010) makes the persuasive case for the urgent need to rethink our model of the school as a single location where young people go to study eight hours a day, five days a week. He argues that this traditional model will not be able to cope with the 400 million additional students that will surge toward the secondary school system in the developing world over the next decade. Programs such as Telesecundaria in Mexico (a millionplus graduates), the National Institute of Open Schooling in India (1.5 million graduates), and the SLTP Terbuka (Open Junior Secondary School) in Indonesia (2.5 million graduates) have demonstrated that it is possible to deliver high-quality education at scale to secondary-aged students at a lower cost and a much wider reach than traditional face-to-face schooling. The key to success in open-schooling systems is building effective quality assurance mechanisms and accreditation systems to ensure that qualifications are accorded equal status to those obtained in the mainstream education system. Open access to education resources and a greater diversity of learning opportunities will form an increasingly important part of the education ecosystem in the 21st century. Figure 2: An educational ecosystem for the 21st century Ministry of Education CURRICULUM POLICY Megaschools Education Institutions School Based Teacher LEARNERS Communities TEACHER-LEARNER Schools Learning Hubs Source: Daniel (2010). Innovative Models for Skills Enhancement in Africa and Asia 59
Page 1 and 2:
Innovative Secondary Education For
Page 3:
Introduction Over the course of 201
Page 6 and 7:
Table of Contents Section 1: Innova
Page 8 and 9:
Executive Summary The Innovative Se
Page 10 and 11: There is much overlap between [21st
Page 12 and 13: Introduction: The Global Employment
Page 14 and 15: Expanding Secondary Education Secon
Page 16 and 17: Figure 4: Employers surveyed in Ind
Page 18 and 19: Table 3: Skill needs in a sample of
Page 20 and 21: The Informal Economy 10 The informa
Page 22 and 23: Section 2: What Skills Do Students
Page 24 and 25: than there is currently in Africa.
Page 26 and 27: f. The focus should be on providing
Page 28 and 29: Enterprises Selected for Interviews
Page 30 and 31: India: Mumbai Name Organization Lak
Page 32 and 33: References Adams, A. V. 2011. “Th
Page 34 and 35: Executive Summary The Innovative Se
Page 36 and 37: Model Type of Innovation Country Pa
Page 38 and 39: Introduction Background In most low
Page 40 and 41: Section 1: Innovative Models of Sec
Page 42 and 43: nies at 50 percent reduction throug
Page 44 and 45: Science, Technology, and Mathematic
Page 46 and 47: Section 2: Innovative Models of Sec
Page 48 and 49: Commission. As such, innovation und
Page 50 and 51: (SSCs) and ensuring that course art
Page 52 and 53: learning will mean only a nominal i
Page 54 and 55: was expanded to Poland and Hungary
Page 56 and 57: land, Cambodia, and Vietnam, the th
Page 58 and 59: For a school, the principal/school
Page 62 and 63: Conclusion and Discussion The regio
Page 64 and 65: ISESE Competition—Shortlisted Ent
Page 66: References Adams, A. V. 1997. Asses
show all

Innovative Secondary Education For Skills Enhancement

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?