Reconciling Tensions & Dilemmas in Global Education - A Conversation with Andreas Schleicher

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

We need to make sure that good ideas spread and scale, and also that bad ideas disappear. That we are not doing well on either side. You know, we are not very good in scaling and spreading innovation, and we are not very good at dealing with issues that do not work in education.

Hello again, welcome back. This week, it's a huge privilege to be able to introduce my conversation with Andreas Schleicher, the Director for Education and Skills at the OECD. Andreas initiated and oversees the Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA, and other international instruments that have created a global platform for policymakers, researchers, and educators across nations and cultures to innovate and transform educational policies and practices. Andreas has worked for over 20 years with ministers and education leaders to improve education. Former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that Schleicher understands the global issues and challenges as well or better than anyone I've met, and he tells me the truth. And former UK Secretary of State Michael Gove called Schleicher the most important man in English education, even though he is German and lives in France. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Theodor Heuss Prize, awarded in the name of the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany for exemplary for democratic engagement. He holds an honorary professorship at the University of Heidelberg. Andreas is also the author of the 2018 book "World Class: How to Build a 21st Century School System." You can follow Andreas and all of the OECD initiatives on Twitter @SchleicherOECD.

Hello, good morning.

Hi Andreas, how are you?

Very well, good to see you.

Very good, yeah, nice to see you. Brilliant. So my thought was, just because of the wonderful work in the Learning Compass and this idea of reconciling tensions and dilemmas, and one of the things that I find persistently, that there are still these different binary camps within education, and so I thought just in terms of framing the conversation it would be great to at least recognize at the beginning that there are clearly tensions and dilemmas that we need to reconcile, and perhaps we can frame the conversation around a few of those key tensions. So maybe if we could start, the first one that I'm interacting with a lot is this idea of structure and agency in relation to specifically a lot of the calls for the transformation that's happening, or, you know, that people are calling for now after the COVID crisis, and just thinking about allowing agency for young people as a key part, but then the balance of how much structure, you know, they would need in order to support their learning. So on the more progressive side of things, you know, a lot of people talking about a real questioning of these rigid structures within education and actually bringing much more agency for young people to own their own learning and to develop their own learning pathways. So just, you know, in relation to your thoughts personally, but also in terms of the work of the OECD, You know, it's an interesting point.

Actually, I'm not sure I see so much of a tension between structure and agency. You know, I think without structure, you will have chaos. You will not develop agency. Actually, I think it's going to be much harder to build the kind of structures that foster agency than structures that are purely there for knowledge transmission. So I think, you know, you need actually to think very carefully about enabling environments. You know, what does it mean to build agency? Building agency means, you know, giving young people room to experiment and try out things, take responsibility, mobilize their cognitive, social, emotional resources. And if you want to do that, you know, young people need to take a certain degree of risk. If they take risks, they are going to make mistakes. And I think really it's about structures that help students learn from and with mistakes. If you don't have those structures, you know, agency just becomes, you know, random activity. So I think you actually need to very carefully channel those ideas of students through carefully crafted learning environments. So I don't think it's a contradiction. I just think, you know, we need to think very carefully about the nature of those structures, create an environment for that.

I suppose one of the tensions that I have heard is this idea that, and for example, talking with the people from LearnLife in terms of, you know, trying to create learning hubs for lifelong learning environments and the idea that you can't, We don't know what the future will hold, and therefore a curriculum structure would thereby perhaps limit the different pathways that students might need to pursue. So that, that idea of the structure of the curriculum, let's say, as one thing that perhaps might be rigid.

Yeah. But, you know, even there, I would argue, I agree, you know, it would be futile and counterproductive to prescribe specific curriculum content in a rigid structure. You know, I think that's, we do not know how the what subject matter really exactly is needed. But what we do know is that young people need to be able to, you know, think like a scientist, think like an historian, think like a philosopher. And I do think for that you do need very carefully crafted curricula. Once again, you know, it's not about, you know, packaging exactly what you should be teaching in what hour, but it's about providing some structure and good guidance for teachers how to develop those kinds of thinking and reasoning skills that are of enduring relevance. If you cannot think like a scientist, if you can't design an experiment, if you can't distinguish questions that are scientifically investigable from those that are not, you know, you're not going to master any content in your life in science. So I think actually it's a question of curriculum design. We should build structures that, you know, focus on the foundations of the disciplines, the ways of thinking rather than the surface content. But I think, you know, you don't need less structure for that. You need different structure. And I think actually teachers will need very, very good guidance on that.

