What profession is most aligned with the ideal education system? If you are Harvard’s Richard Elmore, you’d likely mention the medical profession. If you are Marc Tucker, you’d compare what education could be to the law profession.
Tucker and international educator Ben Jensen, formerly with the OECD Directorate for Education, led a thought leader session at this year’s Learning Forward annual conference, as part of LF’s Thought Leader Series.
Jensen, now the CEO of Learning First, an Australian not-for-profit education improvement organization, is in the final stages of completing a comprehensive study of nations that consistently outperform the U.S. on international tests. The report, titled Beyond Professional Development: Teacher Learning in High Performing Countries, documents findings based on examining countries or provinces like Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and British Columbia.
During their Learning Forward session, Jensen spent most of his short time sharing what he learned about the Shanghai school system. In the recent past, Shanghai was among the bottom performers on the PISA test (the Programme for International Student Assessment). Now, just five years later, Shanghai ranks among the top.
What happened? Shanghai officials studied other successful education systems and modeled the re-creation of their school system based on what they found. In short, they learned that ongoing, job-embedded professional learning was the key to consistently improving teaching and student performance.
Shanghai officials felt so strongly about that finding that they made that the centerpiece of their reform efforts. They even tied a teacher’s evaluation to what they were continuing to learn and apply in the classroom, and on the eventual impact teachers’ professional growth had on student learning.
I’ll provide more specifics when the report is officially released in January. The release will be accompanied by a webinar hosted by Tucker’s organization, The National Center for Education and the Economy, which funded the study. Meanwhile, you can download a background summary of the research effort.
In search of a profession
To help us better understand Jensen’s findings, Tucker compared a high performing school district to a blue chip law firm. “They recruit only from the top law schools and look for graduates in the top 25% of their class,” noted Tucker. He then weaved a story about how this works:
Once hired by the law firm, the associate is assigned to one of the partners in an apprentice-like way. The partner is expected to consistently tend to the induction and growth of that associate, and part of the partner’s annual evaluation is based on the effectiveness of this apprenticeship period.
Learning is ubiquitous in the firm, says Tucker (at right). Associates are expected to be learning all the time. Based on their specialization, they are required to keep up with the latest trends, regulations, and legal decisions and apply this knowledge to their work.
“That’s what a profession does ” Tucker reminded us.
As he said this, my thoughts returned to another thought leader mentioned earlier in this post, Richard Elmore. In one of his most influential books, Instructional Rounds in Education, Elmore and his co-authors state that education is a field “in search of a profession.”
Elmore notes: “Professions become professional by deliberately taking control of the means of production in their sphere of authority, by exercising strong influence and control over the terms and conditions of their practice, and by making judgments about what constitutes acceptable levels of knowledge for professionals.” (p. 188).
Both Elmore and Tucker remind us that professionals are constantly learning and collaborating. They are focused on results and feel a sense of urgency about their practice. They understand that everyone — even highly skilled veterans — can get better.
The knowing-doing gap
As a listened to Tucker, I felt conflicted. Part of me was excited about the findings and possibilities. Another part of me wondered why the knowing-doing gap is so pervasive in the United States. As I write this, I am invoking my better angel. We can do this…our children and indeed our future depends on it.
Let’s redouble our efforts to make public education in Alabama a highly regarded enterprise by providing the expectations, supports and leadership it takes to turn knowledge into action and a “field” into an authentic profession.
