Last week, Roosevelt Academy and Harvard's Derek Bok Center
concluded their second workshop on excellent teaching. Two experts
from Harvard, Terry Aladjem and Ellen Sarkisian trained
senior instructors from Dutch university colleges and universities
of applied sciences in innovative techniques like microteaching. Explicit goal of this initiative
is to teach workshop participants how to take lessons learned and
implement them back at their institutes.
Teachers as mentors
Dutch education minister Marja van Bijsterveldt opened the event
with a speech emphasizing the important role teachers
have as learning facilitators. To her, "excellence is more than
getting straight A's on all your exams."
"Much more, it does ask for a motivation, curiosity and a broad
interest. To foster this, we need to guide young students with
mentors who discover their talents and encourage to develop them
further. This is where teachers come into play by giving space for
originality and rewarding effort by learners."
Lesson learned for Summit 2013
With an eye on the teaching summit in 2013, van Bijsterveldt
also urged the audience to bring lessons learned from this workshop
into the international debate on education. "In March next year,
Amsterdam will host the International Summit on the Teaching
Profession. Originally an initiative by U.S. President Obama
who is a Harvard alumnus himself, the summit will give a platform
to the 20 best performing countries in education to discuss best
practices. And I believe that this workshop offers a great
opportunity to explore what our contribution to this debate may
be."
For the full speech by Marja van Bijsterveldt (in Dutch),
click here.
If you would like to stay up to date to all news surrounding
next year's summit, follow our news section "Teaching Summit 2013"
via www.ScienceGuide.eu