Highlighting the teachers providing education through the COVID-19 crisis

The COVID-19 crisis is one of the biggest disruption of education the world has faced in recent history.

As over 1 billion learners have moved their learning online, the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 wants to bring forward the experiences of teachers working every day to ensure their students continue to benefit from a quality education.

The following guidelines may be helpful:

• Ideally, the length of your text should be between 600 and 800 words.
• Focus should be on your experience as a teacher using distance teaching / learning tools and platforms:
  • how you are working with your students and colleagues to continue providing education despite the crisis?
  • how you are dealing with this new working conditions?
  • what guidelines and support have you been given (if any)?
• Try to use a conversational, personal style in simple English. Please also bear in mind that many readers are not native English speakers.
• We encourage the use of hyperlinks throughout the text to data sources, organizations, publications, etc.
• We encourage sending photos and images to illusrate with your text. Please ensure proper credit information is communicated to the Secretariat.
• Please submit your draft in Word format. To ensure consistency across the text, it will be reviewed by the Secretariat, whereby suggestions and edits may be provided. The final text will always be cleared with the authors before publishing.

What format should your contribution follow?

• Headline: should be no more than 15 words to grab the reader’s attention.
• The introduction: present yourself, where you are from and what grade and subject you teach. It should be short and to the point.
• Use sub headings: they will break up the text making it more digest for the readers. One sub heading = one idea.
• We accept contributions in English, French and Spanish.

As over 1 billion learners have moved their learning online, the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 wants to bring forward the experiences of teachers working every day to ensure their students continue to benefit from a quality education.

For questions or to submit a contribution, please contact: i.da-silva@unesco.org

Download the Guidelines in English and in Spanish.

Realising inclusive and equitable education for all will not be possible without teachers who are supported, empowered and provided adequate training. This is why, throughout 2019, the Teacher Task Force (TTF) continued to work in advancing teacher and teaching issues, as well as supporting countries to develop robust teacher policies. Here are some of the highlights of what we achieved in 2019.

Calling for greater investment in the teaching profession

The Teacher Task Force contributed to key fora and events during the year to make the case for teachers at the global level.
The Head of the TTF Secretariat called for greater investment in teachers in an op-ed featured in the 2019 Commonwealth Education Report. This call was reiterated through the TTF support to the #CommitToEducation campaign launched during the High-Level Political Forum in July 2019. We also made the case to invest in young teachers during World Teachers Day on 5 October.

Putting the teaching profession at the centre of education

TTF Members also regularly collaborated throughout the year to ensure teachers featured high on the education agenda, notably through the TTF’s thematic working groups.

During the 2019 Mobile Learning Week, the TTF thematic group on ICT and distance education held a debate on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on teacher education and teaching practices. This debate brought together a variety of education stakeholders and helped shape the conversation, with a clear takeaway that AI cannot replace a teachers’ presence in the learning environment.

The Thematic Group on inclusion and equity in teacher policies and practices also contributed to discussions on inclusive and equitable education. The TTF organised a panel highlighting the importance of teachers in inclusive and equitable school settings during the European Development Days held in Brussels in June. Panellists highlighted the critical influence teachers have in creating safe and inclusive learning environments.

In December 2019, members of the TTF Thematic Group on early childhood education and care convened a conference mobilizing over 200 participants, including from 18 African countries, that put teacher issues front and centre in ECE discussions. The conference resulted in the Casablanca Declaration and Call for Action, which recognised that ensuring quality training and professionalization for ECE teachers and educators, as well as decent working conditions, is a priority for achieving SDG target 4.2.

The TTF also convened its 12th annual Policy Dialogue Forum (PDF) in December in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) under the theme “The Futures of Teaching”. The PDF was attended by some 250 international and 80 national participants, which included seven Ministers of Education from different regions, and has received positive feedback. One of the country delegates attending the PDF stated that “the Forum workshop came at the right time, (…) it allowed me to identify the various gaps that exist in the management of our teachers and even in the development of our teaching policy and to propose to the various officials at the Ministry level the necessary adjustments”. The key conclusions and recommendations of the Forum were summarised in the Dubai Declaration on the Futures of Teaching.

Improving regional engagement

The Teacher Task Force also strengthened its work at regional level, through a series of member consultations throughout the year, with positive impacts, such as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) officially becoming a member of the Teacher Task Force.

The regional meetings highlighted the strength of the TTF in providing its members with a space where they could come together and collectively reflect on teacher issues from their respective points of view, taking into account particular national and regional contexts. Members were encouraged to continue cooperation and communication throughout the year, and this work will continue to be strengthened in 2020.

