The root of this article was a simple question and resulted in a small quest for providing a straight answer. What should we change in our schools to get better results at PISA*?
In 2018, OECD conducted TALIS - Teaching and Learning International Survey. This survey is set to help countries face diverse challenges in their educational system. It is not focused on students, but on teachers and school leaders and asks them about working conditions and environments at their schools. It interviewed around 260,000 teachers in 15,000 schools across 48 countries.
Putting these two studies together, we compared Romania’s results at TALIS with the averages of the PISA top scoring countries and the average of all TALIS participant countries.
What are Romanian teachers and school leaders saying about their workplaces? On one hand both report less satisfaction with their salaries and employment terms, especially when compared to staff from the PISA highest scoring countries. On the other hand, teachers in Romania are less willing to change to another school/ workplace.
Team activities and collaboration in Romanian schools are below the average of the participating countries and the gap is even higher when compared with the top PISA countries. And we are referring here to collaborative professional monthly learning and team teaching, responsibilities concerning school policies, instruction and curriculum, induction activities, and mentorship for novice teachers.
Romanian teachers consider themselves ready to teach in a mixed ability setting and well prepared for random student behavior and classroom management. However, we have fewer teachers engaged in teaching students with special needs and the school principals report a shortage of teachers with competence in this area. Supporting this is the fact that our schools integrate fewer students with special needs. On top of the issue regarding discrimination in access to education for persons with disabilities, we generate fewer opportunities for our kids to learn compassion, to support each other, to foster inclusion, to collaborate effectively with others, and to recognize the value of variety in terms of abilities in a team, rather than competition.
Our school leaders are younger (46 y.o versus 51 y.o the average of all countries in the survey) and have less experience in their current job (7 years versus 9 years the average of participating countries).
Three times more school leaders from Romania are reporting a shortage or inadequacy of digital technology for instruction, while our teachers show openness to integrating technology into their classrooms. From the 78 countries participating in the PISA test in 2018, only 9 countries applied tests on paper and one of them was Romania.
Concluding, the major aspects that set Romania apart from top PISA countries, when looking solely to teachers and school leaders working conditions and learning environments are:
Teachers hold the future. The study shows that Romania’s poor performance in standardize testing could surely be attributed to lack of financial investment, but we should also look into ways of supporting collaboration in schools, sharing of knowledge, training the teachers in order to stimulate and provide space for inclusion, nurture compassion, and collaboration to the detriment of competition.
Sources:
OECD’s country reports during 2019 and March 2020: https://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/
* PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment and measures the school performance of 15 years old students in terms of reading, math, and science knowledge. This huge study is conducted and managed, regularly, once in 3 years, by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – OECD. At PISA, our country is placed 49th next to our close neighbors: Bulgaria and Moldova and the results are not improving from one wave of the study to another. On top of the list, we find China, Singapore, Estonia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Finland, Poland, Ireland, United Kingdom, Slovenia.
OECD’s TALIS - Teaching and Learning International Survey: http://www.oecd.org/education/talis/
