This blog is based on the findings of Distance learning and teacher training strategies. Lessons from the Caribbean, a recently published report by the Teacher Task Force. It was written by Anna C. Conover, Consultant

Distance teaching and learning have expanded rapidly around the world since COVID-19 school closures first began in 2020. The transition exposed a wide digital divide in many countries, where lack of access to devices, online content and internet connectivity hindered universal access. Equally crucial, the shift shone a light on the need for more and better teacher training in digital and relevant pedagogical skills.

However, in spite of this urgent need, ministries of education in many countries are only now integrating ICT competencies and standards into teacher policy frameworks. Moreover, traditional teacher training programmes do not necessarily adequately cover digital and related pedagogical skills in initial teacher training and continuing professional education.

Teacher training can help improve learners’ and teachers’ experience of distance learning

In response to the demand for training in distance learning and technology integration in small island developing states (SIDS) in the Caribbean, the Distance Learning and Teacher Training Strategies in the Caribbean SIDS teacher training programme was created to enhance the capacity of national education systems. The Teacher Task Force, UNESCO’s Global Education Coalition, Blackboard, the Caribbean Centre for Educational Planning (CCEP), UNICEF Jamaica, and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development collaborated to develop, implement and monitor the programme.

Building on the 2020 pilot project, Professional Development for Teachers for Blended Learning and Online Strategies, the programme was designed to strengthen teachers’ digital and related pedagogical skills. It took a holistic and context-sensitive approach to strengthening teachers’ capacity to guarantee that the most vulnerable students were not left behind during the crisis.

The project aimed to confront challenges such as: how to maintain engagement and interaction for learning; how to convert content into appropriate online learning formats; how to handle school management issues, such as the need to respect normal school hours; and how to work with students with diverse needs. Providing support in these areas also helped to address teachers’ psychosocial well-being, since the abrupt transition to online teaching led to significant disruption of teachers’ professional and personal lives, causing uncertainty and other emotional challenges.

Careful course design, adaptable materials and supportive communities of practice are essential for successful distance learning

A key lesson from the programme was the importance of high standards for course design, content, and capacity for collaboration and delivery. Online platforms or learning management systems must be intuitive and user-friendly; courses must include different forms of interaction and student-teacher feedback loops; and time and space must be allotted for collaboration, reflection and experimentation. Since parental involvement is important for successful distance learning, course design should also include guidance for parents and reliable channels for them to communicate with teachers.

Preparing and adapting materials for online learning is one of the most challenging and time-consuming tasks for teachers in transitioning to distance learning. So, teacher training should include guidance on tools to facilitate this work, such as “live worksheets”, which are interactive and support assessment at a distance. And programmes should use open-source materials where possible, or explicitly state copyright conditions when needed, to increase scalability and enable teachers to re-use materials.

Teachers who participated in the teacher training programme particularly appreciated being part of a community of practice, enabling them to make new connections with distance education experts and other teachers in similar situations across their country and region. This feeling of belonging to a supportive network, as well as their newly acquired skills, boosted their personal and professional confidence in applying digital technologies and the required skills in their classrooms.

Teacher training for distance education should prepare teachers to create inclusive online learning environments

Ensuring inclusive education should be a priority in distance learning. Even though this form of schooling can limit teachers’ interactions with students (e.g., by reducing opportunities for spontaneous communication and gestural cues), it can also provide opportunities to promote inclusion. Designing courses with accessibility in mind is essential to create inclusive learning environments. For instance, to accommodate the needs of learners with disabilities, participants should be given a range of ways to access materials and participate in courses. This may include offering asynchronous* and synchronous** options for discussion, multimodal (visual, aural, textual, etc.) delivery of content, and downloadable as well as livestreamed content.

In multilingual contexts, adapting to teachers’ language needs is also essential. In the SIDS programme, course content was often only available in French or English. However, to allow participants to conduct discussions in the language with which they were most comfortable, course facilitators allowed participants to form online breakout groups using other languages.

Flexibility is a key feature in planning for teacher training

Training teachers for distance education must be flexible, since teachers have competing and sometimes unforeseen demands on their time. Course content, pacing and assignments should be adjusted throughout the course according to participants’ changing needs. This is particularly important during emergency situations. For accreditation transparency and to maintain teacher motivation, courses can adapt to teachers’ time constraints by offering different levels of certification and micro-credentials for specific ICT skills.

