Professionalizing teachers: the wider policy context. Budva, 2006.

1. Professionalizing teachers: the
wider policy context
Péter Radó
Director
Center for Educational Policy Analysis, Hungary
OPEK

2. Questions to be addressed
• Who determines expectations towards teachers?
• What are the expectations towards teachers?
• What makes a teacher a learner?
• What makes a school a learning organization?
• How can policy promote individual and organizational
learning?

3. Who determines expectations?
• Expectations of the employers (teachers as employees on the
labor market) – does not work:
• Teachers are public employees, narrow HR management competencies
of directors
• Insufficient information on the quality of the work of teachers
•Anticipation of changes within and outside education systems
• Education systems are isolated, mechanisms of building on anticipated
changes in the economic, technological and social emvironment of
schools are weak
• Weak flexibility for adjusting to the changes in the environment (school
autonomy, empowerment)
•International references
• Access to information produced by research and evaluation elsewhere
• Vision substitutes (country models or the international mainstream)
Consequence: educational policy is captured by academic
experts and the interest of the (initial and INSET) training
providers

4. Expectations towards teachers: a sample list
• Ability to interpret national and organizational goals
• Ability to use the whole repertoire of differentiated teaching
(formative assessment, multiple ways of organizing
learning in the classroom, etc.)
• Awareness of own biases and stereotyped expectations,
inclusive behavior and teaching
• Ability to construct the content of learning in a multicultural
manner
• Ability to compensate for personal and socio-cultural
disadvantages
• Ability to use ICT and to incorporate them into teaching
strategies
• Ability to cross subject and educational level borders
• Ability to co-operate with others within and outside of the
school

5. Making the teachers learners
The conditions of successful learning:
• Motivation to learn
• Are teachers convinced about the validity and relevance of
expectations?
• Is success made visible?
• Is learning an additional burden?
• Individual return of learning
• Salary differentiation – what might be the basis for differentiation?
• Access to information
• Information on performance
• Information on learning opportunities
• Information that support formal, informal and non-formal learning
• Access to learning opportunities
• Supply driven and demand driven training systems
• Capacity building policies of schools
• The culture of learning – the learning friendly environment
Conclusion: bigger emphasis on the organizational environment,
i.e. on schools

6. Making the schools learning organizations
Learning organization: „an organization and individuals within
it with the capacity to create results that matter” (P.M. Senge)
= schools that are able to improve students’ learning
• Leadership and management – „Schools are not manageable
professional bureaucracies” (H. Mintzberg)
• Self-evaluation and internal school development cycles with
strong focus on students’ learning („PDCA”)
• Connecting organizational processes with internal development
(co-operation instead of rituals, quality management)
• Connecting individual capacity building with organizational
goals
• Teachers treated as accountable professional and not as
„missioners” – human resource management

7. What can educational policy do?
The external conditions of school level change:
• Setting easily interpreted goals (curriculum targets, measurable
achievement standards, promoting the chain of
interpretation)
• Regulation that incite and enforce the self-development effort
of schools
• Empowerment, professional, organizational and financial
autonomy of schools
• Deregulation, resistance to „problem solving” by regulation
• Appropriate professional support services
• Targeting schools and not individual teachers, adjusting supply to
demand
• Targeting students’ learning, not only teaching
• Accountability system: external measurement and evaluation of
the extent to which goals are met, information feed-back
• Targeted developmental intervention in underachieving schools