Are teachers teaching for a knowledge society?

Abstract

Many countries whose economies are in transition have initiated ambitious education reforms intended to modernize their education systems to better respond to the needs of new social and economic realities. Albania is a good example of a society that is emerging from a closed planned socialist system and moving fast to an open society and knowledge‐based economy. As an essential tool in transforming people's knowledge and skills to promote a knowledge society, teaching must reflect, among other things, an active role for students and multilateral communication to support productive learning in classrooms. The aim of this study was to generate scientific evidence for policy‐makers about whether teaching in the first grade of upper secondary schools meets these criteria. Based on our observation data from 303 classrooms in 34 schools in Albania, analyzed using the categories of Flanders' interaction analysis, we found that teacher talk occupies more than 70% of all lesson time and that student‐initiated talk constituted less than 30 seconds within a typical 45‐minute lesson. We conclude that unless education policies give a high priority to supporting teachers in transforming teaching in schools to promote productive, interactive learning, students will not be able to acquire the knowledge and skills they need within a modern knowledge society.

Keywords:

• teaching
• teachers
• classroom interaction
• productive learning
• knowledge society

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the students of the Department of Psychology and Education, University of Tirana, who fearlessly collected the data for this research. We also want to thank the Ministry of Education and Science in Tirana for giving us permission to commence this study. Field work of this study was financed by a World Bank grant.