International lessons in teacher education

Abstract

This chapter describes how two high-performing educational systems, Ontario, Canada and Singapore, create policy systems designed to ensure quality teaching across communities, and compares their systematic approaches to the much less coherent policy system in the United States. These cases are drawn from a recently completed study of international teaching policy, with colleagues, seven jurisdictions within five countries around the world that have worked to develop comprehensive teaching policy systems. The chapter explores a multi-method, multiple case study design to investigate the policies and practices that support teaching quality within education systems. It discusses the Ontario and Singapore cases here because in some ways, they are most like states in the US in their size and student demographics. Ontario is one of the highest-performing provinces in one of the highest-performing countries in the world; 28 percent of its students are immigrants, nearly twice the proportion in the United States.