JTC to Reward Excellent Educators

The search has commenced to identify and award excellent educators, islandwide, as part of the Jamaica Teaching Council’s (JTC) efforts to reward excellence.
The awards will be part of activities to celebrate International Teachers’ Day on October 5, this year. However, the church services, at which the excellent teachers will be awarded, will be held on October 3.
“And we hope that our Jamaican public will come out and celebrate our teachers,” Director of the JTC, Dr. Winsome Gordon, emphasized.
She added that the education officers are already on the search for excellent teachers and that this year is special, because the Council will be offering an award, in each of the 65 quality education circles, for special education teachers, to encourage them.
“The Education Officers are responsible for identifying the teachers, because they work with them but they are going to look at the work of those teachers, their results and results do not necessarily mean that the students are getting As, because we have to look at the cognitive performance and the affected domain and we have to look at how children are shaped by those teachers,” she said.
“We look for planning, innovation, creative ways of teaching. any research that the teacher may have carried out having identified a problem in the classroom,” she explained.
In the meantime, the Director of the JTC explained that they will be embarking on a marketing campaign for the teaching profession.
“We are going to market the teaching profession, because it has many advantages and some of the issues that come across from listening to dialogue from various interests are really not what they seem, and so we will go out and say what the teaching profession is all about and what it is doing. We are going to market our profession to sixth formers,” Dr. Gordon also emphasized.
The JTC was designed to develop an effective and efficient teaching service responsive to the changing needs of society.