Because February is the month of love, we want to put our Love, Care and Empathy domain at the cornerstone for the month. We believe that it is essential to focus on developing our Global Teachers’ cognitive aspects and all the other qualities that make us human.
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. ― Aristotle
Global Teachers are teachers who know their purpose as teachers and who are committed to helping children develop into adults who are equipped to deal with the 21st-century world. Global Teachers are reflective practitioners, facilitators of learning, agents for change in their schools, communities and profession, and effective teachers. They are conscious of the social world outside of classrooms, how they impact learning and the development of children, and design and deliver lessons and manage classrooms to build a more just, equitable and liberated world.
Our competencies are more than just knowledge or an awareness of information but reflect on understanding concepts by demonstrating an ability to execute them in context. The GTI Teacher Competency Framework serves as the roadmap and foundation for all aspects of GTI’s work. It is the basis for the development of programmes, events, and curriculum as well as presenting a picture of the ideal Global Teacher. Our competency model has four domains and embodies GTI’s vision of developing teachers who have:
- Love, Care and Empathy
- Personal and Professional Reflection
- Global Mindedness and Social Responsibility
- Instructional Mastery
These domains consist of various dimensions that encompass the critical components of effective teaching in the current context. The last word of each domain is emphasised to further distil the core work of GTI as promoting teachers and teacher education programs- reflection, empathy, responsibility and mastery.
Although effective teaching has been researched and recognised as a highly personal and emotional activity, its emotional aspects are often overlooked. GTI recognises that the quality of interpersonal relationships and their emotional aspects are critical to the non-affective outcomes of a classroom. Whether children feel loved and cared for, and teachers are able to create empathetic relationships, and learning environments is a critical feature in teacher development and subsequently schools as well.
The focus on competency aims to anchor us to what teachers can do, not just what they know, which suggests that they have both an understanding of pedagogy and have demonstrated an ability to actualise it. Global Teachers Institute aims to develop global teachers who are reflective, empathetic, socially responsible master teachers, capable of facilitating learning environments for liberators, emotionally supportive, culturally relevant, and academically challenging.