Careful planning that considers school calendars and teachers’ accessibility needs, as well as good communication campaigns, are essential to ensure successful enrolment and sustained attendance in teacher training. Registration should be easy and obstacle-free, and directly available online. In general, teacher training should not be scheduled at the beginning or at the end of the school year when teachers are busiest, or during long summer vacations when many teachers are not available.

Partnerships are important for developing teacher training programmes for distance education

Partnerships are particularly important in delivering distance education, since it requires considerable expertise and resources, including costly devices, uninterrupted connectivity, education software, open educational resources, and pedagogical and organizational expertise. Given that connectivity and device availability are often a barrier in online education, governments and stakeholders should develop partnerships with technology companies and internet providers to identify solutions, while ensuring that data security and participant privacy are respected.

Educational technologies have proven to be useful to ensure continuity of education in emergency situations. Increasingly true to all societies, they are also among the basic tools needed to fully participate in our contemporary world. However, investing in these technologies will not achieve the desired results unless we also invest in teachers’ digital and related pedagogical skills. Initial and in-service teacher education must therefore be re-imagined including these skills and technologies. With their first-hand experience of the challenges and opportunities of remote teaching, teachers must be involved in the design, implementation and monitoring of distance learning and technology integration. In such a way, they must effectively be placed at the heart of wider education transformation.

Glossary 

*Asynchronous online learning:  Education and learning that occur online at a different time compared to when the teacher is instructing.

**Synchronous online learning: Education and learning that occur online at the same time, but not in the same place with teachers and/or other learners.

Photo credit: Abir Roy Barman/Shutterstock.com

Chris Henderson, Co-Chair, Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) Teachers in Crisis Contexts (TiCC) Working Group and Teachers College, Columbia University.

In refugee-hosting contexts, teachers contribute more to children’s learning and well-being than any other school-level factor.  Refugee teachers also have strong local knowledge and the desire to contribute to better crisis response and recovery outcomes. However, despite their crucial role and the challenging context in which they ensure learning continuity, refugee teachers often do not receive the support they need.

They are visible to the humanitarian education sector, but remain largely neglected in the national education system sector reviews that drive multi-year education planning and in the budgets that address teachers’ needs. Thus, it is time to pay closer attention to the difficulties they face and to include them in the plans to achieve SDG 4.

Challenging teaching conditions

Teachers in refugee settings are faced with particularly challenging working conditions. In the regions where refugees are allowed to settle, functional classroom spaces, teaching and learning materials, and other basic resources are often missing. Their classrooms are more likely to be overcrowded, multi-aged, multi-ability, and multilingual, especially in the early years when essential literacy and numeracy skills are taught. They must often teach in shifts, covering less material in less time with lower expectations for learning achievement. They may also have to teach content in a second or third language, or they may need to use hybrid instructional approaches.

Refugee teachers also work with children and youth who have experienced or witnessed the acute and chronic suffering of their families and friends. These children and youth are more likely to present with learning or behavioural deficits related not only to the interruption of their education, but to the hardships they contend with on a daily basis.

Lack of training opportunities

Where pre-service and in-service professional development opportunities exist for refugee teachers, they are episodic with varying levels of quality. The diverse range of non-state actors providing teacher management and development support in settings of forced displacement also constrain predictable and sustained responses in meeting teachers’ professional, personal, and family needs.

An uncertain career path

Most refugee teachers live where their right to international protection is recognized. At its most basic, this means they have the right not to be forcibly returned to their home country. However, refugee protection does not automatically grant the recognition of qualifications for employment, neither does it grant access to continuous professional development opportunities when teachers are uncertified or underqualified.

Time to recognise the role of refugee teachers

So often we champion teachers and celebrate teachers’ work. However, as humanitarian sector policymakers and practitioners, we need to align our words with our actions and uphold our commitment to the profession by reimagining and transforming our understanding of teachers and the value of teachers’ work in refugee-hosting settings. Without sufficient support for and recognition of refugee teachers, education access and learning attainment for children affected by forced displacement will remain precarious and SDG Goal 4 will not be achieved. 

It is therefore time to deliver for refugee teachers the status and conditions they deserve and desperately need; it is time to make refugee teachers visible. A shift towards the inclusion of refugees in national education systems following the adoption of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) in 2018 provides an opportunity for action. This includes the provision of predictable and sustainable support for refugee teachers, continuous professional development, and access to fair and decent work conditions.

