Eerste rapport rond internationale lerarenstudy TALIS

08 juli 2009 - Boekenplank

Onlangs is het eerste rapport gepresenteerd in het kader van de Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) van de OECD.

Het rapport 'Creating Effective Teaching and Learning Environments: First Results from TALIS' gaat in op de wijze waarop leraren gewaardeerd worden en feedback ontvangen op hun functioneren, over hun professionele ontwikkeling, over hun beroepsopvattingen en over schoolleiderschap.

De TALIS studie heeft plaats gevonden onder 70,000 leraren en schoolleiders in de onderbouw van het voortgezet onderwijs in 23 landen. De vragenlijst is ook in Nederland afgenomen, maar de respons voldeed niet aan de eisen die door de OECD gesteld waren, waardoor de Nederlandse data helaas niet in het onderzoek zijn opgenomen.

Hoofdconclusies waren:

Teachers are actively embracing many of the challenges highlighted in this report. In most countries, the large majority of teachers are satisfied with their jobs and consider that they make a significant educational difference for their students. Teachers are also investing in their professional development, both in terms of their time and often also in terms of money, an investment which goes hand in hand with a wider repertoire of pedagogic strategies used in the classroom. It is worrying that, on average across countries, three-quarters of teachers report that they would receive no recognition for increasing the quality of their work or for being more innovative in their teaching. In fact, three-quarters of teachers say that, in their school, the most effective teachers do not receive the most recognition and that their school principal does not take steps to alter the monetary rewards of a persistently underperforming teacher

Better support for effective teaching is needed through teacher appraisal and feedback. The generally positive reception by teachers of the appraisal and feedback which they receive on their work indicates a willingness in the profession to move forward. And it’s not just a bureaucratic exercise, but teachers generally report that appraisal and feedback make a difference in their work.

TALIS highlights better and more targeted professional development as an important lever towards improvement. But TALIS also shows that we need to do better in matching the costs and benefit as well as supply and demand for professional development. Relatively few teachers participate in the kinds of professional development which they find has the largest impact on their work, namely qualification programmes and individual and collaborative research.

The hardest issues to grapple with relate to actually improving teaching practice. Teachers in most countries report using traditional practices aimed at transmitting knowledge in structured settings much more often than they use student-oriented practices, such as adapting teaching to individual needs. And even less so do they use enhanced learning activities that require a deeper cognitive activation of students.
TALIS suggests that effective school leadership plays a vital role in teachers’ working lives and that it can make an important contribution to shaping the development of teachers. In schools where strong instructional leadership is present, TALIS shows that school principals are more likely to use further professional development to address teachers’ weaknesses identified in appraisals. Often, there are also better student-teacher relations, greater recognition given to teachers for innovative teaching practices and more emphasis on developmental outcomes of teacher appraisals and more collaboration between teachers.

The close associations that TALIS shows between factors such as a positive school climate, teaching beliefs, cooperation between teachers, teacher job satisfaction, professional development, and the adoption of a range of teaching techniques provide indications that public policy can actively shape the conditions for effective learning. At the same time, the fact that much of the variation in these relationships lies in differences among individual teachers rather than among schools or countries underlines the need for individualised and targeted programmes for teachers rather than just whole-school or system-wide interventions that have traditionally dominated education policy.