Teachers Skills Forum to focus on creativity, innovation among educators

AMMAN — Encouraging teachers to experiment with more creative and innovative teaching methods continues to be the end-goal of the Teachers Skills Forum, which will be held in Amman next month for the third consecutive year.

“From Conformity to Curiosity; Deconstruct and Reconstruct Education”, will be this year’s theme, with the event expected to attract hundreds of local and regional teachers from public and private schools.

Organised by the Queen Rania Teacher Academy (QRTA) in cooperation with the International Baccalaureate (IB), the three-day forum will provide an “array of crucial pedagogic topics, including students’ psychological health, early learning, interactive learning, media literacy and special education”, according to Haif Bannayan, the academy’s CEO. 

“This time, we want to enter teachers’ minds and see how they think and operate inside the classroom,” he told reporters on Tuesday during a press conference. 

With preparations in “full swing”, Bannayan noted that this year’s event, to be held on March 24 at Zara Expo conference centre in Amman, will have different settings to allow more interactive and innovative discussions, alongside more than 136 workshops held in both Arabic and English. 

One of the main speakers at the forum, which is expected to attract more than 1,200 participants, will be Tony Wagner, an expert from Harvard University’s Innovation Lab. 

He will be joined by Siva Kumari, director general of the IB and Steve Munby, CEO of the UK-based Education Development Trust, along with other experts from the University of Connecticut, the University of Toronto and the Jordan Media Institute, among others. 

A total of 200 teachers from Jordan’s public schools will attend the event at the expense of the QRTA. 

“More than 900 public-school teachers have registered to attend the event, but we can only sponsor the participation of 200,” noted Bannayan, expressing the academy’s commitment to engage with as many teachers as possible in its activities throughout the year. 

According to IB representative Mary Tadros, the forum has had “tremendous” success due to its ability to not only equip teachers with new skills, but to also provide them with practical instructions to be better educators and facilitators. 

“Students are changing and forcing changes in the classroom. Teachers who are unwilling to adopt new pedagogies will suffer the most,” she cautioned.