people and planet

19
educators were rarely experts in the field (Pryor et al.,
2012). In Eritrea, Gambia and Zambia, instructors in many
primary school teacher preparation courses tended to be
former secondary school teachers with little experience
of teaching at the primary level (Mulkeen, 2010).
The introduction of a global indicator defined in terms
of professional qualifications is expected to increase the
pool of information on trained teachers. However, more
work needs to be done to develop system-level indicators
that capture more accurately the nuances in minimum
requirements for entering the profession. Even so, the
extent to which teachers meet the requirements is not a
predictor of their skills (Box 19.2).
INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION IN
TEACHER TRAINING
The target formulation explicitly refers to ‘international
cooperation for teacher training in developing countries,
especially least developed countries and small island
developing States’ as a means of increasing the supply
of qualified teachers. However, this addition to the target
seems out of proportion to the role that international
cooperation can play in teacher education.
The OECD Development Assistance Committee, which
is the international platform on aid finance, has a special
code for teacher training. It does not capture the total
amount of external support to teacher training, though,
as part of it may be subsumed under general purpose
codes. Between 2002 and 2014, donors tripled their
disbursements from US$77 million to US$251 million,
which is equivalent to 2% of total direct aid to education.
Least developed countries received 41% of total aid to
teacher training and small island developing states 7%.
The three donors that prioritized teacher training the
most in their education aid portfolio in 2014 were Canada
(9.5%), Portugal (8.5%) and Australia (6.2%).
TEACHER MOTIVATION
AND SUPPORT
How to motivate and support teachers does not feature in
the formulation of target 4.c but is a major policy concern
reflected in the Education 2030 Framework for Action,
which asserts that strongly supported and motivated
teachers are more likely to ensure that learners benefit
from their classroom experience. Models have been
proposed to explain how personalities, values and skills
interact with external factors and circumstances to shape
BOX 19.2
Directly assessing teacher skills
Improving data on teacher qualifications will yield better information on how school
systems comply with minimum standards, but will not address the need for evidence on
teacher knowledge and skills. Given the diversity of competencies teachers bring to the
classroom, it is unrealistic to look for global measures of teacher skills. But some aspects of
teacher competencies can be assessed. The initiatives discussed below should be followed
closely. While they may not lead to global indicators, they are likely to answer policy
questions at the regional and national levels and could provide useful benchmarks.
On general knowledge, data from 23 countries that participated in 2011 in the OECD
Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) showed that
teachers’ numeracy skills relative to those of the average employed adult with a university
degree varied substantially. For example, the numeracy skills of teachers in France and
Spain were at the top 75% to 80% of the average adult skill distribution, whereas teachers in
Denmark and the Russian Federation were close to the middle of the distribution.
On subject-specific skills, as part of SACMEQ in 2007, grade 6 teachers took the
same assessment as their students. Analysis for this report shows that results varied
strongly among the 15 countries. While only 2% of teachers in Kenya scored below the
concrete problem-solving level in mathematics, the share was 35% in South Africa, 39%
in Mozambique and 43% in Zambia. The next round of the CONFEMEN Programme for
Analysis of Education Systems (PASEC) in francophone African countries in 2019 will
include a similar assessment of teacher skills.
On professional skills, the Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics
(TEDS-M), conducted by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational
Achievement, assessed teacher trainees in terms of pedagogical content knowledge. It
included three subdomains: curricular knowledge, knowledge of planning for teaching
and learning, and enacting mathematics for teaching and learning. A proficiency level
was developed which corresponded to the ability to ‘recognize whether or not a teaching
strategy was correct for a particular concrete example, and to evaluate students’ work
when the content was conventional or typical of the primary grades’. Less than 1% of
teachers who were being trained for the lower primary grades in Georgia achieved the
level, compared with 44% in Germany.
In the OECD, the Teacher Knowledge Survey, a pilot survey in six countries in 2016, will
assess the general pedagogical knowledge of lower secondary school teachers, trainee
teachers and teacher educators. The survey will assess teachers’ performance in three key
areas of pedagogy required for effective teaching: instruction, learning and assessment.
Sources: Hanushek et al. (2014); König (2014); Tatto et al. (2012).
teachers’ thoughts, feelings and beliefs (Neves de Jesus
and Lens, 2005; Richardson et al., 2014) (Figure 19.4).
Recent comparative studies have provided valuable
insights. For example, the 2013 TALIS showed that
teachers’ levels of job satisfaction were higher when
they had opportunities to participate in decision-making
2016 • GLOBAL EDUCATION MONITORING REPORT 333