1. Hemispheric Project Report
Responses to the challenge of improving the quality of recruitment and selection, initial formation, professional development and evaluation of teachers in countries in the hemisphere

2. Participating Countries
Caribbean Sub-region: Trinidad and Tobago (Sub-regional Coordinator), Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Barbados, St. Kitts and Nevis, The Bahamas, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Suriname, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica.
Andean Sub-region: Peru (Sub-regional Coordinator), Columbia, Venezuela, Ecuador.
MERCOSUR Sub-region: Paraguay (Sub-regional Coordinator), Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay.

3. Project Goal
To support the improvement of educational quality in the Americas by ensuring better-prepared and more qualified teachers through defining policies based on information gained from comparable indicators, successful experiences and hemispheric collaboration.[1]
[1] Research suggests that teacher education yields the single biggest rate of return to educational quality in some cases even surpassing socio-econ. background.

4. Purpose
To inform and transform the teacher preparation and professional development policies and practices, to allow national ministries of education to effect a change in a significant percentage of teacher education institutions (in each country and by extension, region) to produce professional teachers with high-performing competencies.

5. Outputs Policy development
Regionally standardized teacher education programs and performance appraisal systems established
On-going professional development programs
Hemispheric interchanges among and within sub-regions on successful teacher education programs

6. It will succeed if it has strong stakeholder support.
What is being attempted is the transformation of an entire system of education across the region.
It will succeed where there is the political will and the allocation of economic resources.
It will succeed if it has strong stakeholder support.
The contents of reports have to filter down to all stakeholders including teachers and there has to be distilled to them what is in it for them.
What is being attempted is the transformation of an entire system of education across the region. It will succeed where there is the political will and the allocation of economic resources. It will succeed if it has strong stakeholder support. The contents of the report have to filter down to all stakeholders including teachers and there has to be distilled to them what is in it for them.

7. Recommendations from the Evaluation
An awareness campaign in all the countries
There must be someone managing media information to ensure that correct information is being disseminated e.g. newsletter, brochures
There should be continuous dialogue with respect to the key issues