Empowered Educators

A growing body of research has found that high-performing countries have in common a set of strategies for developing, supporting, and sustaining the ongoing learning and development of their teachers and school leaders. These countries not only train individual educators well, they deliberately organize the sharing of expertise among teachers and administrators within and across schools, so that the system as a whole becomes ever more effective. And they not only cultivate innovative practices, they incorporate them into the system as a whole, rather than leaving them as exceptions at the margins. This book describes how this seemingly magical work is done: how a number of high-performing educational systems create a coherent set of policies designed to ensure quality teaching in all communities – and how the results of these policies are manifested in practice.

Across three continents and five countries, EMPOWERED EDUCATORS examines seven jurisdictions that have worked to develop comprehensive teaching policy systems: Singapore and Finland, the states of New South Wales and Victoria in Australia, the provinces of Alberta and Ontario in Canada, and the province of Shanghai in China.