On October 12, the Bilkent University Board of Trustees organized the “Sharing in Education and Classroom Teaching” workshop.
Bilkent University started accepting students into its Classroom Teaching Program, under the Faculty of Education’s Department of Basic Education, following the Higher Education Council’s approval on May 16, 2024. The workshop, held at the İhsan and Ayser Doğramacı Science, Culture and Arts Center, aimed to highlight the emphasis on the teacher training process initiated in the early 2000s under the leadership of Prof. Ali Doğramacı, particularly regarding the Primary School Teaching program. It also served to share new developments in the field, celebrate the opening of this new program and introduce the program to esteemed educators. The workshop opened with speeches by the Chair of the Board of Trustees, Prof. Gülsev Kale, Rector Prof. Kürşat Aydoğan, and Dean of the Faculty of Education, Prof. Alipaşa Ayas.
Attendees included primary school teachers and administrators from Bilkent, Ankara and Erzurum schools as well as the Deans of the Faculties of Education from Ankara, Gazi, Başkent and Hacettepe Universities. In the first half of the program, Prof. Ferhunde Öktem, a retired faculty member from Hacettepe University’s Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, shared her experiences in the field of child and adolescent mental health and issues. Prof. Sedat Sever, the founding director of Ankara University’s Children’s and Youth Literature Research Center, who has also made significant contributions to children’s literature, gave a speech on children’s educational processes and reading culture.
In the second half of the program, participants were divided into three groups. In this section, topics that had emerged during the preliminary evaluations of the newly initiated program were discussed in simultaneous sessions, allowing participants to exchange ideas and share proposed solutions. During these discussions, the challenges faced by primary school teachers in education and teaching, as well as potential solutions, were addressed. Additionally, recommendations were developed to help newly trained classroom teachers perform their duties more effectively. The contributions of equipping classroom teachers with International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (PYP) competencies to the teaching process were also discussed in a parallel session.
The “Sharing in Education and Classroom Teaching” workshop, attended by 80 participants, concluded with group representatives sharing their final reports.
