Over forty delegates of the RWCT International Consortium member organizations, the Board of Directors and ESP representatives came together in Budapest on 9-12 December 2010 for the first face-to-face annual general meeting of the organization since its legal registration.
Over forty delegates of the RWCT International Consortium member organizations, the Board of Directors and ESP representatives came together in Budapest.
In the first part of the meeting the twenty member organizations present[i] shared their latest achievements in promoting critical thinking, active learning, cooperation and high quality education. In addition to taking the RWCT program (which in most countries is an accredited in-service teacher education program) to increasing numbers of teachers and teacher educators, our organizations are building up new programs using core elements of RWCT, targeting school managers, parents, youth, community workers, adult education providers, librarians a.o., as well as other non-governmental organizations and local public authorities with RWCT derivatives.
The second part of the meeting was dedicated to fine-tuning the RWCT IC 2010-2012 strategy. The outcomes of this whole-day activity were three clearly outlined network project ideas:
- RWCT in Pre-Service Teacher Education: This project aims to contribute to the reform of initial teacher education by establishing a functional multinational partnership with a core group of selected universities to develop and pilot an effective teacher education program.
- Reading-Writing-Thinking Adults: This project, which by now has been fully developed and submitted for funding to the European Commission, will contribute to the development of adults’ key competences through the improvement of adult educators’ skills to deliver effective literacy programmes (using the whole-part-whole approach).
- Professional development for RWCT trainers: To ensure consistent quality of RWCT training, we will provide professional development opportunities for our trainers to be able to particularize the RWCT program for content-based areas of the curriculum. The longer term plan in this respect is to prepare the field for developing instruments to assess students’ critical thinking in specific content areas.
The Budapest meeting was made possible thanks to OSI/ESP, whose sustained support RWCT IC relies on for strengthening its capacity to successfully implement its strategy.
For further information about RWCT IC activities and initiatives, please contact office@rwctic.org.
[i] RWCT IC currently has 19 full member organizations, five associate member organizations and one individual member.
Tags: Research & quality
