Marc Tucker, a long-time proponent of studying high-performing international education systems as a means of improving American education, provided some recent reflection on Shanghai’s students continuing to score highly in PISA, one of the premier means of comparing international student achievement.
Marc Tucker explains how Shanghai is able to both produce high quality beginning teachers and continuously improve the skills of teachers already in the workforce, leading not only to impressive performance on PISA but better student outcomes overall.
While Tucker could wax eloquent about Shanghai’s school system for pages and pages, he limits his focus to two factors:
- Shanghai requires even its elementary level teachers to have majored in the subject area which they teach most often. This also means that, most often, elementary level teachers specialize in subject teaching as occurs in most secondary schools around the world.
- Shanghai employs an extensive mentoring system for new teachers and for all teachers who continually move up a ladder of master-teacher levels.
Tucker elaborates on this second point. He first highlights how new teachers, with light teaching loads, are put into cohorts of mentees, all of whom learn from a mentor teacher who also has a greatly lightened teaching load in order to focus on his or her mentees.
Once teachers have moved beyond this beginner-teacher level, they can work for their entire career to ascend a 13 level ladder, at the top of which are 1,000 teachers (a remarkably small number for a city of 23 million). No matter your level, you as a teacher are a part of weekly meetings by grade level and subject matter in which teachers test lessons and receive feedback from their peers. Tucker highlights how this system saves school systems from the nuisance of tracking and employing data and also focuses teacher improvement among teachers, rather than imposing improvement as a top-down administrative effort.
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