Orientation teacher conferences, peer coaching, department workshops and seminars, one-on-one meetings, allocating textbooks and resources, and many other back-to-school teachers' expectations in most countries around the globe.
Professional development and teacher performance improvement plans take many forms, and all government and governance bodies take responsibility for their professionalism, pedagogical performance, and general well-being and growth. Ministries or departments of/for education around the world fund education, including teachers’ professional development, and this varies from a country to another in terms of country status (high or low-income), level of education (pre-primary, primary, secondary, tertiary), and sources of funding (government, private). Professional development meant here is not the Teaching Certification or Credentials in USA, the Initial Teacher Training ITT in England leading to Qualified Teacher Status QTS, 5 to 6 years MA Teaching Practice in Finland , or Ecole Supérieure du Professorat et de l'éducation ESPE in France, etc.. The professional development meant in this article is the continuous improvement of teachers, so that they align with this yearly-growing age of knowledge and technology.
Saudi Arabia, my current country of residence, is a perfect example of what the ministry is implementing to foster teachers’ performance. Public schools, private and international schools are supervised by the MoE, that has been relentlessly exerting all possible efforts to improve pedagogical skills on the one hand, and optimize teachers’ knowledge of English on the other hand. Thus, teachers are becoming more exposed to international standards and global expectations, resonating with Vision 2030 of the Kingdom. As a director, I have witnessed tremendous action plans and initiatives issued by the KSA Ministry of Education to fill vacancies in the teaching profession and help teachers become well-equipped with 21st century pedagogical skills for excellent professional performance. Since 2005, the ministry began to establish a plan to unify supervisory practices, and in 2018, a unified vision and mission statement was issued for all government and international schools to operate under – emphasizing global competency of learners and 21st century teaching skills. In other words, highly competent, 21st century teachers!
For this purpose, a systematic scheme of supervision and school collaboration became the threshold element to put all teachers on the right, same track for enhancing performance. Programs were diversified to create momentum and chisel teams, exchanging experiences and strengthening ties between the diverse parts of society. One of the most remarkable initiative is the International Scholarship, which enabled hundreds of Saudi post-graduates to bring their educational gain back to their homeland, and work hand in hand with hundreds of highly-qualified teacher expatriates, both males and females, enriching teaching and learning. The latest initiative was the summer training program that was held in July and August, in which more than 147,000 teachers participated, getting efficiently prepared for the classrooms in September.
Same is the case in other countries. Lebanon, my homeland, has been undergoing a robust movement for enriching education through The Plan for Educational Reform and The New Framework for Education in Lebanon that emerged in 1997.
400 dedicated educational experts and officials, supported by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education nationally and global institutions, such as UNESCO, UNICEF Lebanon, UNICEF USA, The European Union, The Clooney Foundation for Justice, World Bank, the State of Canada, Google, and others, designed a comprehensive competency framework and an integrated digital management system. Twelve researches scaled up professional development into 59 training courses, 331 monitoring and evaluation tools, more than 13,000 trained trainers, training more than 11,000 teachers at 867 public schools so far. This training for quality improvement is the product of the collaboration of the Center for Educational Research and Development CRDP and UNICEF.
CRDP has been purposefully targeting continuous improvement through its In-Service Teacher Training Program since 2004. It has been taking salient actionable steps to expand training through more trainees and more comprehensive training objectives that align with 21st century pedagogical skills and digitalization.
However, the Debri:
What are the major challenges that the world faces in terms of teacher professional development?
There are four main challenges that a huge number of countries worldwide is facing, including the largest economies and educational departments:
1.Governments cutting funding due to some economic factors. Many departments of education around the world have been confronting a range of obstacles in terms of funding, despite piloting significant projects for development, researches for advancement, and training for growth. However, according to 2018 educational statistics, financing education has considerably declined globally due to the economic crisis, and the need to diversify their support to other areas too, mainly students' learning.
2.Salaries or compensation: Due to the low salary in comparison to similarly educated workers, professional development efforts exerted remain in many cases inefficient. When teachers are underpaid, they feel underestimated, and consequently lose their potential to implement the professional development assigned to them. Many teachers in Britain, for example, have witnessed a considerable degree of dissatisfaction in their pay. Some teachers diverted to other jobs and few left the country to work abroad. Later, many countries raised the level of compensation, OECD countries, managed to increase the salaries of teachers with more than 15 years of experience by 5 to 8 % in the last three years. Yet, the raises are always less than other same-level, same-experience jobs, causing in some cases indifferent teachers, who would probably care less about their development.
3.Gender: Gender has long been an issue in a variety of areas, and in terms of labor, men have long been more compensated. Although this may not have a tremendous impact on the drives of female teachers, it still has a hidden dissatisfaction. According to OECD 2018 reports, females earn 26 % less than male teachers. Some countries have been casting the light on such matters, such as Australia, that has developed, under the federal Workplace Gender 4 Equality Act 2012, regulations that institutions must follow so that the gender gap gets less, and consequently drives enthusiasm to learn and develop more.
4.Unexpected Factors: One of the factors that is detrimentally causing a disorder in training teachers is the increasing population of learners, such as in Lebanon, Jordan, and Germany, where refugees have increased schools’ populations. Such scenarios become worse, with the need to recruit highly-qualified teachers, especially in secondary schools, or with the shortage of PD resources.
Professional development is our major asset for quality education, which comprises from teachers' teaching and learning – two paths that are never separate. There are powerful examples from all around the world about governments fostering on-going teacher training, even small countries. Cuba, for example, has designed “The Collective Pedagogy System“, in which teachers meet regularly to develop new methodologies and practices.
Lack of ample on-going professional development due to specified or unspecified reasons will always lead to teacher training gaps, and consequently learning gaps on both national and international scales. That’s why robust monitoring systems must be present to assess teachers' growth and professionalism through multidisciplinary approaches, if our world aims at more holistic learners and leaders-to-be!
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