2025 GCEN Shanghai Symposium

About

This year, members of the League of Innovative Schools are invited to join the 2025 GCEN Symposium in Shanghai!

Each year, the Global Cities Education Network (GCEN) offers a dynamic, four day learning experience involving school site visits, collaborative exchanges, and presentations from experts, with a focus on issues identified by the cities and facilitated by those on the cutting edge of practice and policy. The 2025 symposium will take place in Shanghai, China from November 3-6 in collaboration with the UNESCO Teacher Education Center at Shanghai Normal University, a GCEN partner and participant for over thirteen years.

The current themes for 2025 are:

1. Education for All: As a large system, Shanghai must continuously work to accommodate additional students while providing a high-quality education and genuine opportunities for all learners. We will see how Shanghai maintains this focus on educating all students, especially those from economically and socially disadvantaged backgrounds, in order to reach excellence.
2. Teacher development and retention: The UNESCO Teacher Education Center is a leader in developing new educators who excel not only at classroom teaching, but develop into research experts and mentors to create a holistic system of educator support and development. We will learn about the incentives to maintain teachers in the profession including school-based professional learning communities, career ladders, and opportunities for research.
3. The digital world: China is a leader in AI and the national Ministry of Education has been encouraging all teachers to take risks in integrating it into their classroom teaching. We will examine supportive policies and innovative classroom projects. From a workforce perspective, the new economy in China privileges technology and AI literacy expertise together with a stronger skills focus, both at the point of graduation and in pathways leading out of secondary education, to further study and work.
4. Whole child development: We will continue our conversations from the 2024 symposium on how we are transforming education to meet the needs not only of future learners, but of our current learners struggling with a sense of belonging, fewer opportunities addressing their learning variability, and the lasting academic and mental health effects of the pandemic.
5. Workforce development: In China, career and technical education (called vocational education and training or VET) is increasingly harmonizing with higher education to provide a more integrated tertiary sector aimed at producing more highly skilled workers. We will investigate how new forms of lifelong learning are emerging to ensure the continuous upskilling of the workforce, including an on-the-job focus, use of an enabling modern qualifications framework, and widespread adoption of micro credentials

Application Criteria

In addition to GCEN members, district and school leaders from Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools are encouraged to participate.

A select few additional teams and individuals from outside of GCEN and the League will be invited to join as well.

Cost

The conference fee for the symposium is $1,750 per person. This fee covers all programming, transportation to local site visits and events, and lunches during the symposium. Each participant is responsible for their own flights and accommodations.

Application Instructions

There is no application for this opportunity. If interested in participating, contact Heather Singmaster, Director of GCEN at Digital Promise: hsingmaster@digitalpromise.org.

Contact

Heather Singmaster