Talk:Transformative assessment

Context

Teaching can be understood as a complex task that navigates between public and personal demands. In this, teachers are given the role of transmitting knowledge to younger generations, who in turn influence the future of this world. Accordingly, a key point in future education is the transformation and development of teachers' skills and knowledge. Teachers are key figures, in the transformative potential of educational work. For their part, they must acknowledge the ability of their students to participate, collaborate, and learn through their shared educational encounters. To carry out this complex work, teachers need appropriate collaborative teaching communities that are marked by freedom and public support. Therefore, sustaining teachers' autonomy, development, and collaboration is an essential part of public solidarity for the future of education.

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Teaching

Teaching in Collaboration

In this regard, students need to be supported through a system that improves teacher effectiveness by providing essential supports. These may include groundwork in health and nutrition, social services, mental health, and special learning needs. In practice, there are examples of planning teams consisting of teachers, literacy specialist and special education professionals to enable professional exchange and develop new aspects of education. In other examples, public services and nonprofit organizations collaborate with schools in priority areas to connect students and families outside of the classroom and promote learning, health, and well-being. Through this social and institutional role as mediators of new educational ecosystems and learning networks, teachers and their communities become critical actors in shaping the future of education. The idea of collaboration in teaching should not diminish the obligations or importance of individuals. Instead, it introduces new responsibilities to act collectively across the school sector and to strengthen the individual's role in the management and governance of the school. For this, future curricula should provide teachers with autonomy, complemented by strong support, including technical and technological resources.

Global Challenges in Teaching

It is estimated that approximately 70 million new primary and secondary teachers are needed globally in order to meet the SDG4 goals by 2030 set by the UNESCO. The greatest shortage of teachers currently exists in sub-Saharan Africa, which is the region with the fastest growing school-age population. Often, access to certification and qualifications for potential teaching staff is limited in this area, which makes recruiting new teachers even more challenging. It was also observed that an increase of female teachers has led to a general decrease pay and widening gaps in pay equity in certain countries. Moreover, it is essential to recruit indigenous, local, and diasporic teachers to establish an inclusive and equitable school system and to better reflect the students' cultural background. Professionals from among these populations have life experiences and cultivate relationships with communities that enable them to understand the needs, aspirations, and cultural identities that are of great value in creating a just and equitable future.[8] Several studies indicate that quality teaching is the single most important in-school determinant of student achievement. In the future, it will thus remain necessary for teachers to enter the public sphere and to be represented in committees and decision-making processes. These initiatives ensure to maintain communication and exchange between teachers and the political and social spheres. Accordingly, cooperation and collaboration are going to stay an essential part of teacher’s work in the future. For this they need to be supported to work collaboratively as creators of educational environments, relationships and spaces. Quality teaching emerges in teams and in environments that ensure that students' physical, social, and emotional needs are met. The production of knowledge, reflection, and inquiry ought to become an integral part of teaching, therefore, teacher’s autonomy and freedom should be supported. In order to create a more equitable and inclusive school system and to be involved in current developments and needs in the teaching world, the governments and states must ensure that teachers participate in the social dialogues and participatory decision-making mechanisms necessary to collectively reshape education.

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Safeguarding and Transforming Schools

Schools support inclusion, equity and individual and collective well-being and should therefore be protected educational sites. The English word ‘school’ comes from the Greek skholè, meaning free or leisure time. And, though the Greek institution was a central model for the development of education in Europe, many cultures have developed institutions of schooling, for example the yeshiva, madrasah, and calmécac. As schools have developed and spread globally over the past two centuries, they have assumed a role as one of the central public infrastructures for organizing intergenerational conversations on how to live in the world, make worlds, and care for them. Schools enable us to become acquainted with cultural heritage as well as to re-create and expand it.[14] Schools represent societies’ commitment to education as a public human activity and remain among the most essential educational settings. They are a central component of larger educational ecosystems. Their vitality is an expression of a society’s commitment to education as a common good. They provide children and youth with unique environments to participate in the knowledge commons. Schools ensure that everyone has available to them the experiences, abilities, knowledge, ethics, and values that will sustain our shared futures. Schools are one of the few institutions intended to protect and provide opportunity for the poorest and most vulnerable. As centres of community life, schools can offer powerful support for self-reliance and for cultivating sustainable relationships within local communities and with the natural world. For example, in the face of sudden and unprecedented widescale school closures in 2020 and 2021, millions of children and adolescents around the world were deprived of access to their schools, classmates and teachers. This sustained lack of in-person education had profound impacts on the social, intellectual, and mental well-being of millions of children and adolescents which will be felt throughout their lifetimes. Teachers foster the pedagogical mission of making knowledge available to all, of building collective purposes and capacities, and of promoting emancipatory intellectual pursuits. Likewise, teachers depend on healthy functioning of the space and time of schools to reinforce and support their work. Schools have become one of the key space-times for the deliberate organization of encounters with the knowledge commons. Schools have had the power to promote epistemic practices by inducting students into the rich traditions of reasoning, study, research, and inquiry. School activities and exercises can serve to promote a particular ethos and relationship to knowledge. Historically more weight has been given to the transmission of established truth-claims (an assertion that the belief system holds true). However, important shifts in the past several decades have challenged the direct instruction methods found in many schools. Through more participatory schooling practices and schooling cultures, there has been an increased focus on nurturing understanding of the generation and consequences of truth-claims.

In becoming inclusive and collaborative learning environments, schools must also be safe spaces free from violence and bullying, that welcome learners in their difference and diversity. Learning collectively and collaboratively does not imply uniformity. Effective collaborative learning leverages the differences of students and teachers. In many places around the world, children and youth sit through the day, passively absorbing large amounts of information. This norm is embedded in school architecture, furniture design, and the objects and materials present in classrooms. A silent, obedient student has become synonymous with concentration and productivity. Therefore, skilled teaching is equated with maintaining order. Thus, when immobility is seen as a requirement for learning, the school and its classrooms become tedious and unpleasant places. As studies have shown, deep, immersive, absorptive attentiveness can add educational value, which is why classrooms and curricula need to be adapted in the future of education. Digital connectivity greatly enhances possibilities for teachers and students to access information, texts, and artforms from across the world. The collections of the world’s greatest libraries and museums can now be always made available everywhere. But the key problem of most machine learning is that it can only create futures by looking to the past. Research shows that the same stereotyping, sexism and racism that is present in human decision-making is further entrenched in digital platforms for the simple reason that machines are ‘trained’ on datasets that contain the same biases found in society today. This is true of the algorithms that underlie most technology-based personalized learning programs as well.

Lisa Rechelle (talk) 10:38, 2 May 2023 (UTC)

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