Very interesting. And I suppose there's also the level up in terms of the structure around schools and school systems. Thinking about, for example, in Finland, I've been investigating that with the recent PISA results and seemingly that quite a lot of the positivity about that has been from the autonomy that teachers have and the agency that teachers have within the school system. And perhaps there's a correlate there in terms of structure and agency within the system itself, nationally or globally.

Absolutely. You know, I don't think you're going to see student agency without having teacher agency. You know, when you think about the curriculum, you know, there is the intended curriculum, what we write into words. There's the implemented curriculum and the enacted curriculum, what's actually happening in classroom. And there is the achieved curriculum, what's happening in the minds of students. And they're all very closely connected. So in a way, you make the life for teachers very easy. If you provide a rigid structure. You make the life of teachers actually very demanding if you create a kind of structure that actually puts them in the front line. You know, I need to understand how my students learn differently. I need to embrace that diversity with differentiated pedagogical practice. So it's not about less structure, it's about an enabling structure rather than a constraining one.

Very nice. Yeah, interesting. And I suppose that directly leads on then if we go move on to the second tension, which I see in relation to this kind of accountability and innovation. There's some kind of a tension between those two forces in the sense that, of course, we want that autonomy and agency to innovate and experiment and to, as you say, to meet the needs of the students in front of us or to, you know, really respond to the context. But at the same time, and I really like Yong Zhao's phrase, the tyranny of certainty, you know, this idea that we need to be sure that we're doing the right thing in order to, A, kind of justify investment, and B, just make sure that this is the right thing for these children that we're educating, etc. So that obviously speaks to inspection regimes. And I know that you and PISA have been supporting that idea of innovation in education? Do you see a tension there?

Well, you know, first of all, I would say that innovation is not a random process of, you know, somewhere an idea pops out. It's actually a very systematic process. Innovation is about knowledge mobilization, it's about sharing good ideas, good practice. And innovation doesn't happen, you know, if you just let a thousand flowers bloom. Innovation really requires a very carefully curated kind of way of teachers, you know, observing other teachers' classroom, school cooperating with other schools. It's about, you know, professional autonomy in a collaborative culture. And that collaborative culture, in my view, actually really depends on a good accountability system. In the sense that, you know, if you do not know what your neighboring teachers do, or if you are amazingly innovative in your own classroom and nobody else knows about it, that innovation will dissipate very quickly. Creativity is the ingredient of innovation, but innovation is a lot more than that. It's a really systematic process. And So I think that perhaps we should think more about lateral accountability in the sense that, you know, other teachers, their teaching becomes more public rather than a private process, something that is actually visible to your colleagues. That's also why, you know, this concept of autonomy that you highlighted, it's really about professional autonomy. And with that, I mean autonomy is not about, you know, I do what I like to do today or what I think is right today, but that I do what I know is right. 'in the name of my profession.' That is really, I'm the owner of professional practice and I have the knowledge to do the right thing. You know, you need to look at this from the perspective of parents. You know, if you tell parents, 'Oh, well, you know, teachers are going to try just what, you know, happens to them and they're not responsible for those outcomes.' No, you know, I think you need to give everyone in the education the assurance that the teaching profession has that strength, has that ownership of professional practice, that they make those right decisions. And, you know, we shouldn't go back to the kind of industrial form of education where you think, you know, 5 people in a government know what is good for millions of students, and then, you know, that trickles through the system through layers and layers of bureaucracy. I don't think that's the path we should go back to. But I do think it means strengthening the professional ownership of knowledge and making this a systematic process. I do think, you know, we have an obligation to do the right thing. That's what students deserve. You know, every student has just one goal. And therefore, I think accountability to the profession is very important. In other areas, in my view, we do that better. You know, if you are a surgeon or you're a medical practitioner, you don't try things out at random. You actually, you know, pursue things in clinical trials, you develop, you know, very systematic processes, you share them with your colleagues. If you make a mistake, you are responsible to your profession.. And I think there's a very great sense of responsibility to the profession, but it's nowhere that you have a Ministry of Health that writes a curriculum of how surgeons should operate. So I think that's really, I think, how I see accountability. And then I think actually it's the necessary ingredient for innovation because otherwise innovation is never going to be seen at the system level.

