TEACHER NETWORKS: Today’s and tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities for teaching profession

Abstract

This book deals with the evolving role of the teaching profession and the role of teacher networks in response to changing skills needs in society. This book argues that teachers can play the main change agents for reforms of education, provided that they are well supported and enabled to do so. Recently, various teacher networks have emerged at the local and international scale, and questions around their role in supporting teachers, both in their Initial Teacher Training (ITT) and Continuous Professional Development (CPD), have been raised. \nWhat are teacher networks? In this book, we consider teacher networks as learning networks: technology-supported communities through which learners share knowledge with each other and jointly develop new knowledge (Sloep & Berlanga, 2011). The ultimate aim of teacher networks is to contribute to both the quality of the teaching profession and to the learning experience of students, through encouraging collaboration and knowledge exchange at both teacher and student level.