Teachers Academy Foundation (ÖRAV) focuses on sustainable teacher development to support children’s right to quality education. MoNE in Turkey adopted the constructivist approach in 2008, ÖRAV was founded to help teachers how to implement it; to equip state-school teachers with the knowledge, practical skills, and methods to catch up with expected teaching standards and global practices.
ÖRAV designs training programs based on a sustainable social impact design depending on needs analysis as well as SDGs. ÖRAV selects its trainers from state-school teachers. After training of trainer, trainers are involved in supervision, mentoring, and coaching practices. These trainers take part in the facilitation of our programs out of working hours. There are 339 trainers from 55 cities. Teachers are supposed to be the biggest professional force behind raising generations with skills to help them cope with global challenges. For this, they need to learn these concepts and practices and experience the journey themselves before they introduce these skills to students. According to research by KUSIF and ÖRAV, the social impact of ÖRAV is on teachers as they became local agents of change and leadership in their communities and transformed in many other aspects. Teachers receive certificates from the MoNE after completion of the programs due to the protocol with the MoNE.
Until the pandemic, ÖRAV allocated trainers and all other resources to run the training program in the applying schools’s premises and reached 11.000 teachers annually with 15 different programs. After COVID19, ÖRAV had the advantage of having its online LMS, eKampus, a free learning platform, updated in 2018. All current training programs are transformed into online learning designs and new ones were added. In 2021, 46.919 teachers benefited from ÖRAV’s services via eKampus. So far ÖRAV worked with 262.841 teachers.
In the next couple of years, we plan to expand the content span of our programs and invest more in technology to optimize learner experience. Reflections from teachers for our online programs are promising and we plan to introduce more language options other than Turkish.
After a program is designed, training of trainer and continuous growth of them must be planned. Progress of each trainer must be followed to ensure standards. Systematic feedback should be given. When the first cohort of trainers reach a certain level of expertise, they should be trained to supervise the latter cohort. A new cohort of trainers can be involved and be supervised by the first group.
