The teacher diversity gap is literally inherited Seth Gershenson and Alberto Jacinto

The teacher diversity gap is literally inherited Seth Gershenson and Alberto Jacinto

Children often follow in their parents’ footsteps. For example, many children root for the same teams and like the same foods as their parents. But do they enter the same professions?

Over the past year, teacher strikes have brought to national attention the plight of teachers across the country. Teacher shortages and a lack of teacher diversity are major issues facing schools right now. Recent evidence shows that teacher shortages exist and are expected to worsen. So where do new teachers come from? Many come from existing teachers—that is, they inherit the teaching profession from their mothers.

Using nationally representative surveys of the cohorts that graduated high school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we show that compared to other children, the children of teachers are more than twice as likely to become teachers themselves. This is true for the sons and daughters of white teachers and for the daughters of black teachers; the heritability of teaching is even stronger for the daughters of Hispanic teachers. The sons of black teachers are the only group who do not seem to follow in their mother’s professional footsteps.

Teachers are important and effective teachers are in relatively short supply. Yet it is difficult to identify effective teachers a priori, as many observable qualification, at best, only loosely predict effectiveness. A striking exception is teacher race—specifically the race match between students and teachers—which boosts a plethora of student outcomes such as attendance [and here], behavior, achievement, and even high school graduation and college enrollment. This has led to a concerted, and growing, effort to recruit and retain more teachers of color and to diversify the teacher workforce so that it becomes more representative of the students they teach.

However, recent efforts to address the relative lack of racial diversity in the U.S. teaching force have been too little avail: The racial makeup of the teacher workforce has been relatively stagnant over the past few decades at about 80% white and mostly female. This is at odds with the racial composition of U.S. public school students, which has decreased from 70% to 50% white in recent decades. This is detrimental to students of color, who are less likely to experience the benefits of having a “teacher who looks like me” as a result of this imbalance. And it raises the question of why the racial composition of the teaching force is so “sticky.
________________________________________________________________________________
“We show that teaching is indeed transmitted from mother to child, and that this transmission occurs at greater rates than for other similar professions such as social work, counseling, and nursing.”
_______________________________________________________________________________

One possibility is that, at least in the case of teachers, children follow in their parents’ professional footsteps. If so, it is unsurprising that the majority of teachers continue to be white, as white teachers tend to have white children. We pursue this intergenerational story in a new IZA discussion paper. Using data from the nationally representative National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY-79) we show that teaching is indeed transmitted from mother to child, and that this transmission occurs at greater rates than for other similar professions such as social work, counseling, and nursing. Moreover, the transmission of teaching occurs at roughly equal rates for the sons and daughters of white teachers and the daughters of black teachers; interestingly, there is no such transmission for the sons of black teachers.

Overall, children whose mothers were teachers were nine percentage points, or 110%, more likely to become teachers than the children of mothers who were not teachers. Limited data on fathers’ occupation suggest a similar transmission of teaching from fathers to sons, but not to daughters. The figure below reports the effect of a child’s mother being a teacher on the child’s likelihood of entering teaching. These effects are relative to the baseline teaching rates of the children of nonteachers, which is 8%.

Here we can only speculate, but we can rule out some simple explanations by leveraging the rich data collected in the NLSY-79 survey: It is not due to the socioeconomic or demographic background of teachers, nor is it due to ability or educational differences between teachers and nonteachers. Another possibility is that the transmission of teaching is due to parental pressure to follow in the mother’s footsteps; however, this too is unlikely, as we see similar transmission rates for both sons and daughters of white teachers and that the transmission of teaching is actually weaker for single than married mothers.

This leaves a few related candidate explanations. Importantly, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and might well work in concert with one another. First, having a mother who is a teacher might provide access to a network of resources, supports, and job opportunities. Second, having a mother who is a teacher might provide information, either actively or passively (as a role model), about the attractiveness of the job in a way that alters children’s perceived possible or preferred careers. Third, teaching requires a certain level of altruism, extroversion, and comfort with working with children. Perhaps personality factors, in combination with the profession, are inherited from parents, which may make children more likely to go on to become teachers. Though evidence for this story is somewhat limited by the lack of transmission of counseling, social work, and nursing across generations. Risk aversion is another possibly heritable trait that might contribute to the transmission of teaching, which is viewed as a relatively safe career. Indeed, in a family of teachers, a father’s advice to his son was “You’ll never get rich, but you’ll never go broke.”

Still, much remains to be learned about who enters teaching, and why. It would be fruitful for future research to investigate the channels through which this sort of intergenerational transmission occurs, as it has important implications for the recruitment of a diverse teaching force and more generally for understanding who enters teaching, and why. Similarly, it is unclear whether teachers who entered the profession due to parental influences are more or less effective than teachers who entered the field for other reasons. This, too, merits consideration, as providing all students with access to effective teachers is paramount to providing equal opportunity to all. 

