Purpose
The purpose of the 2- day conference is to provide a platform for school teachers to share their learning from their classroom research. It captures the changes teachers are making to the way they teach and learners learn and their reflections on it towards sustaining the impact of classroom learning.

Aim
The conference will showcase the recent practical research activity of about 150 teachers, from diverse backgrounds, aiming to understand how, by exploring new teaching-learning practices, they can improve learning for their students and thus feel empowered.

Outcomes
The conference provides an alternative platform for teachers’ professional development. Teachers and other stakeholders will benefit in various ways.

• Teachers consider classroom research as a part of their CPD.
• Teachers share their ideas with a wider community (other teachers/ELT practitioners through different networks and through publications/seminars/conferences).
• It creates a pool of researchers among EIA teachers who are ready to conduct mini-research studies on their teach ing-learning practices and this enhances teachers’ capacity building by showcasing different activities in other TPD platforms.
• It creates a pool of mentors who can support other teachers to conduct classroom-based research as an on-going process.
• It helps teachers with systematic documentation of their evidence-based classroom practices that will enable them to understand teaching-learning better; this would in turn contribute to designing any policy related to teachers’ professional development (TPD).
• The best papers will be published in a book (by EIA) and in national & international journals and teachers will have opportunities to attend national/international conferences.

Background
The Teachers’ Voice initiative is a logical and essential development in the systematic process of documenting English in Action through the project’s monitoring and evaluation system. It provides a valuable “insider” perspective by supporting teachers to ‘tell their story” through their own eyes, and in their own words. The reflective process of documenting and then narrating changes in teaching-learning practices shifts the focus beyond teachers being implementers of “good” practices: it gives them a voice and empowers them to take greater responsibility for professional development.
The preparation for TVC began with an orientation programme for mentors followed by a series of workshops for teachers at regular intervals. Over a year, each of the mentors worked with three mentee- teachers on a small research study, during which continuous support was provided by EIA both face-to-face and online. It will be interesting to see how teachers make meaning of their research-work and how much of this will be carried over into the future. It will also inform us of the kind of support we need to provide for this initiative to be sustained.

The Conference
The conference itself is planned as a lively, interactive event which places the teacher at the centre. The aim is to stimulate debate, with a powerful exchange of views that are firmly rooted in practice. The mix of different formats - group presentations, poster sessions, panel discussions - will provide a chance for sharing the rich range of experiences and the diverse voices of the teachers.

Partner and Participants
The conference is organised in partnership with the Institute of Education and Research (IER), University of Dhaka thus creating an academic ambience at the two-day event. Along with the teacher-researchers, the conference will bring together representatives of all stakeholders in the primary and secondary sectors (including MoPME, MoE, DPE, DSHE, NAPE, NAEM, NCTB, SESIP, IER etc.), representatives from development sectors as well as English Language Teaching experts, both national and international.