Several improving school systems have sought to raise the prestige of the teaching profession by increasing their professional development requirements and by creating clearly defined teaching career tracks; this is particularly the case in the fair to good and good to great performance stages. However, the implementation paths they have chosen vary markedly. We examine here three contrasting examples and the contexts in which they were applied. The first of these systems mandated a new teacher certification system, which significantly raised requirements, and implemented assessment of teaching practice; the second solely mandated the requirement that teachers should complete a certain number of professional development hours; the third system opted to make professional development completely voluntary.
Two contextual factors are important in explaining why Lithuania chose to mandate its new teacher certification system, including the assessment of teaching skills. First, during the early 1990s teaching was considered a low-prestige career choice in Lithuania – students placed teaching among the lowest options for university study, ranking it fifteenth. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, “Everyone wanted to be a trader … they made ten times as much money as a university professor,” observes one senior Lithuanian school system leader. Second, the certification system was part of a broader move by the Lithuanian Ministry of Education to professionalize teaching. The ministry rolled out a new curriculum in
1996, including competency-based standards and instructional materials (new textbooks, teacher guides, and student workbooks). In the wake of this rollout, there was a strong imperative to ensure that teachers had the pedagogical competence necessary to deliver the curriculum, particularly in regard to cultivating application skills in their students. In parallel to mandating teacher certification, the ministry established a teaching career path and brought in commensurate salary increases for each successive rung on the ladder in order to increase the attractiveness of the teaching profession. Following its pilot in 1996, Lithuania fully mandated teacher certification in 1998 – all teachers who started work before December 1, 1994 were required to obtain certification by December 31, 2001.22 The Ministry of Education outlined four professional designations: classroom teacher, senior teacher (with responsibility for coaching other teachers in the school), “methodist” (with responsibility for coaching teachers across the district), and expert (with responsibility for coaching teachers at the national level and for supporting the writing of the national curriculum). Each step had explicit skill and tenure criteria and a salary increase of approximately ten percent accompanied each step. Teachers were certified through assessments conducted by their school, district, or a national committee, depending on the professional designation; three criteria were used for each subject taught: the teacher’s instructional practice (based on observation), the fulfillment of in-service training requirements, and their knowledge of teaching theory. Recertification takes place every three years. By 2005-06, over 75 percent of Lithuania’s 46,865 teachers were certified, with the vast majority of the remainder falling outside the stipulated tenure band.
In contrast, Hong Kong ‘strongly recommended’ that its teachers should comply with undertaking a stipulated number of professional development hours over a specified time period.23 In 2000, the education system leadership focused its school system reforms on increasing school-based management skills and reducing performance variation across schools. Teacher and principal capacity building were an integral part of this effort; in 2002/03, Hong Kong recommended all
its teachers and principals to fulfill 150 professional development hours every three years.24 Schools defined the mode and content of these professional development activities, as well as had autonomy in monitoring the implementation of teachers’ professional development. “It was easily accepted by teachers and principals because we were just asking them to comply with something they were already doing and the requirements could be fulfilled in a flexible manner … in fact, teachers regularly over deliver on their professional development requirements,” says a Hong Kong senior educator. The flexibility in the system is evidenced, for example, by the option for teachers to fulfill professional development requirements with in-school development activities, such as department meetings, class visits, and attending/ hosting lectures. Similarly, formal courses offered by the Education Bureau, teacher training institutions, or professional associations, could be credited to the teacher’s professional development account, so long as the teacher was present for more than eighty percent of the course.
Hong Kong opted for an input-oriented certification process rather than a skills assessment because, in the words of one Hong Kong system leader, “We have a high diversity in Hong Kong schools due to the different curriculums on offer … It is difficult for us to make a blanket imposition across all our schools. But we wanted teacher and principal professionalism to be clearly on the school radar screen and something that was in their dialogue on a regular basis.” Since the 1960s, the vast majority of Hong Kong’s schools have been publicly funded but privately run by charitable trusts and Christian missionary organizations, which have significant autonomy. “Our philosophy is that we cannot force schools to do something that they don’t want to do, so we tend to use only support mechanisms, little pressure,” says a system leader. This is one reason that when establishing its professional development requirement, the Education Bureau embarked on a campaign to appeal to teacher values, in order to encourage teacher support for the new requirement. Says a Hong Kong educator, “We said to teachers that if you consider yourself a professional, this is what you do.”
in-service training programs; their completion accelerated the teacher’s progress in their career track. “We were concerned that once teachers became certified in the two higher levels and their job security was complete, they would stop progressing their skills, so we also established a bonus system which could reach up to twenty percent of total salary,” says a Polish system leader. Bonuses are awarded to high-performing teachers by the school principals, subject to the guidelines articulated by the various regions.
Each of these three systems has had the same objective in seeking to increase the professionalism of their teachers. Each chose a very different blend of mandating and persuading in their implementation process, based on their particular context. Lithuania mandated both input and output because it viewed teacher certification as non- negotiable – this was necessary to accompany its curriculum changes. Moreover, its teachers were largely supportive because the scheme enabled them access to a higher role and salary, based on demonstrated competence. Hong Kong placed a “soft” input mandate to encourage further study, based on what its teachers were already doing, and so easily garnered their support. The structure of their school system made its leaders believe that a harder mandate would have been difficult to enforce, and might have resulted in broad stakeholder resistance. Poland chose not to mandate either input or output but to use persuasion. This was due to its concerns about potential teacher resistance to any other course due to political context; the system’s leaders believed that this approach would be successful because teachers possessed a high base level of skill, the new career track created incentives to stimulate demand for training, and the ongoing curriculum changes were sufficiently large to ensure teachers would want to access in-service training support.