Yeah, that's interesting. And I suppose there is a system-level need to embed those maybe action research type practices to then try and systematize that type accountable innovation, if you like.

Yeah, and transparent, you know, I think really we need to make sure that good ideas spread and scale and also that bad ideas disappear. You know, that's the other— that we are not doing well on either side. You know, we are not very good in scaling and spreading innovation and we are not very good at dealing with issues that do not work in education. I think that's something that the profession needs strengthening and the kind of lateral information flows, the collaborative culture that needs to be built.

Yeah, yeah. I suppose there is also a connection there in the sense of, as you said, it's that idea of the professional doing what they know is right. But then, of course, that also speaks to what is the evidence? You know, how do we know that that's having the impact we want? But equally, and perhaps this is where it diverges from the medical metaphor, is that actually there still isn't agreement, or maybe I don't think there ever will be agreement about the types of outcomes that we're aiming for, right? So as an example, you've got this cognitive versus— the language fails here, I think, but the cognitive versus affective or dispositional type of tension within education. And I would like to imagine we've transcended the knowledge versus skills argument, but it seems to still keep coming back. And even this week it has reared its head again. And there's a lot of still very vocal advocates for the cognitive outcomes within education. So where do you see that now in terms of— so speaking to that idea of what the evidence is for those outcomes, so therefore how we know that we're doing the right thing, and also the disagreement about the outcomes themselves?

Yeah, you know, I accept that there are lots of things that we do not know, but I don't think we should be satisfied with this. You know, I can't, you know, be satisfied with a situation where I have one group of teachers who say, oh, I only believe in cognitive outcomes, so I'm only going to do that. Another group of teachers says, I'm only going to believe in, you know, social-emotional learning. I'm only going to do that. You know, I think those groups will need to explain, you know, why they believe in what outcomes to their colleagues. And there needs to be a professional struggle to find better answers for the future with all the unknowns. You know, that's the same in science. In science, there are many things that we do not know, but we have that urge, that strive to actually build that understanding. You know, we call neuroscientists, we got— and that is what I miss often in education, that we have a struggle of belief systems rather than the strive for a better understanding with all the tools that we have at our disposition today. Again, you know, I do think the comparison with medicine is justified here. In medicine, we invest about 17 times as much in research and innovation than in the education field. We value knowledge about the efficacy of our practice. In education, we leave too much to the individual preferences and beliefs. And you know, for me, Yeah, we can value different outcomes, but once again, I think we should justify what we value to our students, to parents. And I also there, you know, I think if you go just into one extreme, that would not help anyone. I think it's a question is, you know, you want a great scientist, but you want an ethical scientist. You want a fantastic medical doctor, but you want an empathic doctor. So for me, cognitive, social, emotional outcomes are actually very, very closely interrelated. And it's not about, you know, creating a new subject on social-emotional learning. It's ensuring that we have a broader understanding of how those dimensions interrelate and to justify, to explain it and to give reason for that. And then, you know, we can have divergent views. But if we basically just say, "Oh, okay, let's accept that we do not know what those outcomes are," and then everybody defines their own outcomes, That is something that the answer to that by governments is, okay, you don't know this as a profession, then, you know, we write a curriculum and this is how you're going to do it because we need to tell parents something.

Yeah, interesting. But just to take the practical example of this week, I know your friend Daisy Christodoulou, who was tweeting this week about the debate that you had with her and Nick Gibbs back in 2017, maybe. And obviously in the UK, there's a very strong knowledge-rich focus and still this— well, they would claim very, very strong research-based argument for their position. And that came over quite strongly in that debate was that there was a lot of reference to cognitive science research from that side of the debate. But actually, in terms of these other outcomes, as you're talking about the holistic and the social-emotional, the affective, the dispositional outcomes, that always feels to me to be less of an ability to reach for research evidence that supports that. I don't know, maybe that's my lack of awareness of those things, but it just feels that way, that there's a very strong justification in terms of research from the cognitive side, but not the equivalent on the other side. I don't know whether you share that same view.

