Global Perspectives: Vivien Stewart, Pasi Sahlberg, and Lee Sing Kong Discuss Teacher Quality
Center on International Education Benchmarking (27 March 2012)
Center on International Education Benchmarking (27 March 2012)
In this roundtable conducted by Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at the Asia Society, Lee Sing Kong, Director of the National Institute of Education in Singapore, and Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the National Center for International Mobility and Cooperation (CIMO) at the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture, discuss issues around teacher quality within the Finnish and Singapore contexts. Two specific topics that they mention are perceptions of the teaching profession and teaching preparation programs in each country.
International Education News 
I think Finland’s emphasis on teacher preparation is crucial. The only way to have good teachers is to make teaching an admirable profession, something the U.S. could certainly learn from. Even if other factors of the Finnish curriculum cannot realistically be implemented elsewhere, high quality teacher preparation, the standardization of teacher qualifications, and the use of teacher training would result in more qualified teachers and less range in teacher quality by area. In countries that are not performing well, the problem is usually the gap between schools that perform well and those that do not; evening out the quality of teachers could be one way to make performance more equal nationally.