How can a teacher take free continuing education courses

Periodic professional development is obligatory for school teachers and additional education teachers. In addition, the “crust” on passing the courses gives a solid “increase” to the points when attesting to the category. The teacher can take advanced training courses both in commercial educational organizations and on a free basis.

How often does a teacher need to upgrade his qualifications

By law, teaching staff must undergo continuing education at least once every three years. However, the administration of the educational institution has the right to set its own “quality standards” by sending employees to courses, for example, once every two years - in this case, this should be reflected in local regulations.

Moreover, continuing education is not only a duty, but also a teacher’s right. In other words, educational institutions should “create conditions” for the professional growth of employees - organize training for teachers, send them to courses with or without work, pay travel expenses if courses included in the “required minimum” are held in another city and so on Further.

The form of taking advanced training courses is not regulated by law. They can be:

• full-time
• part-time,
• by correspondence
• using remote technologies.

Until 2014, the minimum duration for a teacher was 72 hours. Now this requirement is no longer relevant - programs that take up to 16 hours to complete can take the course of short-term courses.

Who should pay for continuing education courses

The costs of additional education of teachers are laid down in the budget and oblige the employee to independently pay for courses included in the set "minimum", the administration of the educational institution is not entitled.

The only exceptions are long-term (from 250 hours) retraining programs, when it comes to essentially getting education from scratch. This issue became relevant in connection with the introduction of new professional standards for teachers, according to which pedagogical education is required to work with children. Therefore, graduates, for example, biofacies of “academic” universities, who teach biology at the school, or engineers leading children's technical circles, are faced with the fact that their education has ceased to correspond to their position. In this case, pedagogical retraining is carried out at the expense of the employees themselves - the educational organization has the right to fully or partially finance the courses, but is not obliged to do so.

If an employee has pedagogical education, but the school administration wants him to “expand his profile”, master a related profession and start teaching new subjects - retraining should be carried out at the expense of the educational organization.

How to take advanced training courses at a budget expense

The most common option for continuing education courses is from the educational institution. In most cases, these are full-time or part-time courses, which are held:

• teacher training institutes,
• departments of continuing education of universities,
• city ​​methodological centers
• educational institutions with the status of resource centers or experimental sites.

As a rule, an educational institution has a quota under which they send teachers to study at a budgetary expense. Sometimes the teacher is invited to independently choose a course from the list, sometimes a specific program is offered. In most cases, teachers have the opportunity to "take the initiative" - ​​having read the list of programs in advance, choose something interesting personally for themselves and ask them to send it to this course.

Courses can be devoted both to the issues of teaching individual disciplines and to more “universal” things - for example, project activities, inclusive education, interactive teaching methods, enhancing students' creative activities, work on GEF and so on. For young teachers, special courses are usually provided, introducing into the specialty.