Action for Teachers of Refugees Launch Event A Success
It’s been a busy few months for the Center for Learning in Practice (CLiP) as we continue to make great strides in promoting our mission of improving professional learning and knowledge sharing across multiple sectors.
In March Dr. Diana Woolis, the Center for Learning in Practice’s director, and Gareth Crawford, President of the Carey Institute, travelled to Amman, Jordan, where Diana gave the key note address to the No Lost Generation Education Technology Conference, which brought together donors, technologists and NGOs, all dedicated to ensuring that refugee children receive the high quality of education they deserve. Diana’s presentation, outlining the scale of the global education challenge and arguing for sustainable, effective solutions which are grounded in the realities of daily teaching practice is available here.
From March 14th to 16th, we launched Action for Teachers of Refugees, with an online, global convening of 200 practitioners from 25 countries, with participants joining from as far afield as Cameroon, Egypt, Cambodia, Botswana, Sri Lanka, Panama, Peru and Palestine.
The purpose of the online discussion was to engage a wide range of practitioners and experts in addressing the question, “what is sustainable, effective, pedagogy for teachers and teachers-of-teachers of refugees? Evaluation is still underway, but an initial analysis of the conversations suggests that sustainable, effective, pedagogy for teachers and teachers-of-teachers of refugees is:
- Purpose Driven- Addresses real and contextual needs of teachers
- Offers Real-Time Mentoring- Scheduled availability to peer-coach or mentor for live exchange
- Provides On-Demand Learning- At the point and moment of need
- Socially Structured- Connects teachers to each other, content and expertise across silos, organizations, countries, and disciplines
- And Personalized – Individuals can easily curate, capture, and share content as they want
We plan to have a full detailed analysis report of Action for Teachers of Refugees published in May, followed by a working meeting of advisors, cohort leaders and course designers to prototype rapid preparation of teachers of refugees, teacher support and a competency-based structure that builds a professional community and generates data informed “best practices.”
In the meantime, the following are examples of some initial feedback from event participants:
“The discussions were superb. We need also a place where we can keep updated with what is going on (events, workshops, seminars…) There is such potential for peer to peer meaningful dialog grounded in day to day practice. This platform has been a great practice lab. Thank you!”
“Thank you for this very informative and useful event. I am going back with so many take-aways: Importance of peer engagement; need to assemble, bring together and accumulate scattered practices to enable a structured and reflective learning process. There are so many tools out there (beyond webinars and traditional module-structured platforms). The Practice lab with its power for tagging was eye-opening for me. There is so much that can be done in 48 hours.”
“We need to create more opportunities for groups of actors with diverse backgrounds and experiences to come together as we collectively think about how better to support teachers of refugees and refugee learners wherever they might be!”
