The Global Teacher Status Index is a research project funded by the Varkey GEMS Foundation to compare the "status" of teachers across 21 nations. It attempts to measure how teachers are respected and esteemed based on compensation, student and parent perceptions, etc in the form of a teacher respect index. The following four specific indicators were identified as most useful for the goals of this study:
- Ranking the social status of teachers against other key professions
- Analyzing the career of teaching as a desired profession
- Gaining general understanding of teachers’ social status
- Examining how and to what degree students demonstrate respect for teachers
The Shanghai Secret Revisited
Thomas Friedman recently published an article entitled, "The Shanghai Secret," where he describes what he thinks is the reason Chinese students have done so well on international benchmarks for learning. He summarizes his tour of select schools in Shanghai by stating they have, "A deep commitment to teacher training, peer-to-peer learning and constant professional development, a deep involvement of parents in their children’s learning, an insistence by the school’s leadership on the highest standards and a culture that prizes education and respects teachers."
While I agree with these anecdotal conclusions, it should also be noted that schools in Shanghai, and elsewhere in China, have issues that also need to be addressed:
- Crowded classrooms with students sitting shoulder-to-shoulder for extended periods of time
- Hyper-emphasis on standardized testing results
- Selection of students at early ages based on test results that tracks them toward specific vocations
- Limited application of knowledge through experiences such as project-based learning or design thinking
- Situation ethics, where schools frequently reproduce illegal copies of text books and other media content in violation of copyright laws
- Teacher-centric instruction with little use of classroom methods that engage all of the multiple intelligences of a student
