How to incorporate 21st century competencies into Teacher Training Programme?

Teacher Training for empowering the English Language Teachers with 21^st Century Competency (hereafter referred to as TTC) requires a stringent programme (hereafter referred to as TTP) that should stand for quality and excellence. Unlike the traditional pedagogy centric training objective, TTP should aim at integrating technology literacy, media literacy, information literacy along with the intrinsic empowering skills, such as, communication, collaboration, creativity and critical thinking (also known as problem-solving). The aim shouldn’t be that of preparing the teachers to work as transmitters of knowledge rather that of functioning as facilitators, coaches and mentors who allow the acquisition of knowledge.

Accordingly, this programme must be designed and endorsed by the state agencies that accredit the educational institutions like the Ministry of Education (MoE) and Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE) and offer for teachers, teacher educators and the supervisors with the purpose of improving their teaching and training practices in order to raise the level of the English Language and pedagogical ability of the English Language Teachers in all the educational institutions across the country. The programme should devise the following as its programme outcomes:

Teachers undertaking the TTP must be familiarized about how to create scope of creativity within a course topic (unit/chapter), how to challenge the students with critical thinking (problem-solving) tasks, how to engage them in situational collaboration opportunities and how to immerse them into a circumstance of intercultural or multicultural communication. Wherein, the role of the teacher should be that of a guide allowing the students to plan, manage and head up through the situation utilizing the acquired 21st century competencies i.e. creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration that were upskilled in class. This implies that teaching of these competencies shouldn’t just trigger from teacher-centered lectures, discussion, presentation or assignments in isolation rather they should arise from the topic prescribed in the nominated text book with proper guidelines. The contents must integrate the 21st century competency outcomes as follows:

Therefore, a content such as verb forms may be taught by engaging the students in high level thinking through a project asking them to not only organize new verbs in a variety of useful and memorable ways, but also collaborate with each other to communicate their own opinions using the same English verbs they have learnt. Similarly, the essay writing task may be assigned as an assignment to be collaboratively written within the same group of students in class or with external associates through appropriate communication respecting each other’s opinion as global citizens.

Last but not the least, TTP must be mandated from the top down either as an in-service intervention or pre-recruitment requirement; thus may be offered as a certificate course from recognized accredited center of excellence. The course may be treated as a post-graduate certificate for the would-be teachers who are planning to pursue career in ELT.