Families with multiple generations of teachers are neither rare nor quirky oddities: 44% of teachers were themselves the children of teachers. Schools, districts, and colleges of education should take note of this understudied, under-realized fact.

Approaches to pedagogical innovation and why they matter - David Istance

Approaches to pedagogical innovation and why they matter

Across the world there is the outstanding challenge of innovating schools that too often are rigid and old-fashioned. The world is changing rapidly. Far too many students are disengaged and achieve well below their potential. At the same time, global expectations for education systems are growing ever more ambitious. For all these reasons, schools and systems must be ready to move beyond the comfort zone of the traditional and familiar. Innovation is essential.

Major shifts in curriculum policy in turn argue for pedagogical innovation. Curriculum policy strategies in many countries promote the development of competences, as well as knowledge, including those often called “21st century skills.” Competences such as collaboration, persistence, creativity, and innovation are not so much taught as intrinsic to different forms of teaching and learning through pedagogy. If the 21st century competences are to be systematically developed, rather than left to emerge by accident, then pedagogies must deliberately foster them.

Innovation is fundamental, therefore, and it must reach right into the pedagogies practiced in schools and classrooms around the world. Pedagogical expertise is at the core of teacher professionalism, and so promotion of such expertise is fundamental. Patterns of pedagogical practice are extremely hard to grasp at a system level (never mind internationally), however, given the lack of agreed definitions and the sheer number and dynamism of the relationships involved. Yet, it is so important that it cannot be left as a “black box” hidden behind classroom doors.

My former Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) colleague Alejandro Paniagua and I recently addressed these complex issues in a report from the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI): “Teachers as Designers of Learning Environments: The Importance of Innovative Pedagogies.”

A key aim of this work has been to identify concrete clusters or families of innovative pedagogical approaches, while not getting lost in the myriad of diverse teaching methods. The report outlines six approaches, which lie in the middle of the theoretical spectrum between broad principles, such as inclusiveness or cultural relevance, on the one hand, and specific teaching methods, on the other. This permits a more concrete and practice-oriented focus than considering all approaches together as if they were the same; it also focuses squarely on the pedagogies themselves rather than getting snagged on questions of whether they are necessarily innovative (which will vary widely depending on context).

The six clusters of pedagogical approaches 

Blended learning rethinks established routines and sequencing of student work and teaching to enhance understanding and relies heavily on digital resources. This approach aims to be engaging and coherent for learners, as well as to optimize access to teacher expertise by reducing routine tasks. The report discusses three main forms of blending: the inverted flipped classroom, lab-based models, and “in-class” blending.

Gamification exploits how games can capture student interest while having serious purpose, such as fostering self-regulation and the abilities to handle complexity and the unfamiliar. These pedagogies explicitly build on features of games such as rapid feedback, badges and goals, participation, and progressive challenge, as well as on the human elements of narratives and identities, collaboration, and competition. The OECD report elaborates on an example of using the “Game of Thrones” series for teaching history.

Computational thinking develops problem-solving by looking at challenges as computers would and then uses technology to resolve them. Its basic elements include logical reasoning, decomposition, algorithms, abstraction, and pattern identification—using techniques such as approximate solutions, parallel processing, model checking, debugging, and search strategies. Computational thinking envisions programming and coding as new forms of literacy.

Experiential learning occurs through active experience, inquiry, and reflection. Its four main components are concrete experience that potentially extends existing understanding, reflective observation, conceptualization, and active experimentation. Guidance and scaffolding play pivotal roles. Pedagogies in this cluster include inquiry-based learning, education for sustainable development, outdoor learning, and service learning.

Embodied learning looks beyond the purely cognitive and content acquisition to connect to the physical, artistic, emotional, and social. Embodied pedagogies promote knowledge acquisition through the natural tendencies of the young toward creativity and expression, and encourage the development of curiosity, sensitivity, risk-taking, and thinking in metaphors and multiple perspectives. The report identified three main forms: school-based physical culture, arts-integrated learning, and the construction of tools and artifacts. The OECD report illustrates this approach through an example of teaching geometry through dance.

Multiliteracies and discussion-based teaching aims to develop cultural distance and critical capacities. Critical literacies situate knowledge in its different political, cultural, and authorial contexts and deconstruct narratives. Class discussion, always valuable, becomes central in questioning ideas and dominant language. This pedagogical approach uses students’ life experiences to create meaningful classroom activities, constructive critique to create distance from received knowledge, and encouragement of students to extend their horizons. This approach also depends on active teacher scaffolding.

These clusters are not stand-alone approaches, and they can be combined in different ways. Indeed, in our OECD report we discuss the importance of combining pedagogies that work well together as well as of understanding what teachers should do to practice powerful, effective versions of the pedagogy.

In sum, innovation in teaching and learning is increasingly essential for education in the 21st century, and this needs to reach right into the pedagogies practiced in schools and classrooms. Understanding pedagogical innovation presents formidable challenges but represents a black box that must be prised open for advances to happen