High-quality teaching is determined to a great extent on what teachers know and are able to do. In its Communication on School Development and Excellent Teaching For a Great Start in Life, the European Commission underlines the importance of teacher education for teaching quality, pointing out the role that collaborative work and career-long professional development can play. The Commission highlights the need for CPD to be accessible, affordable and relevant, and underscores the positive effect of involving schools and teachers in defining CPD policies. There are some challenges encountered while providing CPD to the teachers. The first one is the way it is perceived. Teachers often see CPD as a top-down process normally run by school management. Indeed, recent surveys would tend to back this position with head teachers generally dominating the decision-making process within schools (Friedman and Phillips, ibid). In this way, the benefits are often viewed in terms of management goals rather than for the individuals concerned. There is a growing awareness that it is imperative to tailor CPD to the needs of employees and make it much more about the personal development of individuals within an organisation and not just for the benefit of the organisation itself (Dent et al., 2008). The second problem is the trainers themselves or rather the information provided to the trainers in preparation for their courses is another matter. Since some organisations do very little to highlight where training is required and what skills their workforce lack or need, it is hardly surprising that outside trainers are not able to respond to genuine needs of the participant teachers. The third problem is the outsourcing of CPD is that trainers come in, do their training and then disappear; the training tends to be superficial (Weston, 2013). There is no back up, no planned system of evaluation of impact. The problem of evaluation is critical from the employer's perspective and a lack of demonstrable impact means that some organisations perceive CPD as an additional expense with very little return. In order to overcome these challenges with the help of this project we will focus on improving teachers’ competences in 9 competence areas which are necessary for teachers in 21st Century. We will work with teachers to develop, deliver, evaluate and adapt content in each region ensuring that any of the final outputs are relevant, targeted and suitable for each context.
Education can equip learners with the agency, competencies and sense of purpose to shape their own lives and contribute to the lives of others. Teachers should be empowered to use their professional knowledge, skills and expertise to deliver the curriculum effectively to educate their students with the competencies necessary for the era. The concept of competency implies more than just the acquisition of knowledge and skills; it involves the mobilization of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values to meet complex demands. Future-ready students will need both broad and specialized knowledge. We considered this project would be innovative in the sense that improving teachers’ competencies in various competence areas. Also, the knowledge and experiences of the teachers would directly have a positive impact on students to acquire 21st-century competencies like: Critical Thinking-and-Doing (Problem-Solving, Implementing Surveys, Analysis) Creativity Collaboration Cross-cultural Understanding Communication Computing Coding All these topics were studied separately in different projects but in our Project, we focused on them in a holistic way.
While we were writing the application form, there were some challenges encountered while providing CPD to the teachers. The first one was the way it was perceived. Teachers often used see CPD as a top-down process The second problem was the trainers themselves or rather the information provided to the trainers The third problem was the outsourcing of CPD was that trainers came in, did their training and then disappeared; In order to overcome these problems we, as local education authorities came together and provided training courses for country promoter teachers from partnership countries in the areas in which we had successful implementations in our local setting. We prepared training content and implemented them with the participation of teachers from partner countries. After these trainings, all training materials were shared with participants. They localized all these contents to their educational settings and they implemented local training courses for teachers in their respective countries. In this way, we increased the impact of the project. Last but not least all these training contents has been uploaded to a project website so that we can ensure the sustainability of the project after its life time.