INTRODUCTION
Focus, focus, and focus! Focus is what this book is about. Here we aim to help school leaders understand what they should focus on and why. We share examples, vignettes, and practical advice to illustrate how to focus without losing sight of the big picture. School leaders often are overwhelmed (Klusmann et al., 2023). They feel they need to be responsible for everything happening in the school, from curriculum to pedagogy, from teachers to students, from finance to extracurricular activities, from the physical environments to school culture, and from systematic …

About five years ago, all schools embraced the idea of global competence. Governments wanted their students to be globally competent; organizations such as the Asia Society led the development of the content of global competences, and international tests such the PISA even administered an assessment of global competence of 15 years old students in different countries in 2018.  International study tours, global exchange of students and teachers online and offline, joint global projects in teaching and research, as well as publications and conferences on global competence were all on the …

Learning for Uncertainty: Teaching Students How to Thrive in a Rapidly Evolving World 
By G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Taylor and Francis on Jan 31 2022
Introduction
How do we prepare our children for a world that is yet to be made? This is the question we want to know and we try to explore in this book.
As we write this, educators across the globe are struggling to educate students amidst a world-wide pandemic.  Many are being stretched to adopt and use unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies.  For their part, most students, …

My latest book Learners without Borders: New Learning Pathways for All Students is published by Corwin in July 2021. Below is Chapter One.

It may surprise you to learn that teenagers in Nepal are using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to learn English and Egyptian, study dinosaurs, and take high-level STEM courses. On Episode 33 of Silver Linings for Learning, a weekly show about educational innovations during COVID-19, we had five Nepalese students and two teachers as guests. They told an unexpected story of learning beyond their schools. Nepal, a very small country largely …

PISA has many peculiar and surprising discoveries…
Having a growth mindset is negatively associated with academic performance for participating students from China (Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang or B-S-J-Z China), according to the 2018 PISA results. That is, Chinese students who had a fixed mindset scored higher in PISA reading than those who had a growth mindset. Considering that Chinese students’ stunning scores that put them way above all other students in the world, this finding should be disconcerting to proponents of growth mindset, including the PISA team.
Does this invalidate the belief that growth mindset …

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on December 3rd 2019. It was adapted from part one of an article to appear in Journal of Educational Change. The longer version discusses three illusions PISA has created and relied on for its undeserved impact on global education: the illusion of excellence, the illusion of science, and the illusion of progress.
PISA is a masterful magician. It has successfully created an illusion of education quality and marketed it to the world. In 2018, 79 countries took part in this magic show out of the belief …

The following is the Introduction of my book What Works Can Hurt: Side Effects in Education published by Teachers College Press in June 2018.
Introduction
“Ibuprofen may cause a severe allergic reaction,” you are warned when you buy a bottle of Advil, and “this product may cause stomach bleeding.” Medical products are required to disclose clearly their intended effects and known side effects. The intended effect of the common pain reliever Ibuprofen, for example, is to temporarily relieve “minor aches and pains.” The drug’s known side effects include allergic reaction and stomach bleeding. Hence …

This piece was published in the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet under the title There’s a new call for Americans to embrace Chinese-style education. That’s a huge mistake. on September 20 2017.
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Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Why American Students Need Chinese Schools?[1]” by Lenora Chu, author of the newly released book Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve. The message is familiar, along the same line as another WSJ article titled Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior several years ago.
I would …

The results of the Brexit referendum and U.S. presidential election will go down in history as the biggest surprises of 2016. The final results defied all predictions. The polls were wrong, as were the pundits. Though they predicted that the majority of Brits would vote to remain in the EU, more ended up voting to leave. Though they predicted a win for Clinton, Trump is the one moving into the White House this January. “From the US election to Brexit…the polls set voters and pundits up for a fall,” writes Siobhan …

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) beat PISA by one week. It just released its 2015 results. Within hours of the release, Google News has already collected over 10,000 news stories reacting to the results from around the world, some sad, some happy, some envious, and some confused. The biggest news is, however, nothing new: Children in East Asian countries best at maths. They were the best 20 years ago when TIMSS was first introduced in 1995. They were the best in all subsequent cycles.
Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, …