Sustaining Teachers' Professional Growth: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
This seminar is the second in a series which brings together practitioners, researchers and policy-makers who are committed to enhancing the development of the teaching profession. After the success of the 2012 seminar on the Future of the Teaching Profession, the agreement to hold a second demonstrates a shared recognition that system-wide teacher policies are vital to the success of education in every country. The seminars are intended to strengthen the discourse on the future of teaching and teachers and are held prior to the International Summits, whose focus is at a government and teacher organization level. For this reason this year's seminar planning group of Open Society Foundation, LfL: the Cambridge Network at the University of Cambridge, Education International, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development also included representatives from the Dutch Ministry which is hosting the 2013 Summit.
This session in the afternoon of the second day focused on illuminative accounts of practice from the UK (Chris Ingate and Val Hill), Ghana (George Oduro), The Netherlands (Susanne Winnbust and Simon Verwer) and Bosnia & Herzegovina (Ivona Čelebičić). These were all practice-focused and in some cases presented by practitioners.
Representatives of the organisations who had been part of the planning group made presentations in which they reflected broadly on the themes of the seminar; Mary Metcalfe (Open Society Foundations), Hans Ruesink (The Netherlands Ministry), John MacBeath (Leadership for Learning: the Cambridge Network), John Bangs (Education International), and David Istance (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development).
Tuesday morning considered the seminar theme from the perspective of teachers. John MacBeath (Professor Emeritus University of Cambridge) framed the morning, followed by contributions from Ron Thorpe (President and CEO, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards), Tünde Kovacs (OSF and Belgrade University), Lawrence Invarson (Principal Research Fellow, Australian Council for Educational Research), and Dirk Van Damme (Head of Division of the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), OECD).
The presentations on the first afternoon considered the seminar topic from the perspective of policy. There were presentations from Maureen McLaughlin (Senior Advisor to the Secretary and Director of International Affairs, US Department of Education), Hans Ruesink (Netherlands Ministry), and John Bangs (Senior Consultant-Education International).
The seminar began with welcomes and introductions, followed by framing contributions from each of the partners: Leadership for Learning: The Cambridge Network; Open Society Foundations (event sponsors); Education International; the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development; and the Netherlands Ministry.