Centres of Excellence is an extension of our in-service teacher training and Good to Outstanding initiatives.
Schools spend many calendar days and man-hours in teacher training and professional development programs. Yet the teaching learning and work processes in school remain largely unchanged. If this scenario sounds familiar, consider the following:
- Does your school have processes for sharing new knowledge and experiences with peers and/or of documenting them?
- Is there a formal way to access this information at a later date?
- Is there a mechanism to build upon adoption and application for the benefit of the whole school?
Many schools fail to maximise benefit from teacher training
While schools train their teachers to keep them abreast in new knowledge, practices and experiences with the expectation that these will benefit the entire school community. In reality, most schools internalise only a small percentage of learnings and opportunities that these training programs provide and much of the time and money committed to these programs is wasted.
Some schools are wary of training teachers as enhanced capability is perceived to be passport to better and higher paying jobs, and the loss of a trained resource deprives the school of valuable knowledge and experience. These schools prefer to hire trained staff from other schools rather than engage in targeted and focussed skill building with the school context.
How can Art of Learning help your school?
Art of Learning understands that schools need structures to support, nurture and transform information into knowledge and teachers need scaffolding as much as students in becoming proficient in the application of new knowledge.
Art of Learning helps schools design and implement strong knowledge management structures to assimilate and build on knowledge and expertise available within the school community. By creating Centres of Excellence focussed on knowledge assimilation, consolidation and dissemination, schools can adopt and incubate ideas into structured practices. These centres provide support to teachers in adopting best practice, contextualised to the requirements of the school.
Our Centres of Excellence initiative is designed to minimise the cost of in-service teacher training of schools, while ensuring school-wide adoption rate of knowledge and practices. The program empowers the school and its constituents to take ownership of their own training experience and ripple out the benefits at the organisational level. We help schools minimise the cost associated with teacher attrition as the expertise and experience is retained in the school despite the loss of the qualified teacher.
Never will your school have the need to organise the same training for your teachers over and over again.
