ETF supporting innovative teaching and learning
Innovative, open-minded teachers are pivotal to learning environments that are creative and inclusive. Teachers who are able to cultivate and nurture young people with skills and self-efficacy will help them find solutions to today’s challenges and create a prosperous and more sustainable future for tomorrow. Updated, relevant and caring education and learning systems can have an increased impact when delivered by teachers who have been supported to renew their own knowledge and enhance their expertise and competences. Valuing teachers and providing them with the right tools is therefore an essential part of the education and training equation.
The European Commission has set out a vision for a European Education Area by 2025–30 which focuses on teachers, as well as quality education, inclusion and gender equality, green and digital transitions, and higher education, all contributors to building a stronger Europe in the world.
Working in the EU’s neighbouring regions with a wide range of stakeholders (including policy-makers, practitioners and actors from the public, private and civic spheres), the ETF is engaged in developing teaching and learning, in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Across our partner regions – Western Balkans and Turkey, Eastern Partnership, Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, Central Asia, and more recently sub-Saharan Africa – our actions target the continuing professional development of teachers and trainers, particularly those in the vocational sector. In addition, they aim to promote innovation in teaching and learning, ensuring more inclusive and equitable education and training systems overall.
Specifically, the ETF’s Creating New Learning initiative supports innovation in all aspects of teaching and learning. Our online platform, Community of Innovative Educators, facilitates the sharing of best practice and expertise development, and a pilot project in Serbia offers a great example of what can be achieved when teachers collaborate and learn from each other. In July we carried out a call for practice fostering new learning, to highlight innovative teaching practices that are able to inspire teachers, trainers and policy-makers across all the ETF’s partner countries. The response was incredible, with more than 800 applications from 50 countries. The three best practices will be awarded the ETF Innovative Teaching and Learning Award 2022. The ETF has also developed a tool to help identify the digital training needs of vocational teachers, and has created new profiles for vocational teachers of the future.
The ETF’s Network for Excellence (ENE), which mirrors the EU’s initiative on centres of vocational excellence (CoVEs), seeks to stimulate the sharing of ideas, practices and experience between CoVEs at both national and international levels. ENE works on the development of partnerships by grouping CoVEs to combine their efforts to promote excellence in specific areas. GRETA – Greening Responses to Excellence through Thematic Actions – is one such initiative that brings together CoVEs from across the ETF’s partner countries to share their experience and knowledge in updating programmes and curricula to meet the challenges of the green and digital transitions. Hosting regular thematic webinars throughout 2022, there is much focus on the importance of ‘training the trainers’ so that they may better respond to students’ needs.
ENE is also connected with CoVEs in sub-Saharan Africa, as part of the ETF’s support to the EU’s cooperation with the African Union on skills development. As detailed in Learning Connects No. 3, an ETF study undertaken on behalf of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for International Partnerships (DG INTPA) examined data from 26 vocational schools from 14 sub-Saharan African countries to give a snapshot of good practice in the region.
This month, we will find out more about the work of DG INTPA in an interview with Cécile Billaux, Head of the Private Sector, Trade and Investment Unit.