Looking ahead to 2020

Following a fruitful year, the Teacher Task Force will keep up its advocacy work at global and regional levels in 2020, ensuring that teacher and teaching issues remain high on the Education 2030 and SDG agendas throughout the new decade.

The TTF will also launch a new online Knowledge Platform in 2020. The goal of this web-based portal is to facilitate the exchange of knowledge, expertise and experiences on different dimensions of the teaching profession among TTF members and partners, and become a key resources for all those working on teachers and teacher policy development.

With the release of the online Teacher Policy Development Guide training courses, developed in collaboration with the Open University UK, the TTF Secretariat will also continue to work with its members to broker support for countries who are in the process of developing, implementing and monitoring national teacher policies.

The Teacher Task Force will continue to contribute to several initiatives at global and regional levels to advance the cause of the teaching profession in 2020.

A collaborative partnership between UNESCO, the International Task Force on Teachers for 2030 and The Open University has resulted in an online version of the Teacher Policy Guide being published and launched at the 12th Policy Dialogue Forum in Dubai on 10th December 2019.

Designed by Freda Wolfenden, Kris Stutchbury and Deborah Cooper of The Open University, this newly launched online guide proposes courses and interactive learning elements to help users who are developing teacher policies. For example, the online guide features an interactive glossary, which means that definitions for words used in the text are easy to search and access.

The online guide also includes some focussed activities that have been placed throughout chapters 2-5 of the guide to help policy-makers and education stakeholders apply the knowledge provided to their own context and help them frame their teacher policy as it develops. Users are also able to track their progress through the chapters and activities thanks to a dedicated user-account on the website.

The other interesting feature of the new online guide is the addition of short quizzes at the end of chapters 2-5. They are designed to assist learning and understanding the concepts encountered in the guide while working through the chapters.

The quizzes are not designed as a memory test and the questions have hints if the user does not get the answer right the first time. They can be attempted as many times as the user wishes and each attempt will draw upon a slightly different selection of questions from the question bank for that chapter.

Working through an online chapter and successfully passing the chapter quiz results in the user receiving an online digital badge for that chapter. Completing the whole guide and all the quizzes online results in a printable Statement of Participation, which includes all four badges.

The online guide chapters can also be downloaded to allow the users to work on them offline (so far in PDF and Word format). However, unlike the online modules, these are not tracked for progress and do not include the quiz questions.

The online version is currently available in English and can be found at the following link www.open.edu/openlearncreate/UNESCO-Teacher-Policy or accessed through the QR code below.

Online versions of the Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Chinese and Russian copies of the guide will be published in 2020 in the same online collection.

The International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 will be holding its 12th Policy Dialogue Forum from 8 – 11 December in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Organised in cooperation with the UAE Ministry of Education and the Hamdan Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation for Distinguished Academic Performance, the Forum will be looking at the “Futures of Teaching”.

One of the Teacher Task Force’s main concern is the world’s ability to recruit and retain more than 69 million teachers needed in primary and secondary school, according to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. If we do not, we will not achieve inclusive equitable education for all by 2030.

However, with our rapidly changing world, getting teachers into classrooms is not the only issue anymore. We need to ensure they are ready to face new generations of learners and the challenges awaiting them.

Why did the Teacher Task Force choose this theme?

Climate change. Migration and displacement. The rise of intolerance. The digital revolution.

With all the changes the world is facing, the global education community decided to launch a new initiative, the "Futures of Education: Learning to Become”, to reimagine how education and knowledge can contribute to the global common good.

Teaching in the 21st century has become an incredibly challenging and complex profession. Teachers share the tremendous responsibility of preparing future generations to address these challenges. 

Teachers need help to meet this challenge and responsibility. They need to be prepared and supported to teach skills, knowledge, and values relevant to the changing world, including digital technologies and artificial intelligence, relevant interpersonal skills, new methods of learning, and socio-emotional development. 

What will be discussed?

The 12th Policy Dialogue Forum will focus on how the Futures of Education influences the future(s) of teaching. The discussions will be organised around thematic areas to shed light on various ways teaching would evolve in conjunction with the times.

With the emergence of new trends in learning, teachers, and most importantly teacher education and preparation, need to adapt to the disruption caused by the advancement of technology as a teaching and learning tool. Moreover, technology is not just changing the skills students need to develop, but also the way they approach and acquire knowledge as well as were they learn.

The addition of a digital component to the learning environment has sparked a growing recognition of the need to change teaching practices and transformed the educational. Indeed, the tradition of a teacher standing in front of a class imparting knowledge is being more and more challenged by the xxx of putting the learner at the centre and encouraging their greater autonomy in the learning process.

