International research shows that teacher quality is the most significant factor affecting educational outcomes. However, training programs often misinterpret this by overemphasizing skills and content, while overlooking the more personal dimensions that facilitate effective teaching. This creates teachers skilled in conveying content but lacking the reflective capacity to understand the deeper purpose of their work.
To solve educational inequality, the GTI believes that teachers must not only focus on instructional practice and skills acquisition, but also on facilitating personal transformation and setting a deeper meaning for their practice. GTI develops global teachers who are capable of facilitating learning environments for learners that are liberating, emotionally supportive, culturally relevant and academically challenging.
The GTI Teacher Competency Framework serves as the roadmap and foundation for all aspects of GTIs work. It is the basis for the development of programmes, events, and curriculum as well as presenting a picture of the ideal Global Teacher. 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 actualize it.
The competency model has four domains and embodies GTIs vision of developing teachers who have:
● Personal and Professional Reflection
● Love, care and Empathy
● Professional Mastery
● Social Justice & Responsibility
The last word of each domain is emphasised so that we can even further distil the core work of GTI as promoting teachers and teacher education programs– reflection, empathy, mastery and responsibility. Each domain, in turn, emphasises the other and explores it through another lens, and with each exploration adding more depth and understanding to the processes and relationship between each other. A Global Teacher is one who embodies all of these domains in a wholly integrated and internalised way.
