After arriving in the United States in 2011 to assume presidency of the International Council on Education for teaching, my one thing has been to internationalize teacher education by linking teachers to the global learning agendas of UNESCO and the OECD.

While many agree innovation is best achieved in a collaborative environment, the latest OECD report on teaching and learning across the globe found most teachers are still teaching largely in isolation. Teachers around the world need a forum to document, share, and discuss their innovations if teacher professionalism is to include a role for teacher professional judgment. The Mapping Educational Specialist knowhow (MESH) Guides, an initiative of the Education Futures Collaboration, is our response to this need.

MESH Guides seek to provide teachers and teacher educators with access to research-based innovations to build capacity among preservice and inservice to make professional judgments that improve the quality of learning in their classrooms. Over the summer, we held our first MESH North America chapter meeting using a virtual platform to connect a small group of colleagues from different parts of the U.S. Since then, a small group of MESH Guide writers have begun work on their first MESH map. If you are interested in joining those who will share their learning via the MESH Studio wiki, please contact me at james.omeara@nl.edu. For those who are happy at this time to watch from the side, I invite you to check back regularly to see how collaborative teacher professionalism  can contribute to improving the quality of learning outcomes across the globe.

 

 

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