The Jamaica Teaching Council salutes teachers

THE JAMAICA Teaching Council (JTC) continues to recognise, support and reward excellence in the teaching profession. As teachers, you have oftentimes shouldered added responsibilities to educate and guide our young people on a path towards meaningful education. For such commitment, the council congratulates you and urges you to continue in your pursuit of education for all children.

The council is aware that teachers are facing new teaching and learning complexities driven by socio-economic and cultural changes, added to the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In response, the JTC is restructuring its professional development programmes through strategic partnerships, to give every teacher access to experiences that will leverage the teacher into the digital age.

For the first time in the history of the teaching profession, it is threatened. Advancement in artificial intelligence is demanding that the teaching profession applies its comparative advantage. Teachers who care cannot be replaced by the best of the humanoid robots. Our profession is founded on love, building the quality of person who is respectful, productive, values life, and can live in peace with his or her fellowmen.

As teachers, we continue to hold ourselves accountable for our actions to engender quality education. Interpretation of the curriculum into meaningful learning is the teacher’s task. The JTC has now created a strategy for teachers to access professional development, according to their needs, and to realise the mantra, ‘Every child can learn, every child must learn’. Such progress in education requires a competent, committed and an autonomous teacher.

The JTC will continue to focus on opening wide avenues to enable the teaching profession to engage with the benefits of the digital age. We will support the teaching profession to strategically guide learners away from passive reception to active involvement, positioning Jamaica effectively in the new digital era.