Down the Rabbit Hole: Professional Learning for International Educators

Eyes-deep in reading for the MA dissertation, with 200 links in my Paperpile and counting, concurrently thinking about future professional learning at school, and following the threads of developing the IMaGE of a school, I keep stumbling across articles, books and papers that offer distractions from the work at hand. The result is a bent mind and a head full of ideas; a productive pseudo-procrastination that I’m trying to weave into a narrative, or at least keep stored for later reference.

Launching out from Lesley Snowball’s chapter on International Teacher Certification in the SAGE Handbook of Research in International Education, I find myself asking questions about how we develop IM in our teachers and what we might do to enhance this in the future. She proposes seven standards of development:

1. International Education in Context
2. Teaching in Multilingual Classrooms
3. Multiculturalism
4. Student characteristics and learning
5. Transition
6. Internationalising curricula
7. The reflective international teacher

It looks like a streamlined ITC certificate can be earned through the European Council of International Schools, with five main standards.

1. Education in an intercultural context – teachers will be involved in creating opportunities for developing intercultural understanding

2. Teaching competencies for the international teacher – teachers will develop skills particular to the challenges of international schools and international curricula

3. The language dimension – teachers will develop their depth of knowledge of the many aspects of language learning, and share this through a workshop and during classes

4. Student transition and mobility – teachers will explore specific ways to support students in transition, in the many different types of transition they face during their school lives

5. Continuing professional development as an international educator –teachers will develop their own reflective practice as a way of deepening the value of their continuing professional development.

Although much less recent, I like Tim Brighouse’s five principles for development of global education, in the foreword of Miriam Steiner’s 1996 ‘Developing the Global Teacher: Theory and Practice in Initial Teacher Training‘:

1. Schooling and education should be based on the goal of everyone achieving success, rather than allowing success for some and failure for others.

2. Schooling and education should be based on the assumption that intelligence is multi-faceted not general, environmentally-affected as well as inherited, and limitless not fixed. [Gardner, yo

3. Schooling and education should be based on the assumption that learning is lifelong, not a ‘once and for all’ activity.

4. Schooling and education should be based on the assumption that competition is best when ipsatively rather than normatively based.

5. Schooling and education should be based on the assumption of inclusive not exclusive practices.

………o0O0o………

Clearly there is much to read once I get past this dissertation. With Faculty & Development being just one of eight radials in the IMaGE of the school, I find my mind being expanded with every day of reading. It will be a challenge to martial this all together, for sure.

Sources

Snowball, Lesley. “Becoming more internationally-minded: international teacher certification and professional development“. Chapter in the SAGE Handbook of Research in International Education. (2006)

Steiner, Miriam. Developing the Global Teacher: Theory and Practice in Initial Teacher Training. 1996. Foreword by Tim Brighouse.