Towards a shared understanding of teachers in refugee-hosting settings

With the aim of including the above issues on the Transforming Education Summit Action Track 3 Agenda on “Teachers, Teaching, and the Teaching Profession”, and to work towards a harmonized understanding of teachers and teaching in refugee-hosting settings, UNHCR, INEE, and Education International (EI) are co-convening a meeting at the upcoming Transforming Education Pre-Summit in Paris.

We will bring together government, United Nations, international non-governmental organization, and civil society organization representatives alongside refugee teachers and youth from Chad, Kenya, and Venezuela to discuss and debate the following provocations:

1. Who do we consider to be “teachers” in refugee hosting settings? Might new definitions and pre-conditions for entry into the profession be one part of the solution to the global teacher shortage? 
2. How, if at all, do we recognize and regularize community and refugee teachers as part of the professional teacher workforce in refugee hosting settings?
3. What are the limitations or barriers of current legal frameworks and financing mechanisms, and what innovative approaches exist to overcome financing challenges? 

This session will also be an opportunity to give refugee teachers and youth a platform to share their experiences and inform the agenda for transforming the provision of education in crisis settings globally.  

A key outcome of this meeting will be a memo of recommendations, produced by INEE, UNHCR and EI meeting moderators, and submitted to the UNESCO International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 for consideration and inclusion in subsequent Transforming Education Summit statements relating to Action Track 3. 

We invite you to participate in person or via webcast in this important meeting from 1.00pm to 3.00pm CET on Thursday June 30th. We need your voice to help forefront and elevate refugee teachers at the Transforming Education Summit in New York in September. 

For more details, please see the pre-summit programme here.    

Hero photo: M'Bera refugee camp, Mauritania. Photo: EU/ECHO/José Cendón

Published on 22-06-2022 on the Emirates Thinkers platform

In the latter half of September, the United Nations Organization will hold the Transforming Education Summit 2022 at its headquarters in New York, attended by the leaders of various countries of the world. In preparation for this global gathering, the Ministers of Education will meet at the end of June at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris to prepare for the upcoming summit, which will set priorities for educational work, and explore various dimensions of the educational process worldwide.

Specialist work teams have been assigned to coordinate efforts and preparations for the organization of this global event. In this article, in my capacity as a member of the High Committee preparing the reports and recommendations to be presented at the summit, I will set forth the course of the work taking place in preparation for the summit, and its main themes.

First of all, the importance of the Transforming Education Summit 2022 is attributable to the renewed challenges facing the educational sector worldwide. The experience of countries and governments during the Coronavirus pandemic, with the accompanying widespread use of distance learning technology, has cast a shadow over the course of the educational process. How will education be in the future? What are the main challenges it faces globally? These are the key questions of the upcoming summit, which revolves around five main themes:

- Theme One: Inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools - that is, supplying a healthy and safe educational environment that provides for gender equality in education, ensures appropriate learning during global disasters and crises, and fulfills the conditions for integrating children with disabilities into public education and in suitable rehabilitation centres; ensuring the school environment takes public health conditions into account, and students get their share of healthy nutrition, realizing the principle of "a healthy mind in a healthy body."

- Theme Two: Education and skills for life, work and sustainable development. Attaining the keys to knowledge and life skills, in addition to the skills needed for the new labour market, in particular the skills involved in creating jobs that achieve sustainable development.

- Theme Three: Teachers, teaching and the professionalization of education. This theme addresses the acute global shortage of teachers, the professionalism required of them, and their continuing development over the course of their work - i.e., providing a suitable work environment for them, in addition to training a professional educational leadership that encourages creativity and innovation.

- Theme Four: Digital learning and transformation. This involves a discussion of the issues surrounding the digital transformation of schools, and how to provide digital learning resources for all, especially free resources, in addition to ensuring the security of digital education, privacy, and maintaining the safety of students in the course of their integration into the electronic world, or what is known as digital citizenship.

- Theme Five: Funding education. This requires the allocation of appropriate budgets for education in the various countries of the world, especially given that success in implementing solutions in all the previous areas is linked to the availability of an appropriate budget. The key issue at stake in all of this is that the funds allocated for education should be directed to the educational field itself, and not wasted on matters that are of little benefit to students; as someone once said, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”

Therefore, the Transforming Education Summit 2022 - with its five themes - sets out the steps for developing education worldwide, and represents an important opportunity for re-imagining education and accelerating its progress, thereby achieving development goals.

This blog was written by Maria Teresa Tatto from Arizona State University and was prepared for the Secretariat of the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030. It was originally published on the Futures of Education Ideas Lab on 23 May 2022.

