Yesterday I met with Andreas Schleicher and Michael Davidson at Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD.) Andreas and I have a relationship going back through both International Summits on the Teaching Profession and before that to important contributions he made to the Celebration of Teaching & Learning. He is the godfather of PISA and one of the most universally respected voices at the international education table. Michael, a Scotsman, with long experience in Britain and at OECD, now oversees TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey), which I’m pleased to say the U.S. now participates in, partly as a result of the International Summit. If you don’t know TALIS (or PISA for that matter), you might want to spend some time on the OECD website.
I was fascinated to learn that the OECD countries are thinking about doing a project that would allow for inter-country exploration of teaching and learning through the analysis of teacher videos. Since the National Board has the world’s largest collection of these videos and the accompanying reflective papers - which I would argue may be more important than the videos because they provide the opportunity to get inside the heads of accomplished teachers - Michael and Andreas are interested in seeing what the U.S. can bring to the discussion through the National Board’s assets.
By the way, this discussion on the status of teaching worldwide and building a global profession will continue at the next International Summit on the Teaching Profession, which moves to Amsterdam in March. Interest in the Summit grew from 16 countries in 2011 to 23 countries in 2012 - both hosted by the United States in a move that will be one of the lasting legacies of this Administration and a true collaboration between the Department and the AFT, NEA, CCSSO, Asia Society, National Board, and WNET. I learned today that many more countries have asked to participate as observers in 2013. If you’d like to see the online reports from the earlier Summits, you can find them on the Asia Society’s website and also at the U.S. Department of Education’s website .