Professional and personal empowerment of teachers necessitates teachers themselves to be part of decision making processes that directly affect their life-long journey of teaching. In order to get teachers out of this vicious circle, a new approach to teacher empowerment was sought, this time not on behalf of teachers but with teachers.
The network model creates space for teachers in determining their needs, taking initiative and action to answer them. This helps improving their teaching skills with critical and creative thinking based upon the values of inclusiveness, equity, fairness.
Teacher empowerment necessitates intellectual competency and socio-emotional readiness, for which teachers are in need of a sustainable support mechanism. A professional learning network is capable of answering the ever changing needs of teachers thanks to its flexible, innovative and incentive structure.
With the input of teachers, Teachers Network has been developing engagement tools, hybrid programs, collaborations and projects with multi-disciplinary stakeholders, based on teacher needs and initiatives. Various talks, workshops, hybrid programs with various collaborations on different subjects are being held in the Network continuously.
Reversing the top-to-bottom approach, the network model had two main achievements. Firstly, as teachers took initiative in answering their own needs, they have formed ad-hoc communities where they work together with their peers from different disciplines and backgrounds on specific topics. Teachers Network’s engagement tools offer teachers a framework to hold activities based on their expertise and interests. By joining hybrid programs, teachers develop their creative problem solving and critical thinking skills.
Secondly, activities held by teachers and the output produced within adhocratic working groups and hybrid programs reached more than 25.000 people across 81 cities in Turkey thanks to the network model’s capability of bringing together teachers with educational stakeholders.
The starting point is to build a community around a mutual issue and discuss the needs; in this case teachers. Based on those needs, with the tools and paths of creative and critical thinking, solutions should be implemented and revised by the subjects themselves. To create wider impact, an engaged stakeholder network contains NGO's, individuals and public and private agencies should be build.
