Dates: Thursday December 14 and Friday December 15, 2017
Location: UNESCO Beirut Office
Under the Patronage of H.E. Dr. Marwan Hamadeh, the Minister of Education and Higher Education, the Teacher Education Research Group (TERG) organised the SDG4 Teacher Conference (Arab States) – Quality and Innovation in Teacher Professional Development: Issues and Challenges.
TERG is a network of researchers and academics affiliated with the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS), Haigazian University, The Lebanese American University (LAU), the Lebanese University (LU) and the UNESCO Office in Beirut, Regional Bureau for Education in the Arab States (UNESCO Beirut).
This conference seeks to create a forum to present, discuss, document and promote rigorous research on Teacher Professional Development (TPD) in the Arab countries and beyond. TPD encompasses a wide variety of approaches for capacity building including initial teacher education, teacher learning communities, graduate research programs in university, online courses and provisions, mentoring and coaching and individually guided activities.
Given such an important variety of TPD delivery means, the conference aimed to shed light on what is going on in the region, as well as on promising practices to be scaled up.
More specifically the conference aimed to address the following objectives:
- Examine innovative models and approaches for Teacher Professional Development (i.e. pre-service and in-service)
- Facilitate productive dialogue among stakeholders (teacher education schools/colleges/teacher training institutes, policymakers, unions, schools) on how to improve teacher professional development.
This conference focused primarily on two dimensions of Teacher Professional Development:
1) Initial Teacher Education/ Teacher Preparation
2) Continuous Professional Development (CPD)
