The challenges

It is widely recognised today that the role of schoolteachers is changing at rapid pace. From classic top-down instructors, teachers are now becoming learning designers and facilitators. Pupils change, too. From receivers of knowledge, they are increasingly becoming active learners in the classroom. Yet, successfully adapting to these news roles also requires developing new skills and competences. Teachers need to learn how to cater for different learning needs and preferences among pupils; how to provide the latter with feedback and support towards learning goals; and how to work in multidisciplinary teams to design active learning strategies. Additionally, the COVID-19 crisis, where many teachers are required to teach online for the first time, is also case in point that teachers need a lot more support and training than is often available.

However, education systems cannot cope with the massive number of schoolteachers that needs to be trained in the new competences associated to this changing role. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) may be a potential solution helping to overcome this challenge, but they usually suffer from high drop-out rates. Additionally, using experts or trainers to assess the learning outcomes of participants is hardly compatible with the scale of MOOCs. This means that new – peer-based – ways to assess learning are needed that are feasible, reliable, and well valued by participants.

The Teach-UP policy experimentation

 

Teach-UP tests two different instructional design approaches in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) by delivering scalable online courses on new teacher competences in four areas: formative assessment, personalised learning, collaborative learning, and creative thinking.

Teach-UP runs in two strands that feed into one another:

1. A randomised-controlled trial, using online courses as the experiment medium, and involving 4,000 teachers and student teachers in 10 countries: Austria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Malta, Lithuania, Slovakia, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey.
2. A series of annual Country Dialogue Labs in each of the 10 countries, where teacher training stakeholders can discuss the current challenges in training teachers and debate possible solutions.

All outputs of the experimentation can be found here. The experimentation is coordinated by European Schoolnet with 17 partners. The research organisation IRVAPP is responsible for evaluating the randomised-controlled trial.