The “Mohamed bin Zayed Award for Best
Teacher” organized a training program for distinguished teachers, who had participated
in the award’s last edition.
A
group of leading teachers has been chosen to attend specialized training courses
and workshops and visit various leading educational facilities in the Republic
of Finland. This aims to develop their skills, enhance their job performance,
and highlight their talents and abilities for innovation and creativity, to
employ them in the classrooms. This will eventually achieve the Award’s objectives
and vision of having sustainable education, in which the teacher is the most
important link.
The
training program falls within the future vision of the Award, which is to
enhance the contents and practices that contribute to the consolidation of the
characteristics of the distinguished teachers working in the countries
participating in the Award. To achieve this, the teachers who had remarkable
participations in the Award had been offered specialized training to enhances
their abilities, skills, and outputs.
The two-week program aims to achieve a set of
educational goals, namely to familiarize the participants with the educational
principles used in the Finnish educational system that stimulate critical
thinking and research skills among students, early childhood education,
mathematics education, and the uses of various technological solutions in
education, including programming and robotics. The teachers have also received
many lessons to enhance their professional development and enable them to
transfer the knowledge they have acquired to their schools and include it in
their teaching methods. They have also had access to the latest methodologies and technologies that keep pace with
the rapid changes of the 21st century.
The program also included several official
and professional visits to the National Agency for Education, various museums,
scientific centers, and public libraries, during which a presentation had been
delivered on the best practices applied in the field of leadership, curriculum
development, and lesson planning and the best methods for effective application
of inquiry-based teaching methodologies. The presentation also included a
discussion on the various examples of exemplary lessons and strategies that
supported learning. The participants had also been provided with the theoretical
foundations that would enable them to understand the processes of change in the
educational system and how to choose and implement appropriate strategies for
evaluating the school environment.
The program also helped the participants learn
about the theoretical and practical aspects related to the methodology of teaching
small groups, by facilitating the participation of groups of students in
activities and focusing on the use of research skills and problem-solving
methods, to create a supportive environment for students’ active learning.
Dr.
Hamad Al-Darmaki, Secretary-General of the Award, stressed that the “Mohamed
bin Zayed Award for Best Teacher” devoted the best effective educational
practices, to achieve a great deal of creative competition among teachers and
to highlight their achievements, talents, and creativity. He added that the
Award had also helped sober educational thought find its way into the school
community by developing the teachers’ skills and abilities and learning
methods. He added that this had been achieved by providing a deliberately prepared
training system to serve the aspirations of the Award, advance the teachers’
progress paths at various levels, expand their educational horizons, and push
them towards more creativity and innovation by enrolling them in specialized
training courses in the finest global expertise houses.
He
thanked His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, may
Allah protect him, for his continuous support and sponsorship of the Award. He
added that this had been the cause of the development and comprehensiveness of
the Award, which aimed to advance education at the level of the Arab states and
then the world, through accession of a number of foreign countries. He pointed
out that this confirmed that education and teachers had always received a great
care from His Highness and the importance of achieving developmental leaps in
education in the UAE and the world.
He said that the award was in constant
development and continuous change in line with global trends, whether in terms
of objectives, standards, or variation of contents. He added that the Award was
an opportunity to learn about the best educational practices in the Republic of
Finland, which focused on the educational process, especially the teacher.
He added that the Award was a pioneering
educational platform that offered advanced capabilities, which contributed to
informing teachers of the best teaching methods and exchanging experiences with
teachers in Finland.
Al-Darmaki stressed that consolidating
excellence, creativity, and innovation in the education sector was the message
and goal of the “Mohamed bin Zayed Award for the Best Teacher”. He added that
the Award was a cornerstone for the teachers aspiring for appreciation and
achievement and a platform for enhancing teachers’ role in education, using the
tools necessary to achieve this noble message. He said that the Award sought to
develop teachers, raise their status, and make the educational field competitive
towards adopting practices and policies aimed at investing in the teachers’
energies.
24/08/2022
