Practices
Practices
Practices
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Chapter 5: The Teaching Professions: Teachers,<br />
Teacher's Educators and School Leaders<br />
The quality of an education system depends largely on the quality of its<br />
teachers, of those who educate them, and of School Leaders. Teachers play a<br />
vital role in helping children and young people to develop their talents and<br />
acquire the complex range of knowledge and skills that they will need in their<br />
future lives.<br />
The teaching professions now face rapidly changing demands, which require a new set<br />
of competences. The pace of change in the world is so fast, that every teacher needs<br />
to keep her practice under constant, critical review and adjust it in the light of<br />
students’ outcomes and latest research. Teaching staff need to offer individualised<br />
teaching so that all learners achieve specified learning outcomes, whatever their<br />
particular learning needs, cultural or social background; they need to take maximum<br />
advantage of the latest technologies and methodologies.<br />
In short, teaching staff in the 21st century need a radically broader and more<br />
sophisticated set of competences than before, and developing the competences of<br />
teaching staff and school leaders, including those who have been in the profession for<br />
a long time, is a continuing and increasingly urgent priority in all Member States.<br />
The challenges also affect school leadership and the support schools are providing to<br />
develop and maintain teacher quality. Schools need to develop into learning<br />
communities where everyone - pupils and teachers - is involved in sharing skills and in<br />
creating new knowledge; into environments for successful learning and teaching<br />
practice.<br />
This cannot be achieved without significant improvements to the ways that teaching<br />
staff are encouraged and supported so that they can help every learner to achieve<br />
optimum educational outcomes. The objective has to be the establishment of highly<br />
efficient and effective mechanisms to attract, recruit, educate, retain and support<br />
throughout their careers teachers, school leaders and teacher educators. The<br />
Commission has recently proposed ten priority areas for action in its document<br />
‘Supporting the Teaching Professions’ (Nov. 2012).<br />
The European Commission facilitates the exchange of information and experience<br />
between national policy-makers. A group of them meets regularly to discuss common<br />
challenges in teacher education and to share good practices. These 'peer learning'<br />
activities lead to policy recommendations that support national efforts to improve<br />
policies on teachers and teacher education. A good example of this work is the<br />
Handbook for Policy Makers on the induction of beginning teachers published in April<br />
2010.<br />
To complement this policy work, through the Comenius programme, the Commission<br />
has also supported projects tackling the different challenges facing the teaching<br />
professions. This compilation includes just some of these projects, which have helped<br />
teachers, student teachers, School Leaders and schools to improve the quality of<br />
learning and teaching by developing their professional competences; other projects<br />
focus on school and pupil evaluation and assessment in order to identify challenges<br />
and possible solutions. Many cross national partnership projects encourage teacher<br />
reflectivity to improve their teaching styles and strategies; the issues of mentoring<br />
and leadership are present in many projects.<br />
To learn more: http://ec.europa.eu/education/school-education/teacher_en.htm<br />
81