In a world where intolerance and inequalities are also rising, teachers need to teach principles and values such as tolerance. While the causes of education inequalities are linked to many factors, teachers and educators can still play a transformational role in the classroom. The global education community and national governments needs to look at the skills, dispositions and knowledge necessary for the diverse classrooms of tomorrow.

What will the Forum look like? 

Around 300 education stakeholders from around the world will gather in Dubai to reflect on and discuss their visions of teaching to respond to the new challenges facing teachers. 

The Forum will allow the collection and consolidation of insights on the futures of teaching, including the identification and framing of emerging trends, good practices, questions and challenges related to the learning-teaching process and their implications for teacher education and continuous professional development.

His Excellency Hussain Ibrahim Al Hammadi will host a Ministerial round table, bringing together ministers of education from all region, to share their innovative reforms they have initiated to improve teacher training, address inequalities and introduce technological and other innovations.

They will be joined by education experts, academics, researchers, school leaders, teachers and NGO/CSO representatives from around the world who will also share their perspectives on the future of teaching and shape recommendations to national governments on how to improve teacher education to better prepare teachers for the future.

By choosing this year’s theme to be “Young teachers: the future of the profession”, the World Teachers’ Day’s co-convening agencies wish to address one of the issues that has been plaguing the profession for some time now: how can the teaching profession attract and retain young, bright talents in the profession?

The global education goal, SDG 4, calls on countries to ensure that children are not only going to school but also learning, yet the proportion of teachers that are trained has been falling since 2000, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Even more worrisome, new projections by the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Report found that, at current trends, learning rates are expected to stagnate in middle-income countries, and drop by one-third in Francophone African countries by 2030. This would leave 20% of young people and 30% of adults still unable to read by 2030.

To turn these worrying trends around, we must invest in teachers, their education and professional development.

The reality of teaching

To get the real picture of teachers’ current training and working conditions, the Teacher Task Force collaborated with UIS and the GEM Report to produce a fact sheet giving the latest data on the global indicator for the Teacher Target.

Every learner has the right to be taught by a trained and qualified teacher. Unfortunately, this is not a reality for all of them. In Sub-Saharan Africa, only 64% of teachers were trained according to national standards at primary level in 2018-17. This share falls to 50% at secondary level. Comparatively in 2005, these figures had gone up to 71% and 79% respectively.

The share of trained primary school teachers has also fallen in Southern Asia, where it has gone from 78% in 2013 to 72% in 2018.

To teach efficiently, teachers need decent working conditions, like having electricity or sanitation facilities in schools. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 34% of primary schools had access to electricity and 44% had access to basic drinking water in 2018-17. To make matters worse, 1 in 4 primary school did not have single-sex basic sanitation facilities in low-income countries.

To the issue of training and working condition plaguing the profession is the additional fact that the teaching profession also suffers from a poor image and status. Compared to jobs requiring similar qualifications, teaching often offers lower salaries for the responsibility and the amount of work required.

This leads to teachers leaving the profession in high numbers without enough new recruits to replace them, especially young new teachers.

Missing: young teachers

The future of society depends on the future of education. We need young teachers willing to take on the challenges of tomorrow.

Indeed, attracting young candidates to the teaching profession is a major challenge worldwide, and this is not just a supply issue. The hardships and obstacles affecting the profession disproportionately affect young teachers.

In their latest Education at a Glance report, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that young teachers, defined as under 30 years old, make up a small proportion of the teaching population in their member states. Indeed, teachers under 30 account for 13% in primary education, 11% in lower secondary and 8% in upper secondary on average across OECD countries in 2017.

Keeping young teachers in the profession is also a critical concern. Student teachers often indicate the experience of facing their first classroom as the most daunting part of their job. This leads to high attrition rates in this age group. Solid teacher education and induction practices, as well as peer mentoring have been highlighted as models that could offer young teacher the support they need in their first years in the profession.

A problem without solutions?

The main concerns around the attractiveness of the teaching profession could be addressed in teacher policies developed as presented in our Teacher Policy Development Guide.

Indeed, in the guide are listed nine dimensions that we believe essential to address the current issues facing the profession. Among these dimensions, we list training and education, working conditions and remuneration as mandatory component of any policy pertaining to teachers.

It is our belief that tackling the problem of attracting and retaining young people in the teaching profession will require sound and holistic teacher policies developed with the input of a broad range of stakeholders, including young people themselves.

Held annually on 5 October, World Teachers’ Day commemorates the anniversary of the adoption of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers. This Recommendation sets benchmarks regarding the rights and responsibilities of teachers and standards for their initial preparation and further education, recruitment, employment, and teaching and learning conditions.