About GTP Finalists

About Merit Karise

Experiencing her home country Estonia break free from the Soviet Union, Merit was impressed by the power of the media’s verbal and image language. She now works at two vocational schools, Kuressaare Regional Training Centre and Tartu Art School, teaching creativity, English, career planning, and advertising as socio-cultural communication.

Merit was voted Teacher of the Year by the Kuressaare Regional Training Centre, received a national award for Best Internet Course in Social Sciences at Tartu Art School and won several prizes in EU video-making contests with her students. As a result, she has been invited to speak at many events, workshops and seminars about creativity and innovation, inside and outside of the realm of teaching.

In 2010 Merit set up an NGO to promote local heritage, world cultures, innovation and activism in social life, partly funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture. Among other projects, they have built a website featuring hundreds of local folksongs and folktales, and also contributed the winning idea to the 50th jubilee song festival of the region. These local projects are complemented by her coordinating her school in an EU Comenius project involving schools in 9 countries. In addition, she writes op-ed articles for national newspapers on culture from a youth perspective and is a member of the Kuressaare city council.

About Rashmi Kathuria

Rashmi has been working as a maths teacher in Delhi for twenty years. She decided to teach mathematics in a new way, using a blended approach, instead of following the standard textbook method. Apart from covering literacy and numeracy, she includes life skills, entrepreneurial skills and global citizenship in her classes.

In 2000 she set up a Mathematics Laboratory in her school that helps students visualise and experiment with mathematical concepts using concrete objects. She supplemented the lab with a blog for students and other teachers, providing over 500 enriching resources, project ideas and more. For making her materials available on the Internet in this way she received awards from two Presidents of India: the National Best e-teacher award from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam in 2007 and the National ICT Award from President Dr Pranab Mukherjee in 2010.

To make maths more realistic and teach students entrepreneurial skills, she helped set up a school business, “Udaan Creating Identity”. This project won the Top Global Prize in the School Enterprise Challenge from NGO Teach a Man to Fish.

Rashmi shares her methods widely by conducting workshops for teachers and university students, advising organisations that develop teaching materials, and building an international network of maths educators.

Rashmi is a Google Certified teacher/innovator, won Pearson’s Teaching Excellence in Mathematics award 2015, AIRMC National Best Mathematics teacher 2010, Face to Faith Gold award 2014 and Outstanding award 2015.

About Hanna Dudich

Hanna was born in Ukraine to a family of doctors, and everyone thought she would be a doctor too. However, she was inspired by her English teacher at school to teach English as a foreign language. Experience of the American educational system as an exchange student convinced Hanna that the Ukrainian system needed some new ideas. She imported project-based learning and student-centred methods, and has spent her years as a teacher pioneering these in Ukraine, using up-to-date technology such as tablets, smartphones and Google Class pages.

She has also had success in establishing partnerships with schools in other countries. She is the vice-principal of STEM integration and educational innovation at her school, and she has been the school coordinator of the Connecting Classrooms and eTwinning programmes; a Microsoft Expert Educator; and a PenPal Schools Global Ambassador. Some of the school’s projects have been recognized on an international level: winning a Macmillan competition, a British Council Olympic Games competition, and coming second in a Microsoft Global Forum project. She has received awards from the American Council, the British Council, and Teacher of the Year on a city level in Ukraine.

With the prize funds, Hanna would set up a pilot programme of portable STEAM laboratories, equipped with basic instruments and materials for scientific experiments. The lab would travel from place to place bringing new educational technology to every classroom, no matter how far from a city it is.