I, you know, I'm not sure. I actually think there is very strong research on both sides of the spectrum. Like, we have very strong evidence of the impact that social-emotional outcomes have on employment outcomes, on life satisfaction, on the health of people, on their engagement as citizens. So I think there's no shortage of evidence, but I think we need to work harder to reconcile those perspectives. For me, the pandemic has been very illuminating. Those students that succeeded were the ones who could live with themselves, who could live with others, who could have that discipline to organize their learning independently. Who could structure their learning, who could access a wide range of learning resources, you know. Those kids that used to be spoon-fed by their teachers with very specific bits and pieces of knowledge, they were left on their own devices. So I think actually, you know, I think the evidence base is there and, you know, we should probably do a better job to see how we reconcile the different focus. For me, actually, once again, I don't think I don't think this is something that we should treat knowledge and skills as two opposing ends on a spectrum. These are orthogonal dimensions and one without the other is of very, very little value. You know, I think we have in education, in my view, focused too much on the reproduction of subject matter knowledge that now is questioned by, you know, artificial intelligence. Our education systems have done well to educate second-class robots, you know, people who are very good to repeat what we tell them. And now we suddenly see, Well, you know, technology is taking on that. We need to think harder about what makes us human in this world. And I think the social-emotional dimension is absolutely key. But again, it's important that this doesn't become an ideology, that we have actually good, you know, and there is neuroscientific evidence on both sides of the equation. So rather than putting yourself in one camp and then picking up the evidence that supports you, think about, you know, how do we reconcile the different sources of evidence that exist?

No, absolutely. I mean, I personally would very much agree with that, but it's very interesting how persistent the dogmas are and the ideologies are on, on both sides, perhaps. But I just wanted to ask you in terms of a context question, does that context matter in terms of the types of emphasis? Because obviously you look incredibly broadly across all countries. And for example, let's take a country like Chad, for example, with hugely high illiteracy rates, etc. Is there a different type of emphasis in terms of what the needs are there in terms of educationally versus somewhere, you know, more well-developed with the higher literacy rates and higher socioeconomic?

Oh, you know, there's no question about it. You know, the simple answer is, you know, labor markets differ and societies differ very much. So the demand on a combination of skills that will make people successful vary significantly. But honestly, I think we often exaggerate those differences. It's very comfortable in education to say, you know, I'm different from everybody else and my school and my classroom and my country and my culture is different from anybody else. You know, I actually believe that culture often is less inherited by the past and more created by what we do. And therefore I think, you know, we should look at those also as broad outcomes and ask ourselves, you know, what is going to drive the context and culture in our country? Now I was very, very struck and we saw in our PISA 2015 assessment that Japanese and Chinese students were both extremely good on individual problem-solving skills. But when we tested collaborative problem-solving skills, we could suddenly see the Japanese were even better on those than on the individual problem-solving skills. And the Chinese students had a very hard time with collaborative problem-solving skills. And you don't find the answer in culture. You find the answer very squarely in how learning is structured. In Japanese classrooms, there's a great emphasis on student collaboration, you know, on knowledge sharing and all of that, uh, discipline and so on. And in Chinese classrooms, there's a highly competitive culture.

Yeah.

And then, you know, those become the culture that we then read into the context. So I actually think we should be cognizant of differences in our societies, but at the same time also see education as the tool shaping that longer-term context. And that often I think gets, gets lost.

No. And you've been quite, I think, quite open about the fact that in a way you've been using PISA as a tool to support that change. I mean, like as an example with the global competence introduction in 2018 and connecting that with what you've said before, that are you using PISA as a way to question and challenge people's views about some of the educational outcomes with that idea of having global competence there as something you assess, in inverted commas, and therefore implicitly you're saying actually this is something that we want people to take seriously and to move forward on.

