JAPAN SPECIAL
increasing diversity in their classrooms and differences in learning styles. And they need to keep up with innovations in curricula, pedagogy and digital resources. To address these demands, Japan will need to rethink many aspects of its approaches to teacher development, including how to optimise the pool of individuals from which teacher candidates are drawn; recruiting systems and the ways in which staff are selected; the kind of initial education recruits obtain before they start their jobs, how they are monitored and inducted into their service, and the continuing education and support they receive; how their compensation is structured; and how struggling teachers can be helped to improve, while the best-performing teachers are given opportunities to acquire more status and responsibility.
In recent decades, Japan has tended to prioritise reductions in class sizes over investments in the quality of teachers. This balance may now require adjustment, and our studies provide a range of examples on how this could be achieved. What is clear is that performance is the result of what happens in classrooms, and only reforms that are implemented in classrooms can be expected to succeed. Teacher engagement in the development and implementation of educational reform is therefore crucial, and school reform will not work unless it is supported from the bottom up. In short, much remains to be done to fill Japan’s educational goal of “zest for living” with life–to which the Great East Japan Earthquake has given such urgency and an entirely new meaning. For the decades ahead, the aim should be to build an
education system that shifts away from reproducing educational content for degrees towards strengthening competencies for life; from educating for situational values (“I will do anything the current situation allows me to do”) towards sustainable values; from competing in exam hell towards strengthening social skills and social cohesion; from educating to serve the nation state towards education for citizenship in the local community, Japanese society and the wider world we live in. *Programme for International Student Assessment Reference Schleicher, Andreas (2013), “Lessons from PISA outcomes” in OECD Observer, No 297 Q4, available at: http://oe.cd/v4 Visit www.oecd.org/pisa