Jamaica to host education summit, January 21

Five hundred teachers and educators from across 15 countries are expected to be in Jamaica on January 21, 2023, for the Global Education Teachers Summit to be held at the Jamaica Conference Centre in downtown Kingston.

The confab is being organised and hosted by Jamaica-born, Maryland-based educator Keishia Thorpe under the theme ‘Redesigning the future of education’. Teachers are expected from Colombia, Canada, the United States, Ghana, Mexico, Uganda, Argentina, and Morocco, among other countries.

The summit is being held in partnership with the Jamaica Teachers’ Association and the Jamaica Teaching Council, with the Ministry of Education endorsing the event, and will see six training sessions spread across the day. There will be presentations by master teachers, education ministers and education strategists.

The summit is free for all teachers and is being sponsored by Thorpe’s non-profit, Elite International.

Thorpe, who was recognised as the 2021 million-dollar winner of the Global Teacher of the Year, has since been travelling to a number of countries to observe teaching methods and interact with educators. She is also a United Nations education advocate.

The event is being billed as a stakeholder mini-conference to bring together educators and education stakeholders from across the world for knowledge sharing, and to discuss equitable and inclusive practices as a vision for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for Education 2030.

Thorpe said the summit is designed for professional development, skilling and upskilling participants to address the knowledge of learning gaps caused by the pandemic.

“The goal is to equip participants with essential skills, innovative practices, and evidence-based strategies to navigate and solve problems relative to the modern student and 21st-century classroom,” she said

Among the issues for discussion are democratising, optimising, and digitalising education, and teacher education.

Participants are expected to engage on issues such as using knowledge and tests as measures for performance; using assessment and evaluation to measure outcome; decentralising education and free choice of education options.

The event is endorsed by Varkey Foundation, while the sponsors are Barita Foundation and the US Embassy in Kingston.