When I was a doing my teacher training qualification, many, many years ago (29 to be precise – ouch!), I clearly remember one professor saying to a room full of trainee teachers: ‘once you know how to teach, stop’. We all looked at him in confusion, naively thinking ‘well, aren’t we here to LEARN how to be a teacher?’ But of course, his point was that being a teacher is not a finite process. Like most things in life, it is something that you certainly get better at with practice – and that you keep learning as long as you are in the classroom.
To state the obvious, every child is different. This does not mean the way we teach them all has to be different, but it does mean we need to keep re-thinking, assessing, reflecting, and working on how we teach, to make sure we are doing as good a job as possible. In my twenty years of teaching, I was fortunate enough to receive hours, days, weeks of professional development support, to keep improving how I taught. New pedagogical research is published, traditional methods are updated, and it may well be that the ways things have always been done is most definitely not the best way to do things. As the Education Policy Institute published in 2020 ‘High Quality CPD (continuous professional development) for teachers has a significant impact on pupils’ learning outcomes’.
So, this is what we are doing with our Teach2030 programme – making sure that all teachers who live in lower-income countries and may not often receive the professional development materials and courses that reflect their pupils and their settings, can access high digital quality learning for themselves too. And to complement our Teach2030 courses, we are thrilled to deliver regular interactive online workshops. These are held monthly and they last around 15 minutes, and we provide participants with new ideas to try in their classroom, an opportunity to reflect and refresh an aspect of their teaching, and to be part of our global Teach2030 community.
Join our latest workshop by signing up on our website and we’ll provide you with the joining details via email.
