Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around The World

Three teachers huddle around a laptop in the school library at Kranji secondary school in Singapore. Rosmiliah, a senior teacher, and her two colleagues are engaged in an intense discussion of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and how to incorporate them into their teaching of geography. The trio constitutes just one of many teacher groups working on year-long projects to create new and innovative learning resources.

This rich learning environment for teachers is not the work of a single innovative school or principal: Kranji is much like any other neighborhood school in Singapore. The opportunities for teachers to collaborate and engage in professional learning are embedded systemically in Singapore’s education policy.

While Singapore is well-known internationally for its strong investment and thoughtful designs for education, it is not alone. A growing body of research has found that high-performing countries have in common a set of strategies for developing, supporting, and sustaining the ongoing learning and development of their teachers and school leaders. These countries not only train individual educators well, they deliberately organize the sharing of expertise among teachers and administrators within and across schools, so that the system as a whole becomes ever more effective. And they not only cultivate innovative practices, they incorporate them into the system as a whole, rather than leaving them as exceptions at the margins.

This book describes how this seemingly magical work is done: how a number of high-performing educational systems create a coherent set of policies designed to ensure quality teaching in all communities – and how the results of these policies are manifested in practice. Across three continents and five countries, EMPOWERED EDUCATORS examines seven jurisdictions that have worked to develop comprehensive teaching policy systems: Singapore and Finland, the states of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia, the provinces of Alberta and Ontario in Canada, and the province of Shanghai in China.

Linda Darling-Hammond and a team of esteemed scholars offer lessons learned in a number of areas that shape the teaching force and the work of teachers: Recruitment, Teacher preparation, induction and mentoring, professional learning, teacher feedback and appraisal, and career and leadership development.

LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND, president of the Learning Policy Institute, is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University. She is the award-winning author of numerous books including Beyond the Bubble Test: How Performance Assessments Support 21st Century Learning, and Powerful Teacher Education: Lessons from Exemplary Programs (Jossey-Bass).

DION BURNS is a senior researcher with the Learning Policy Institute and research analyst at the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education.