UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — As education systems around the world grapple with teacher shortages, changing technologies and demands for reform, a new book co-authored by Penn State Professor of Education Gerald LeTendre examines what happens when efforts to improve education fail to account for the people responsible for carrying them out.
LeTendre, Harry Lawrence Batschelet II Chair of Educational Administration in the Penn State College of Education, co-authored “The Teacher and the State: Understanding How Global Initiatives Can Fail Teachers” with Jo B. Helgetun. a researcher with the SHIFT research unit at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; and Thibault Coppé, professor of educational sciences and head of the SHIFT research unit at the Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
The book explored the relationship between teachers and the policies, institutions and global reform movements that shape their work, examining how initiatives intended to improve education can produce unintended consequences when reforms developed at the international or policy level encounter the realities of teachers’ professional lives. This book is the second of two volumes. The first volume, “The Teacher and The State: A Comparative Analysis of Nordic and East Asian Nations” explored the dynamic relationship between the state and teachers through a comparison of eight Nordic and East Asian nations.
LeTendre studies international education policy, teacher quality and education reform. His work uses international and comparative perspectives to examine how education policies and practices operate across different national contexts.
In the following Q&A, LeTendre discussed the new book, the challenges facing teachers around the world and what can be learned by examining education reform through teachers’ experiences.
Q: What is an example of a global education reform, and how did it translate for teachers on the ground?
LeTendre: Lesson study is a great example that many people have analyzed and written about. Lesson study originated in Japan and can be traced back to the 1870s. It was promoted by teacher unions after World War II as a way for teachers to study and critique each other’s lessons. It has been widely adopted in the U.S. and other nations and even has a global organization. I took part in lesson study when I was an assistant homeroom teacher in rural Japan in 1987. Lesson study, as it was organized then, is a kind of professional development that is initiated by teachers, led by teachers and carried out for the benefit of teachers. For example, my supervising teachers and I created model lessons for teaching English, shared the lesson plans with interested teachers in our district and invited teachers from other schools to view the lesson. I recall over a dozen teachers, some from different prefectures coming to the school to observe the demonstration lesson. At the end of the day, those teachers, and often visiting professors, provided us with a review and critique of the lesson. This kind of teacher-initiated professional development is some of the most effective I have seen in my professional career.
Q: What tends to get lost between the development of education initiatives and their implementation by teachers in classrooms?
LeTendre: There are several common problems. The first is that reforms try to limit teachers to instruction, push them out of education leadership roles and ignore the cultural values that, in many nations, place teachers as general role models for children and young adolescents. In many nations, teachers have a broadly recognized social responsibility to attend to the moral and socio-emotional development of students. Another is that many reforms blindly promote trainer-of-trainer models that demand rigid implementation fidelity. These models typically have some empirical evidence under a certain set of conditions, often in wealthy nations and with limited sample sizes from which broad generalizations are drawn. When the model is implemented elsewhere, the situation is different — scope conditions are altered — so the model must be adapted or modified. But these reforms almost never give teachers the authority, or the training, they need to successfully test adaptations. Teachers are needed as leaders in education broadly writ, not just within the school.
Q: How do digitalization and artificial intelligence fit into the larger patterns you examine in the book? What does your research tell us about the factors that can shape how new technologies are incorporated into schools?
LeTendre: We devote much of the second volume to this, and we show that the latest artificial intelligence (AI) gimmicks, like two-hour learning with AI tutors, is part of a long trend where national elites have tried to replace teachers with technology. Remember the massive open online courses (MOOCs)? That was a good example of a failed technology that, at the time, had everyone in the media talking about how all college courses and advanced high school courses would be taught by a few “star” scholars. MOOCs, like radio instruction, televised teachers and “intelligent” computer tutors all were promoted to get rid of teachers, and all failed.
Why? First, elites — whether elected or not — want control. Teachers have enormous power to shape the views of future generations, and elites around the world have long wanted to take control over the curriculum. In the book, we discuss how totalitarian states do this, and how teachers in these systems are reduced to tools of state oppression. In democratic nations, teachers can act as servants of the broader society, educating students to question and think about controlling their own lives.
I think it is really a healthy development that we are seeing a worldwide backlash against not just AI in schools, but bans on social media, restrictions of cell phones and even rejecting one-to-one device initiatives. The movement to reject “take home technology” is growing rapidly in the Nordics and rapidly heating up in the U.S. The release of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores, whether they declined due to technology or not, is often cited as a reason to reconsider relying on technology. Various devices, programs or AI models take control out of the hands of both teachers, who serve important roles as translators of policy into practice, and parents. We are seeing more empirical evidence mount that interaction with social media, chatbots and AI can create real harm for students. Of course, in some cases, students can benefit immensely from assistive technologies, but that is a decision that the teacher, working with the guardians and learning support specialists, needs to make. Policy makers need to trust teachers who interact with the children daily more than the CEOs of the companies that produce technology, software or AI models when creating policies that guide technological adaptation.
Q: What can looking across countries reveal about teachers and education reform that might be missed by focusing primarily on the United States?
LeTendre: The U.S. is an incredible outlier. The U.S. has one of the oldest constitutions in the world, and it doesn’t even mention public education. By contrast, the Belgian constitution plays a central role in defining how education is understood in Belgium today. This means that in the U.S., unlike in most of Europe or Asia, public education has been essentially developed by the states for much of the history of the nation. Consequently, the role of teachers as a mass profession has been more muted here than in other nations around the world. When we look at countries in the Nordic or East Asian regions of the world, we can see the powerful impact teachers had on national development, and the central role they play in supporting stable, democratic societies. We found that teachers in these nations had very different historical roles and patterns. For example, a lot of Americans tend to think that teachers in East Asian nations are all viewed the same way — placed on a pedestal as it were. We show that while there is generally great respect for teachers in East Asian nations, there is not one East Asian or Confucian model as there is no uniform Nordic model. Looking at Finland, Singapore or other high-scoring nations as an ideal example to model educational practice cannot be done without a detailed knowledge of the social and cultural context of teaching. As each nation has evolved over time, cultural history matters, but it is also changed as the nations have been subject to different waves of globalization overtime.
