Category: Teaching

The path to sustainability for the Liberian Education Advancement Programme

“The Ministry of Education previously stated its intermediate-term goal to double the government’s education investment by 2020”

In 2016, Liberia – one of the poorest countries in the world – embarked upon the world’s most innovative public-private partnerships in education. Its government was determined to improve learning outcomes for children.

Now three years in, it’s time to revisit whether the dramatic learning gains for students in the Partnership Schools for Liberia’s (PSL) first year have been sustained. If so, it would be a strong indication that the Liberian Ministry of Education is on the right track with its reform program “Getting to Best.”

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Are students ready for the future of work?

“There is perhaps too much emphasis on exam grades and not enough on the students’ actual learning journey”

With a myriad of factors influencing the future of work such as automation, globalisation, mobility, and flexibility, the future of work holds endless possibilities for change and opportunities for growth.

As many admin centric and unskilled tasks are now being automated, it’s important to understand what self-management and unique human skills will be valued in the future. The role of education has traditionally been to prepare students for their future workplaces, but as the pace of change accelerates, are curriculums keeping up with the evolving requirements of the future of work?

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Key challenges when teaching in countries with limited opportunity

“The bureaucracy could be paralysing, resources were minimal, and teachers received little support from the system”

As an international educator, I’m sure you don’t need to be told how culture, environment and infrastructure often shape the education systems of the countries that we work in. The external forces that affect a countries education structure are vast, varying from historical biases through to physical geography and the accessibility of resources.

My time in Guyana, South America highlighted this point. There were countless issues that Guyana’s schools faced. The bureaucracy could be paralysing, resources were minimal, and teachers received little support from the system despite organising extracurricular events and buying equipment using their own salaries.

However, the greatest challenge was the innate lack of opportunity within the country’s education system. This limited opportunity was a driver of many problems I faced during my time as a teacher and this quick post cover a few of the most common that you may encounter yourself.

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How to stay healthy while teaching abroad

“Staff are a school’s biggest asset, and their wellbeing directly affects the students in their care”

Working overseas is soaring in popularity for teachers, with an estimated 15,000 leaving the UK each year to join international schools. It’s easy to see why it’s so appealing – new places, sights, food, culture, people and a different pace of life all add up to an experience that can be both transformative and enriching.

There is so much to think about when you embark on an adventure of this kind that even the hardiest of travellers might not consider the nuts and bolts of what it will actually be like when you get there after the excitement has died down. Ask anyone who has lived abroad and they’ll tell you it’s the funny little things that can catch you out and make you feel like an outsider, like not knowing where to buy a trivial item such as cotton wool. Knowing to ask for fruit and vegetables by weight rather than quantity, on the other hand, can really help you feel as if you belong.

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Learning and Long-Term Memory

“If we want to be effective in education, we need to help students build up the content of their long-term memories”

By some quirk of fate or coincidence, 1956 was the year that saw both the founding of TASIS by Mrs Fleming and the publication of one of the most significant articles ever in the field of education.

Written by American psychologist George Miller, it was titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” It helped to establish the powerful truth that short-term (or working) memory is limited both in duration and capacity. This is important because if short-term memory is necessarily constrained, then to be effective, education has to focus on something else.

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To stay globally competitive, the US needs to build internationalists beginning in K-12

“While encouraging study abroad is the right thing to do, preparing the next generation of global citizens must come earlier”

In a world with internet, video conferencing, and 95% of consumers living outside of the United States, fostering international competencies and connections at an early age is more important than ever for our future livelihoods.

Given that globalization will only increase, we must consider whether we are sufficiently preparing our young people to be successful in the workforce of today and tomorrow.

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What we learned from conducting a virtual exchange

“Virtual exchange is a valuable tool for preparing young people for the workforce of tomorrow”

Virtual exchange has been gaining traction as a mode of international education. By connecting students online across borders, virtual exchange is a “third space” of international education, blurring the lines between traditional incoming and outgoing student mobility programming.

Even so, virtual exchange complements rather than replaces traditional programs. As Mohamed Abdel-Kader, the Executive Director of the Stevens Initiative at the Aspen Institute recently noted, there is a large unmet need for U.S. college students to have international experiences.

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The world is flat, and all the best universities are at the top edge

“The recognition of institutions of higher learning in the global South as equally desirable as those in the North would be a positive first step in redressing imbalances”

The world is flat, and all the best universities are at the top edge. Between virtually every university prospectus promising to prepare students for a “globalised, interconnected” world, and any recent international league tables, this – intentionally or not – is the message being produced in many quarters of higher education.

As a Canadian who went to Tanzania for a Masters degree, I can happily report that neither of these is the case. The world we live in today is not inevitably converging into a single reality whose ways can be learned at any one institution, and some of the very best educational experiences are to be had at the universities of the global South.

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Feedback matters: how can universities truly capture the student voice?

“For too long student evaluation data has been underutilised”

Policy changes mean that universities around the world are having to take a more robust and strategic approach to course and module evaluation. 

I have been helping universities to improve teaching and learning through the way they capture, analyse and respond to student feedback for the past 10 years. At Explorance we find that what UK universities really value is an insight into how other countries are approaching the issues, challenges and opportunities around capturing student feedback. Working in Australia, Canada, China, Spain, Mexico, UAE and USA give us a compelling insight into what ‘good’ student engagement looks like.

But the UK is also an interesting case study for international universities. Here, the National Student Survey (NSS) poses questions on how students have the opportunity to give feedback and how their feedback is acted on – and the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework (TEF), which provides a resource for students to judge teaching quality in universities, draws on data from the NSS. All this points to student engagement rising higher up UK universities’ priority list than ever before.

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Germany Meets the Limits of Apprenticeship

“With a population about 25% the size of the United States, Germany has nearly 3x as many apprentices”

 

Question: How many Germans does it take to change a lightbulb at one of our apprenticeship programs? Answer: None. We leave it to the visiting American politicians.

I’ve begun telling this joke to my friends in German’s tech community. American senators, governors, even mayors (most recently the Mayor of Birmingham, Alabama) are a near-constant presence at Germany’s famous apprenticeship programs, visiting, touring – and yes, enjoying our wonderful food and wine – in search of a pathway to good jobs that don’t require a traditional university education.

We Germans are rightly proud of our apprenticeship system, which provides training on not only the technical skills workers need to succeed, but also on “how work works” i.e., training workers on the basics, like how meetings work, and showing up on time. The system dates back to craft guilds from the Middle Ages and involves federally-mandated collaboration between these associations, unions, educational institutions, and government.

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