Global disruptions – whether technological, economic, social or ecological – present a challenge to sustainable education. To meet the challenge, new thinking is needed on how to organize and deliver education. In response, the International Commission on the Futures of Education has produced a critical report, Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education, which brings together inputs from students, teachers, governments and civil society. With a spirit of optimism and possibility, the report calls on societies to act urgently to guide education transformation, now and into the future.

The role of teachers in reimagining education

The report points out the transformative work of teachers in reimagining education. Teachers play a central role in the embodiment of pedagogy and curricula, as well as acting as mediators of educational opportunities toward inclusivity and sustainability. The report calls for reinforcing teaching as a profession and for teachers to ‘take up their roles’ by:

1. Working collaboratively to provide each student with the support they need to learn;
2. Enacting the curriculum using participatory and cooperative pedagogies while managing digital technology; and
3. Engaging with educational research to reflect on their practice and produce knowledge.

To support teachers in playing this key role, the report advocates for teacher development as a rich and dynamic continuum of learning and experiences. It calls for public solidarity on much-needed changes to the policies that govern the selection, preparation, career trajectories and organization of teachers and the teaching profession.

Teaching as a collaborative and research-based profession

The reports’ priorities are commendable and urgently needed. However, some other considerations could provide additional nuance to the Commission’s report, if given greater weight. The report could note that teacher education curricula will need to be reformed, to align better with new expectations for teacher knowledge and roles. It is also important to recognize that teaching is intrinsically collaborative, and the role of students in this collaboration should be considered. And more thought needs to be given to what is required to properly equip teachers for a critical role in knowledge production and educational research.

Reforming the teacher education curriculum

The report rightly recommends that teachers should more often work in teams, to better engage in knowledge production, reflection and research, and further suggests that teachers should participate in public debate, dialogue and education policy. But to achieve this, a deeper cross-national examination of teacher education curricula may be required. This could help to unpack what learning opportunities exist in teacher education programmes that can support teacher agency and solidarity as a new foundation across a number of different geographies. Research can illustrate how, where and whether future and current teachers are prepared to engage deeply in this critical work during their initial teacher training, continuing professional development, and beyond. Promising examples include empirically tested approaches in developing contexts, such as the Escuela Nueva Activa (ENA) and other active learning models like flipped classrooms.

Moreover, given that teachers need to be ready to incorporate a variety of new competencies in their professional profiles, other forms of teacher support need increased attention. For example, to challenge the prescriptive lists of ‘must do’s’ that have in the past characterized top-down teacher policy, teachers must be enabled to use their voices, agency and social dialogue through their official representatives or unions. Teachers must increasingly become leaders as administrators and as professionals in pedagogical autonomy, research and public participation.

Recognizing the importance of teacher-student collaboration

By definition, teaching has never been a solitary practice. Teachers typically not only collaborate with each other – they also do so with their students. Previous research shows that teaching is inherently interactive and collaborative with students. Not all teachers manage this resource effectively, but successful teaching requires alignment with standards of good practice such as ‘achieving and maintaining classroom order and purposeful activity, gaining pupils’ attention and interest, ensuring that pupils know what they are expected to do, that they understand the content of the lessons, etc.’[1] While recognizing the importance of teacher–teacher collaboration, the report does not consider students as a fundamental resource and leaves out the important finding that students can and often do teach and assess each other, improving academic achievement. Able teachers can use formative assessments to support this practice, thereby developing authentic learning communities in their classrooms. This aspect of education could become another dimension of the new social contract for education: supporting student agency in their learning and collaboration with teachers and other students in fostering better and wider learning networks. 

Developing teachers’ research capacity

Collaborative research on a global scale, in which teachers, teacher educators, and researchers in different disciplines explore diverse education models, is also essential and should be a first step to enact a new social contract for education. Action research in the classroom for agentic and effective change should be emphasized: this refers to evaluative, investigative and analytical research methods designed to diagnose problems or weaknesses and help educators to develop practical solutions. Meanwhile, teachers also need to be more involved in systematic academic research in order to maintain appropriate scrutiny and enable educators to influence policy. Since both types of research are essential to help practitioners—including teachers—to reimagine a better education future, building practitioners’ capacity to engage in action and systematic research is critical. These skills are different from those needed to ensure reflective teaching, but they will be no less essential to teachers’ professional work for developing flexible, context-sensitive teaching practices.

Photo credit: Davide Bonaldo/Shutterstock.com