Twenty-first-century educational practice: research, evidence and knowledge management - Teaching with Technologies: The Essential Guide - page 182

10 Twenty-first-century educational
practice: research, evidence and
knowledge management
Overview
The challenges facing education systems and teachers continue to intensify. In
modern knowledge-based economies, where the demand for high-level skills
will continue to grow substantially, the task in many countries is to transform
traditional models of schooling . . . into customised learning systems that iden-
tify and develop the talents of all students. This will require the creation of
'knowledge-rich', evidence-based education systems, in which school leaders
and teachers act as a professional community with the authority to act, the nec-
essary information to do so wisely, and the access to effective support systems
to assist them in implementing change . . . in many countries, education is still
far from being a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are not
yet being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of those practices.
(OECD 2009a: 3)
Given the importance of the education system to any national economy, the OECD
findings that education systems are not 'knowledge-rich' or 'evidence-based' is
surely an astonishing state of affairs. The McKinsey Report (2007) How the world's
best performing schools come out on top asserts that teacher quality is the single most
important issue to be addressed in systems which wish to improve. A comparison
of knowledge-management practice between the education sector and the medi-
cal profession, comparing the adoption of technologies to support international
collaboration in the synthesis of evidence and the collaborative building and test-
ing of knowledge to disseminate evidence to inform practice (see for example the
Cochrane collaboration), shows that the education sector is still in the dark ages.
This chapter makes the case for national education systems to adopt tried and
tested knowledge management and Web 2.0 tools used by other sectors. It exam-
ines the problem of the quality and extent of the evidence base underpinning teach-
ers' practice, which is often unacknowledged. In the twenty-first century, through
the use of technology, the research and evidence base underpinning teachers'
practice could be made accessible to all. This lack of research-based professional