The meteoric increase in technological advancement in the last few decades has dramatically transformed how people live their lives. Innovation is seen to be essential as it ensures sustainable growth in a knowledge-based economy and a competitive global marketplace. Consequently, enabling innovation to occur becomes of prime concern to educators…

Following a major shift in Swiss teacher education in the 1990s, teachers are now educated at the university level with a more research-oriented focus than before the reform. Furthermore, the curriculum in teacher education is not only more academically oriented, but also concurrently practice-focused. Swiss student teachers are highly involved in…

This article discusses the relationship between policy, research and practice in the Singapore education landscape in response to Hargreaves and Shirley's arguments of Fourth Way principles of educational change. Examples of recent policy developments in Singapore are used to illustrate the interaction between judicial uses of research data and…

Policy makers are often looking for solutions to develop their educational systems in today's highly competitive knowledge-based economy. Hargreaves and Shirley's Fourth Way provides a useful approach in analysing policy trends, successes and pitfalls, based on an observation of practices and research evidences in the west, particularly, the USA…

In recent years, education systems around the world have been keeping a keen eye on rankings of student achievement as measured by internationally benchmarked tests. This has led to considerable attention being paid to teasing out success factors that may account for countries that have emerged top of the ranks or those that have shown the most…

This article has two main objectives. It first outlines the first three waves of change termed by Hargreaves and Shirley (The Fourth Way: The inspiring future for educational change. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, "2009") as the First, Second and Third Way that defined global educational policy and practice since the 1960s. It then…

Internationalization becomes increasingly important in higher education in a globalized world. Exporting higher education services by recruiting overseas students is an integral facet of internationalization of higher education. It not only helps develop the place as an education hub but also facilitate internationalized environment of higher…

This paper describes education reform projects designed to bring about major improvements in school and tertiary student outcomes. Individually the projects illustrate characteristics of educational reform in local contexts for primary, secondary and tertiary education. In combination they signal key components essential to getting large scale…

Building a strategic direction for education ultimately rests on the extent, to which we resolve the key issue addressed by UNESCO's International Commission on Education for the 21st Century (the Delors Report): what kind of education is needed to create the kind of world, we want to emerge in the future? Certainly, globalisation brings with it…

This article relates the philosophical and conceptual study of educational institutions with educational policy. I argue that both the descriptive and prescriptive answer to "what a school is" should focus on the school that is important, which is the central case. This central case of a school should embody an ethos of openness towards the basic…

This article draws lessons from experience at UNESCO and Eidos pertinent to the issues of developing East-West Partnership in education. For the past 60 years, UNESCO's mission has been to promote international co-operation. It has been very much involved in promoting intellectual co-operation among the professional leaders in education. Eidos is…