Hi Team,
It is sunny in Vancouver today and I am delighted to share our joy!
I am joining the team right in the middle of the discussion owing to unavoidable circumstances created by some on-going activities in the office that had tight timelines. I welcome each one of you to this forum, even though Anouk has already done this as the designated 'host' of this very productive space. Interestingly, I have enjoyed reading everyone's introduction, including those I have known for many years :-). I believe you might enjoy reading mine too.
I probably need to give a long post alert as I will be introducing myself and the Teacher Futures programme as well :-)
I work at the Commonwealth of Learning as Adviser: Teacher Education. Prior to this, I worked at Maseno University in Kenya for 7 years as Director, eCampus and also Senior Lecturer at the School of Education. I studied at the Open University in the UK, and it is here that I got my research re-orientation from language education to teacher education. I met and worked with some great people in teacher education while at the Open University, including Prof. Bob Moon, who has also made time to contribute to this forum.
I am glad that we have this platform where we can slowly nurture a community of experts in various areas related to COL's teacher education initiative. It is going to be very useful in improving the efficiency in implementing COL's Teacher Futures, a programme designed to improve teacher quality and learning outcomes through school-based teacher development. It recognises the central role of teachers in maximising learner performance and opportunity. Through Teacher Futures, COL encourages and supports knowledge sharing and peer learning through local and cross-national communities for teacher educators and teachers. In this particular community for the programme team, we hope to not only support knowledge sharing but also research, monitoring and evaluation of key components of the programme. We also aim to engage actively with team members in other teacher development initiatives supported by COL, like the Green Teacher programme in Nigeria.
Anouk and I did not set house rules as we expect common sense to prevail. However, I just need to emphasise that this is a closed group for COL's highly respected project contact persons, consultants and other resource people. The posts herein are considered as programme resources for internal reference in COL's RM&E and should not be shared elsewhere. We will continue to tease out other 'common sense' issues along the way.
I look forward to further engagement with each one of you! And thank you Anouk for getting us started.
Best regards
Betty