The OECD Program TALIS and framing, measuring, and selling Quality Teacher™

The teaching profession has been the subject of international political debates for decades, though until more recently, this was largely around the conditions of work in sub/national settings and in relation to those agencies that might ensure teacher professionalism. The argument put by international organizations such as the World Bank (2012), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and UNESCO is that teachers can, and should, play a key role in developing the requisite ‘human capital’ for the global knowledge economy. The OECD have developed and implemented a Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) to address this policy issue. TALIS is part of the OECD’s family of indicator-based data-sets which also includes for example the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). This chapter shows that the indices and items in the TALIS questionnaires suggest that TALIS involves a bias toward constructivist pedagogy and the flexibilization of teachers’ work.