Yeah, you know, this is one of the most fundamental decisions that we had to make when we created PISA. One way in which you could design a test is just to look at the common denominator of what has been taught in different countries and then focus a test on this. And that's actually what's been done before PISA in like TIMSS and PIRLS and those studies, you know, you do a curriculum analysis, you look at what is in common, and then you design test. And it's the safest way to do this and the fairest way to do this across countries. Nobody can complain that the test is not instructionally relevant. The challenge with this is you end up with a very stale common denominator of education systems. With PISA, we took intentionally a different avenue. We basically said, let's focus on the union of what is being explored in different countries. And that means, yes, you know, we're going to test you on global competency, even if it is not taught and you're going to see some weaknesses in your student population. PISA is really about opening up new perspectives, perspectives that we often miss in the national context. Global competency is something, you know, this is about, you know, your perspective to see the world through different lenses, appreciate different ways of thinking, different ways of working, different cultures. You couldn't assess it in a national context. You know, everybody would say, how could you possibly do this? But you can do that in a comparative context. And for me, the same is true, you know, So on the knowledge and skills dilemma, in PISA we assess both aspects and we give equal emphasis to this. And if you have a very knowledge-centered curriculum, you suddenly see we are missing out on the skills dimension. Or if you have put all your focus on application of knowledge and you lack the rigor in the knowledge base, you're going to see that in PISA. So that's really— PISA is the kind of global lens that allows us to situate our own approaches It doesn't say, you know, your approach is right or not right, but you can compare yourself, you can see yourself through the lens of another education system. But that was one of the most difficult and fundamental decisions that we made at the very beginning.

Yeah. And that's interesting actually, that perhaps there is a trade-off between those things. I don't know, would you agree with that? That, for example, if you take Finland as an example, they've seen this decline over the last 10 years and they've always been, well, recently been held up as the poster child of global education, but clearly their maths, reading, and science are declining. But perhaps is the trade-off that they're actually focusing on, on the other aspects?

Possibly, you know, I think, and that's again, you know, something that those comparisons should highlight, you know, where are our strengths? And sort of this, this idea of trade-offs is always, you know, volume of learning time will determine outcomes. I cut an hour of mathematics and I will get get less mathematics outcome. But that's not what we see in the data, actually. It's more usually the quality of the learning environment that drives outcomes. So I'm not sure it's a direct trade-off, but surely, you know, if you pay attention to one thing, you may lose out on, on another aspect. And I think PISA is not, you know, making judgments on this, it's just showing you, you know, where are your relative strengths evolving, you know, and where are students missing out.

No, I think that's very interesting, and I've heard you say that before, that it raises questions. I mean, the point of PISA is to raise questions rather than provide answers. But I think obviously one of the unintended consequences is that you create a ranking and therefore countries or, you know, systems try to rise up the rankings, let's say. So it does have certain unintended consequences there. But I suppose that's That connects into my final tension, which was this idea, and this is where I started. And when I wrote to you in the open letter, I have this feeling around the network dimension that we can see and we've seen it even more so with the pandemic. It's very strong, the interconnections and the networks that exist versus these kind of— and they're still networks, sure, but they're hierarchical networks which seem to be predominant in the education field, you know, within a school or within, even within a classroom. Right. And then at the school system level and national level, you have a lot of hierarchical networks. And I, my personal fear for my own children is that actually they're not being prepared to be able to interact and be competent in those much more loosely connected networks that we know exist now, whether it's social networks or professional networks or, you know, just organizations as complex adaptive systems. This is not directly relevant to the OECD work perhaps, but I just wondered if you had any thoughts there on that tension between that kind of hierarchy and these more loosely connected networks.

Yeah, you know, I mean, the future of society is the network society. Now I think we build, you know, lateral rather than vertical kind of relationships. Now I think The future is not command and control, but about collaboration. And I actually believe that has a lot to do with how we educate young people. Do we create awareness for other ways of thinking, other ways of working? Do we see value in plurality, in multiple perspectives? And I think that's, for me, very, very important. In a school, you know, I actually think authority is very important. But, you know, a teacher should derive his or her role through the authority of their kind of knowledge, of their wisdom, not through the institutional mechanisms that the school provides, you know. And that's why I think co-creation is actually a very powerful concept, strengthening both students and learners and teachers in the instructional process. And that's, I think, something that, you know, if you go back to Confucian education, no teacher had authority through any formal position in a hierarchy. They had their authority through, you know, I've studied longer, I know. And I think we have created an industrial structure out of this, where you, by definition, by your role, by your status, get certain privileges. And I don't think that's a very sustainable way of working in the society in which we live. You know, we have seen that already in the business sector. You know, the future is flat, collegial, not hierarchical. And education hasn't done well with We still have very, you know, old-fashioned way of accrediting knowledge. We don't value people for what they actually know and can do, but for how they have acquired certain skill, what program they have administered. And I think we're probably not doing enough to prepare young people well for their future. We prepare them still for our past. In the industrial age, you know, that was the perfect way of educating people because, you know, education was about sorting people. Education was about, you know, making people compatible with this kind of hierarchical ways of working. And I think that's something that we will need to revisit. I think it's going to make the teacher's role much more challenging, but also so much more interesting. You know, I think actually the future teacher role, if you are not just an instructor, but you are also a good coach, a good mentor, I think you will actually have a much more rewarding— if your role is really to develop human beings rather than just to transmit a specific piece of a subject, I think the role for teachers will be far more rewarding, and not to speak of more effective.

