If there's one thing we all agree on in education
it's the importance of good teaching.
Cast your mind back to your school days
and you'll probably remember one brilliant teacher
who inspired your passion for a topic or even helped shape who you are today.
Nothing matters more.
Students with the best teachers learn at twice the rate of the average.
That's why governments across the world
make such huge efforts to improve the quality of teaching.
Better teaching means...
The trouble is, the efforts governments make to improve teaching
can often be destructive.
They focus on creating a top-down culture of compliance,
holding teachers to account through high-stakes appraisal
and pay-related incentives.
Teachers aren't encouraged to collaborate,
despite all the evidence that proves it's crucial to their improvement.
Most training spends too much time trying to improve teachers' knowledge
rather than changing their classroom habits.
These measures may have some impact on test scores,
but are they building the teaching profession we need?
Will they stop teachers burning out or leaving the profession?
Will they help teachers make the most of new technologies
that could transform learning?
Can they attract the coming generation who crave creativity in their work places?
Remember that one brilliant teacher from your school days.
Was it just their ability to follow instructions that inspired you?
Probably not! We believe it was their power to create.
At the RSA,
we're committed to cultivating everyone's creative capacities.
Creativity makes businesses flourish, societies thrive and lives fulfilling.
It's crucial for learners and just as crucial for teachers, because..
Across OECD countries,
just one in four teachers feel they'd be rewarded for innovative teaching.
That's unacceptable.
We need systems that support and motivate teachers
to experiment together
Cultivating teachers' creativity
doesn't mean just setting them free to do what they want.
We need a disciplined creativity,
informed by and generating the best possible evidence.
The best way to do this is to re-imagine teachers
as designers.
Like designers, great teachers are searching for creative solutions
to real problems and dilemmas.
They're focused on learners' needs
and meet them by working creatively within constraints.
Like great design, great teaching combines analytical and intuitive thinking.
Through design thinking,
teachers can become the authors of their own pedagogies,
rather than just the recipients of ringbound rules and downloaded top tips.
It's time for policy makers and school leaders
to focus on nurturing teachers' creativity.
We need systems and cultures that support risk taking and design-thinking.
Collaborative, research-rich professional development should support teachers
not just to do what works, but ask, "What
and adapt ideas for their own students.
It's important that this doesn't turn into
just another thing teachers have to deal with.
Get this right and, instead of feeling like victims trapped by the system,
teachers can being to feel like changemakers.
This can't just be for schools that are already good.
Often, under-performing schools are hit with so much command and control
that teachers have too little opportunity for innovation.
The journey from poor to good cannot be mandated.
And the journey from good to great cannot be assumed.
We especially need our most creative teachers
working in low-income communities
so that our poorest children can benefit from our richest teaching.
It's a big task, but nurturing teachers' creativity
could do more to improve student learning than any other reform.
If we can re-cast teachers as designers,
we can turn that one inspirational teacher into many.