Constructing Global Teaching Quality: The Epistemic Virtues of the OECD Global Teaching InSights Study

• In Event: "Teachers, Schools, and Data: Regulating Quality, Autonomy, and Reform in globalised times"

Proposal

In 2021, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) debuted the Global Teaching InSights Study results and platform, an interactive collection of more than 700 videos from eight countries containing more than 175 hours of teaching in classrooms around the world, featuring time-stamped annotated analyses of teaching content, pedagogical moves, and teacher decision-making captured from classrooms from around the globe (OECD Observation Masterclasses, 2023). OECD Director of Education and Skills, Andreas Schleicher, declared the Global Teaching InSights Study would finally open “the black box” of classroom practice, fulfilling the OECD’s decade-long effort, dating to its Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), of supporting the teaching profession by spurring a global dialogue about the “common problems of practice” (OECD, 2020, para. 14).

In this paper, we examine how the Global Teaching InSights (GTI) Study is more than just another study of teaching. Our approach sets out to account for the powers embodied in its techno-scientific projection of global teaching quality. Specifically, we seek to understand how the observation practices immanent to the study’s design embody epistemic virtues that construct and depict teaching quality as a globally observable phenomenon? We examine the study as a blueprint for building a global teaching observatory, instrumental not only to finding global teaching quality but in making the global teacher.

We draw upon work in the sociology of science in order to study teacher observation as a material, epistemological, and affective infrastructure that creates a global teaching observatory. We analyze the Global Teaching InSights Study (hereafter “the Study”) in terms of what Bruno Latour (1987) refers to as a “center of calculation.” Using a post-structural approach, we engaged in a critical examination of teacher observation systems through a literature review focusing on these systems’ historical evolution, political context, and debates concerning validity.
We then analyzed a range of the Study’s resources, including 23 chapters of technical documents, platforms, videos, and artifacts, focusing on coding principles, video technology, and the implementation of a psychometrically calibrated framework. Upon the initial analysis of the collected data, we employed a heuristic codification process (Saldaña, 2016) utilizing ATLAS.ti software. that helped us to identify eight distinct observation-related categories. Then, thinking with historians of science Lorraine Daston’s & Peter Galison’s approach to examining objectivity (2007), we noted how the categories embodied three epistemic virtues of codification, harmonization, and measurement, enforceable norms that appeal both to ethical values as well as to pragmatic efficacy in producing knowledge. We describe these as follows:

1. Codification refers to the process of classifying teaching as patterns with six general domains derived from teacher education and the learning sciences, each with its associated observable components and indicators. As an epistemic virtue, codification of teaching and learning entailed a linear, seemingly inevitable movement towards “finding” the common domains of teaching at a global scale. It presumed an opposition between its global codes and participating countries’ pre-existing standards of teaching quality (GTI, Ch 4, 2020, p. 3). This bias toward the global over local is not explicitly stated; instead, it is the embodied principle of the coding process itself.
2. Harmonization refers to the research practices that standardized and regulated classroom observation practices across the Study’s eight international monitoring stations. We note how this seemingly technical process of conducting an international study of observation presumes a consensus about what and how to observe. The desire to find a “common language” for teaching infuses the efforts to stabilize global teaching quality with controlled variability. It promises a pathway to transcend cultural differences by bracketing them within a pregiven framework so as to an otherwise conflictual set of definitions about teaching. It locates whatever is in opposition to the scientific methods of the study as “cultural” and therefore unobservable.
3. Measurement refers to conversion of the abstract processes of codification and the protocols of harmonization into normative judgments that guide what raters are to see as the embodied enactment of teaching. The use of tools such as rubrics, rating components, and indicators, now derived and verified through the GTI Study, facilitates the rating and comparison of observations, thus beginning the process of making “a global teacher.”

Our analysis demonstrates how these epistemic virtues’ desires are themselves a form of power. Codification embodies a desire to bring order to chaos, harmonization is the desire for consensus, and measurement is the desire for improvement. This affective infrastructure (Bosworth, 2023; in education, see Zembylas, 2022), then, is not epiphenomenal to its rules and principles for teacher observation; rather, it is entangled within the different layers of the Study’s material practices as co-constituitive of global teaching quality, as well as the related hopes that this discovery will foster a collaborative process to understand cross-cultural diversity in teaching practices and lead to the general improvement of teaching at a global scale.

The epistemic virtues play a pivotal role in establishing the standards and benchmarks for global teaching excellence, defining the range of opportunities and limitations that educators face on a global scale. By examining these processes, we shed light on the importance of considering epistemic virtues as a fresh approach to studying educational policy. Rather than focusing solely on declaratives statements and analytically contrived global education agendas, our analysis suggests the need to delve into the intrinsic mechanisms that shape the perspectives of stakeholders and teachers, guiding them towards the attainment of quality education. Our analysis holds significant implications for teacher education and educational policy, emphasizing the need to comprehend the underlying epistemological, material, and affective infrastructure that influences the assessment of teaching quality and its long-term impact on the future of global teaching.

Authors

• Christopher M Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Ezequiel Gomez Caride, Universidad De San Andrés