Yeah, no, absolutely, I would agree. And I think we do need to do a lot more with that because I think it's a, it's a challenge. And I think sometimes we imagine that children aren't ready for that kind of approach. And there are people who claim there is strong evidence that they need more things broken down for them and instructed rather than, you know, that idea of co-creation as a complex process. And that can be quite cognitively overwhelming. And, you know, so it needs to—

Yeah, but, you know, think about, you know, if you have a 3-year-old daughter, you know, they're actually very co-creative and they are not listening to any hierarchy and authority. They're actually trying out everything. They're putting in question whatever you do, whatever you say, you know, want to find it out their own way. They're the most creative people that we have. So actually, we are born with that capacity of co-creation, that capacity, you know, not to to reproduce other people's wisdom, but to create our own ways of thinking. And I think we should just do a better job in school to maintain some of that energy. Because once again, in the age of artificial intelligence, that's what makes us human. That's how we will be complementary to the artificial intelligence that we created in our computers, not substitute it. So I actually do think that is an innate human ability. So we just need to nourish it better.

Yeah, yeah, it's still, still a lot of tensions, I suppose, that are persisting, but they are— I mean, for me, they're fascinating to, to hear from you firstly, but also then just generally more in the more open conversation about how we resolve these things. Because as I started, I do think there is still a binary either-or mentality often in education, and, and I think I appreciate the fact that you are trying to challenge that, and that's really positive. I just— if I could just finally finish with just, just on the compass, because I think I think for me, there's a huge value in the Compass, and I would love to hear what it is that you are planning in terms of the OECD continued rollout of the Learning Compass, because I think back to those transformative competencies, you know, that idea of creating value, reconciling tensions and dilemmas, and taking responsibility. There we go. Because I feel that there's a huge amount of value there in terms of it as a framework. But I've had other conversations with other people who aren't aware of it firstly, or people who are aware of it, but are not seeing it being used used in such an applied way in, in educational context. I don't know what your thinking is and planning is for future in the way that that compass might get used a bit more actively on the ground.

Yeah, you know, I think that's a very fair question. You know, we have a concept and an idea, and which is actually a good result of co-creation. Yeah, that was done with students, with educators, with neuroscientists, with— I think it's a good example of how you can actually co-create an idea of education. But, you know, that is early days. The harder question is how do you, you know, implement it in the classroom? How do you create the learning environments that can foster those three dimensions? And then you need to ask yourself what kind of people with what skills are needed as educators to foster those learning environments? What kind of organizational structures will be needed to support the ways of working? And I think all of that work needs to be done. It is very successfully being done in some schools. One also has to see that, that actually there are many schools that are well on their way with this amazing kind of results. There are entire school systems. So I must say, you know, the IB school system, for example, has well before the Learning Compass incorporated many of the elements into their daily practice. So a lot of that exists, but I think we have to make that far more systematic and evidence-based. That's really the role of the OECD. Not to just create another idea of schooling, but to create a very strong evidence base that helps students to learn better, teachers to teach better, school systems to become more effective. And I think that's where we are still at the very beginning, you know, otherwise it's just a framework.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you, Andreas. I won't take up any more of your time.

I'm sure you've got a busy day ahead of you, but thank you.

I really appreciate it. And I know my listeners will as well.

Pleasure to meet you, Tim.

Brilliant. Thank you, Andreas. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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