Teacher-training college to benefit from CHF 800,000 from Swiss state

Since the enactment of a new law in 2015, teacher-training colleges have also been able to apply for funding from the Swiss state in relation to research into various projects.
 
As a result, the Zug Teacher-Training College (PHZ) is to benefit from CHF 800,000 for its involvement in a number of projects over the coming four years.
 
Prior to the PHZ qualifying for such funding, certain conditions had to be met. These include that they work in cooperation with other institutes of higher education, be it a university (or university of applied sciences (FHS)), that projects run for at least four years, that they be innovative and relevant to the tertiary sector of education across the whole of Switzerland.
 
One area the PHZ (photograph) will be concentrating on is how to tackle the lack of qualified specialist lecturers. These are expected not just to have subject-related qualifications but professional ones, too. They should also have experience in teaching of the appropriate age group, whether it be at a teacher-training institute, a kindergarten or primary school; ideally, they should have a doctorate, too. Hence students will be able to benefit from their lecturers having not only expertise in theory, but in practice, too.
 
Another project involves the “Orality Centre” of the PHZ, a department which helps teachers and pupils to develop competency in the appropriate spoken language and associated areas of listening and conversation, bearing in mind how important it is to understand the arguments of others and how to formulate one’s own arguments, initially at school, and later professionally. 
 
A further project the PHZ involves a programme set up by the “swissuniversities Development and Cooperation Network” (SUDAC), which looks to “promoting collaboration between the various types of Swiss institutes of higher education and their partners in developing and transition countries in order to achieve excellent standards of education, research and innovation with regard to global challenges” and not least to looking at the best ways of “transferring know-how”.