Andrew Bethell Associates has been leading on the development of a global version of Teachers TV. The project is still in development but is securing support from major agencies from around the world and will launch a BETA website with videos from 25 different countries by the end of 2012.
In May 2012 World Teachers Video Network (WTVN) signed a partnership agreement with Education International, the global federation of about 400 teaching unions in more than 170 countries and territories, it represents 30 million teachers and education employees in education institutions from early childhood to university. The partnership will support the the objectives of EI to support the development of quality teaching as a vital ingredient to improve the professional status and security of teachers around the world.
It will be a website that showcases effective teaching from countries around the world to promote the sharing of good practice from teacher to teacher and country to country. It will identify and disseminate video case studies of practices that have contributed to evidentially proven educational outcomes based on data from the PISA report on world education outcomes and the TALIS report on teacher quality and development.
WTVN will focus on the core competences that lie at the heart of all good teaching and every curriculum. It will be about the craft of the classroom. It will also offer the opportunity to illustrate examples of successful system improvements as well as looking at effective approaches to teacher training and professional development. It will prioritise practice that is transferable, scaleable and affordable.
The format of videos and their distribution will be based on the success of Teachers TV in the UK, ThaiTeachersTV in Thailand, YLE in Finland and most recently Teaching Channel in the USA. Worldteachers.tv will extend these successful initiatives through the use of high-quality television techniques to capture examples of effective practice from around the world and make them available to all .
WTVN will exist primarily as a dedicated website with high-quality streaming video accessible around the world and available for download free at the point of use. Videos on WTVN can be watched with sub-titles in a variety of languages and potentially any language using the latest intuitive translation software .
See below for extracts from three exemplar videos each of which focus on practical strategies for education improvement and bring policy to life.
An extract from a Teachers TV video in which a teacher from Cornwall visits Finland to find out more about how Finland does so well in the PISA rankings of effective education. The lesson shows how dissection is such an important part of Biology. As the Finnish teacher explains, “Young people these days spend so much time on computers they do not use their hands. You need to have good hands to be a scientist.”
Find out how one school in Morocco is using a grove of olive trees planted in its school playground to teach students about maths. The students care for the trees, harvest the oil, visit the camel-driven olive press and sell the resulting oil in their local market, all using maths. The teachers at Sidi Bouskri School believe the project helps pupils to understand the link between their lives and the work they do in the classroom. It also helps them develop positive relationships with the school and its natural environment.
One of the Education for All Millennium Goals is to support girls into education. In this video a head teacher in Senegal has a remarkable record of keeping girls in her school. In this clip we see how she deals with the challenges faced by one girl.
