The IDEAL Futures Teacher Academy aims to provide a range of professional development activities and a transformative dialogue hub to enable pre-service teachers and in-service teachers in the early years, primary, and post primary sectors to engage in dialogue with policy makers, other educational leaders and the digital tech sector, with a view to leading innovative practices in digital education.
The main objectives are to:
1Support high quality collaboration between ITE Universities, Teacher PD providers, Teacher employment organisations, Policy Makers and Educational Technology providers.
2Identify the key challenges, problems and dilemmas facing pre-service and in-service teachers in a digital era in the context of the digital leadership ecosystem from the perspectives of policy, praxis, pedagogy and identity and identify opportunities for teachers to re-envision and lead a transformative approach to digital leadership in education.
3Develop and evaluate a high quality, multi-level, pedagogical model that supports transformative dialogue and leads to a co-operative and integrated approach to addressing issues facing education in the area of digital pedagogical leadership.
4Create a range of professional development (PD) content, activities and associated micro credentials to implement the pedagogical model. These will support educators across all levels of education to foster skills in digital educational leadership, including formal Open Educational Resources, Synchronous Workshops, Hackathons, Peer Observations, Transformative Learning Projects and Design Based Research Activities.
5Explore and evaluate how digital technologies, pedagogies and digital models of CPD can be used to facilitate communities of inquiry, transformative dialogue, reflections and virtual exchange of knowledge in the area of digital leadership in education.
6Develop a model of sustainable practice to support pre-service and practicing teachers and educational leaders to continue to integrate transformative dialogue into 4 ITE Programmes and 4 Teacher Professional Development Activities.
7Promote and disseminate the IDEAL Futures teacher academy outputs throughout Europe.
