How Do We Recruit and Train 10 Million Teachers?

ICET Conference, Oman, 14-17 December 2009 by Sir John Daniel, President, Commonwealth of Learning // Developing countries have been striving to achieve Education for All for the last 20 years. Because there is now good progress towards the goal of Universal Primary Education (UPE) a massive surge of children is heading for secondary education. UNESCO estimates that countries across the world will need to recruit and train at last ten million new teachers over the coming decade. How will this be done? // Drawing on his new book Mega-Schools, Technology and Teachers: Achieving Education for All, Sir John Daniel will show that open and distance learning (ODL), which has a long and successful record in teacher education, is an important part of the answer to the teacher shortage. However, it is not enough to put the old wine of outdated teacher education curricula into the new bottle of ODL. A new approach to teacher education that focuses on classroom-based in-service education rather than theory-based pre-service education is needed. Successful examples of this transformation will be given.