What are the essential learning skills?

The key aspects of essential learning skills integral to our educational approach are crucial. These include

  • Learner autonomy: Across the world, students are increasingly expected to take some responsibility for their own learning, in order to become ‘lifelong learners’. Teachers are expected to facilitate this process.  Global-CPD believes that teachers with high skill levels in the above domains are better able to share responsibility for guiding the learning process in the classroom with students. Taking responsibility for their own professional development through maintaining a basic ‘teaching portfolio’ is congruent with this approach to student learning.
  • Learning cycles: We aim to help teachers reach their full potential. We believe that teachers move through various stages in each domain: from ‘novice’, to ‘advanced beginner’, ‘competent’, ‘excellent’ and finally ‘’exemplary’ and that learning is cyclical. Teachers moving from one context to another need time to attain the skill levels they showed in a previous context. We will help each teacher improve, aiming for the ‘exemplary’ level in each domain.
  • Exemplary teachers:  We believe that the exemplary teacher can effectively reach each student at their own level of proficiency while moving the whole class forward in meeting instructional aims. Exemplary teachers are committed, hard-working, have a passion for teaching, are approachable and are inspirational role models for their students. They have high but achievable expectations. They leave no child behind. At the same time, they are also individuals with their own styles. They take risks and experiment in the quest for further improvement.
  • No one right method: There is no one correct teaching method.  At Global-CPD we value traditional, core teaching methods as well as newer student-centered, constructivist approaches. The best choices are always made after carefully analyzing the students and the intended learning outcomes in relation to the stakeholders’ expectations and the assessment system.
  • Community values: Alongside teacher and classroom observation, the atmosphere of the school will be considered; i.e. behaviours in corridors, cafeteria etc, since these have an impact on teacher motivation and classroom management. Also, teachers are encouraged to keep parents informed about developments in the classroom in order to strengthen the home-school connection.

Finally, we look forward to working with teachers to create a vibrant community of ‘teachers-as-learners’.