Oecd Education & Skills Topclass Podcast

Is there an equal share of men and women working in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (or STEM)? Do girls and boys in school have preconceived biases about whether they should pursue these subjects? To celebrate International Women’s Day and as part of the OECD March on Gender initiative, Caitlyn Guthrie, Advisor in the OECD’s Directorate for Education and Skills, and Raffaella Centurelli, Advisor in the OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Innovation, discuss gender imbalances in the STEM fields, both in school and in the job market, suggesting workable ways to reduce gender inequity and promote equal opportunities for all.

How will new teachers and school leaders prepare themselves to face the complexity of the 21st-century classroom? And what do today’s teacher and school leader training programmes look like across the globe? David Liebowitz and Hannah von Ahlefeld, both former teachers and current OECD Analysts, talk about the challenges of training teachers and school leaders, drawing on their experience in schools and their work at the OECD to analyse a number of different approaches.

In a society that is becoming more and more interdependent, the next generation will have to use a brand new set of skills and a new level of understanding in order to work well with their peers from every nation - a set of skills known as "global competence". Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, Anthony Jackson, Director of the Asia Society’s Center for Global Education, and Mario Piacentini, an Analyst at the OECD's Education and Skills Directorate, discuss what these skills entail, their importance, and how we can integrate them into existing education systems worldwide.

Not every student’s brain works and learns in the same way. Classrooms are increasingly becoming more aware of what is known as "neurodiversity" among their students, a term used to describe neurodevelopmental disorders such as ADHD and ASD. We talk to Tracey Burns, Senior Analyst in the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, about how neurodiversity affects classroom learning and what schools can do to accommodate children that learn in a different way.

The Teaching and Learning International Survey (otherwise known as TALIS) is a survey conducted every five years that asks teachers and school leaders from around the world about the working conditions and the learning environment in their schools. There have been two rounds of the survey so far, one in 2008 and one in 2013, with 50 countries scheduled to participate in the 2018 round of TALIS. We chat to Noémie Le Donné, an Analyst in the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, about how the survey works, what the results show us, and how the data affect the education world at large.

Do today’s students really know how to work well together? For the first time ever, the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015 (otherwise known as PISA) examined students’ ability to collaborate to solve problems and the necessary social skills involved in that process. Andreas Schleicher, Director of the OECD's Directorate for Education and Skills, and Jeffrey Mo, Analyst for the OECD'S PISA team, discuss the results of the survey and why collaborative problem solving was chosen as a new test criterion.