Mohamed bin Zayed Award for Best Teacher Organizes Training Program in Finland

The “Mohamed bin Zayed Award for Best Teacher” organized a training program for distinguished teachers, who had participated in the award’s last edition.

A group of leading teachers has been chosen to attend specialized training courses and workshops and visit various leading educational facilities in the Republic of Finland. This aims to develop their skills, enhance their job performance, and highlight their talents and abilities for innovation and creativity, to employ them in the classrooms. This will eventually achieve the Award’s objectives and vision of having sustainable education, in which the teacher is the most important link.

The training program falls within the future vision of the Award, which is to enhance the contents and practices that contribute to the consolidation of the characteristics of the distinguished teachers working in the countries participating in the Award. To achieve this, the teachers who had remarkable participations in the Award had been offered specialized training to enhances their abilities, skills, and outputs.

The two-week program aims to achieve a set of educational goals, namely to familiarize the participants with the educational principles used in the Finnish educational system that stimulate critical thinking and research skills among students, early childhood education, mathematics education, and the uses of various technological solutions in education, including programming and robotics. The teachers have also received many lessons to enhance their professional development and enable them to transfer the knowledge they have acquired to their schools and include it in their teaching methods. They have also had access to the latest methodologies and technologies that keep pace with the rapid changes of the 21st century.

The program also included several official and professional visits to the National Agency for Education, various museums, scientific centers, and public libraries, during which a presentation had been delivered on the best practices applied in the field of leadership, curriculum development, and lesson planning and the best methods for effective application of inquiry-based teaching methodologies. The presentation also included a discussion on the various examples of exemplary lessons and strategies that supported learning. The participants had also been provided with the theoretical foundations that would enable them to understand the processes of change in the educational system and how to choose and implement appropriate strategies for evaluating the school environment.

The program also helped the participants learn about the theoretical and practical aspects related to the methodology of teaching small groups, by facilitating the participation of groups of students in activities and focusing on the use of research skills and problem-solving methods, to create a supportive environment for students’ active learning.

Dr. Hamad Al-Darmaki, Secretary-General of the Award, stressed that the “Mohamed bin Zayed Award for Best Teacher” devoted the best effective educational practices, to achieve a great deal of creative competition among teachers and to highlight their achievements, talents, and creativity. He added that the Award had also helped sober educational thought find its way into the school community by developing the teachers’ skills and abilities and learning methods. He added that this had been achieved by providing a deliberately prepared training system to serve the aspirations of the Award, advance the teachers’ progress paths at various levels, expand their educational horizons, and push them towards more creativity and innovation by enrolling them in specialized training courses in the finest global expertise houses.

He thanked His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, President of the UAE, may Allah protect him, for his continuous support and sponsorship of the Award. He added that this had been the cause of the development and comprehensiveness of the Award, which aimed to advance education at the level of the Arab states and then the world, through accession of a number of foreign countries. He pointed out that this confirmed that education and teachers had always received a great care from His Highness and the importance of achieving developmental leaps in education in the UAE and the world.

He said that the award was in constant development and continuous change in line with global trends, whether in terms of objectives, standards, or variation of contents. He added that the Award was an opportunity to learn about the best educational practices in the Republic of Finland, which focused on the educational process, especially the teacher.

He added that the Award was a pioneering educational platform that offered advanced capabilities, which contributed to informing teachers of the best teaching methods and exchanging experiences with teachers in Finland.

Al-Darmaki stressed that consolidating excellence, creativity, and innovation in the education sector was the message and goal of the “Mohamed bin Zayed Award for the Best Teacher”. He added that the Award was a cornerstone for the teachers aspiring for appreciation and achievement and a platform for enhancing teachers’ role in education, using the tools necessary to achieve this noble message. He said that the Award sought to develop teachers, raise their status, and make the educational field competitive towards adopting practices and policies aimed at investing in the teachers’ energies.