Global Education Professional Development

Hello everyone!

We hope those of you in the Northern hemisphere had a great summer holiday and are enjoying a great start to the school year.

We've scheduled four cycles of our Professional Development courses this year, with the first group getting started in late October. Thanks to your support of our Professional Development scholarship fund, we will be providing scholarships in the first cycle to three educators from the School of Choice (L'Ecole de Choix) in Haiti, helping them achieve their goal of fostering leadership development for children in Haiti that are living in the most extreme conditions of poverty. Here's how they describe their vision:

L’Ecole de Choix is anchored by the principle that a quality education provides individuals with the fundamental tools to affirm individual dignity through the choices they make.  Choice and autonomy grant us our dignity; and it is that dignity that assures each of us the very heart of our humanity, both in the way we are responsible for ourselves, as well as for the communities in which we live.  It is in this way that education becomes the pathway to our humanity.

We look forward to having these dedicated educators join others from around the world in developing their capacity to deliver effective, engaging learning experiences for all students.

We also have a special opportunity tomorrow to raise funds to support more scholarships for educators in the developing world: all donations (up to $1,000 per donor) will be doubled by Microsoft!

This special opportunity is being offered through the Give for Youth site run by Global Giving, and starts at 12:00 PM (Noon) Eastern time tomorrow (Tuesday, September 24th) and runs until the $100,000 of matching funds are used up by other projects. We hope you will consider renewing your support to build the capacity of educators who need it the most, knowing that the impact of your support will be doubled by Microsoft's generous contribution!

If you're able to renew your support, please visit the project page on GiveForYouth.org as soon as possible after 12 noon tomorrow! Thank you!

Educators from around the world have taken part in TIGed’s professional development e-course, “Education for Environmental Stewardship”. Now its 8th cycle, the focus of this course is the importance of environmental awareness and engagement among our students, taking advantage of a variety of classroom tools and resources. In this cycle, participants from Nigeria, Canada, India and Romania have joined in every week to engage in discussions about environmental projects of which they are part, and how to incorporate more environmental elements into their learning environments.

Lidia, an educator from Boldesti-Scaeni, Romania, is one of such scholarship recipients who has shown a passionate drive towards taking what has been learned through the e-course and applying it to the various environmentally-focused projects she is a part of at the school she teaches at. She shares, “The course was useful for me because I strengthened in the idea of devising strategies [and] co-working with colleagues who teach classes [on] ecology [and] natural resources. Implementation of an environmental project could have a big impact both for the school and the local community on establishing  [environmental] partnership agreements.”

For Lidia’s final project, she plans to have her class collect packaging material (i.e. plastic bottles), and explore supplementary “lessons on manufacturing processes and production of new plastics”. Her dedication to improving the environmental literacy of the youth with whom she works is admirable, and her efforts to create an engaging environment for her students to grow in has resonated with the many other educators in the e-course who strive to do the same.

Through the generosity of donors, educators from around the world have been able to take part in the e-courses, fostering a greater sense of environmental stewardship among the youth with whom they work. A warm thank you goes out to everyone who has taken part in ensuring that global and environmental education progresses and that educators have the necessary support and resources to bring it into the classroom!