Chapter 1. Introduction. Understanding education reforms that broaden the curriculum. The need for a theory of how to sequence educational change.
Fernando M. Reimers.
Chapter 2. Education Reform in Ontario: Building Capacity Through Collaboration
Taylor Boyd, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Chapter 3. Singapore’s Teacher Education Model for the 21st Century (TE21)
Durgesh Rajandiran
Chapter 4. 2013 Mexico’s Education Reform: Beyond a One-Dimensional Analysis
Paul Moch Islas, Anne K. Calef, and Cristina Aparicio
Chapter 5. The Punjab Schools Reform Roadmap:A Medium-Term Evaluation
Rastee Chaudhry and Abdullah Waqar Tajwar
Chapter 6 Nurturing Every Learner’s Potential: Education Reform in Kenya
Jelena Fomiskina, Eve Woogen, Ama Peiris, Somaia Abdulrazzak and Emma Cameron
Chapter 7: From Content Knowledge to Competencies: Education Reform in Zimbabwe
Djeneba Gory, Jayanti Bhatia, and Venkatesh Reddy Mallapu Reddy
Fernando M. Reimers isthe Ford Foundation Professor of the Practice of International Education and Director of the Global Education Innovation Initiative and of the International Education Policy Masters Program at Harvard University. An expert in the field of Global Education, his research and teaching focus on understanding how to educate children and youth so they can thrive in the 21st century. He is a member of UNESCO’s high-level commission on the Futures of Education.
This open access book is a comparative analysis of recent large scale education reforms that broadened curriculum goals to better prepare students for the 21st century. The book examines what governments actually do when they broaden curriculum goals, with attention to the details of implementation. To this end, the book examines system level reforms in six countries at various levels of development. The study includes system level reforms in jurisdictions where students achieve high levels in international assessments of basic literacies, such as Singapore and Ontario, Canada, as well as in nations where students achieve much lower levels, such as Kenya, Mexico, Punjab-Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The chapters examine system-level reforms that focus on strengthening the capacity to teach the basics, as in Ontario and Pakistan, as well as reforms that aim at building the capacity to teach a much broader set of competencies and skills, such as Kenya, Mexico, Singapore and Zimbabwe.
The volume includes systems at very different levels of spending per student and reforms at various points in the cycle of policy implementation, some just starting, some struggling to survive a governmental transition, and others that have been in place for an extended period of time. From the comparative study of these reforms, we aim to provide an understanding of how to build the capacity of education systems to teach 21st century skills at scale in diverse settings.