GE Foundation, the philanthropic unit of GE, which focuses on education and the environment, has teamed up with the US educational organisation AmidEast, to offer professional training for English language teachers in the Mena region.

The programme will offer the Professional Certificate in English Language Teaching (PCELT).

Launched in 2012, the program is offered by AmidEast in partnership with the World Learning/SIT Graduate Institute and aims at raising the overall standards for teaching by providing candidates with an innovative approach and curriculum that combines international best practices and topics relevant to the region.

The programme has trained and certified 132 English language teachers in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Palestine (24 each) and Iraq and Morocco (18 each). These PCELT graduates come from over 43 locations in the Mena region, with approximately 90 per cent being public school teachers, from primary to university level, and representing a broad range of learner needs and realities. Additionally, 20 local trainers have also been part of the program, with 11 of them already licensed and the others soon to be fully qualified PCELT trainers.

Led by the success of PCELT, new opportunities for its expansion have emerged, including the launch of PCELT in Lebanon and Yemen. The GE-funded pilot program has also advanced AmidEast’s goal of offering PCELT throughout the region, building on the organization’s extensive experience in English language training and educator development.

New courses following the pilot phase, through such funders as the US Embassy, have resulted in an additional 102 teachers completing the program to date. As AmidEast offices build capacity to offer PCELT on a sustained basis, those numbers will continue to rise.

The 120-hour PCELT program is based on an experiential approach in which participants observe, analyze, experiment with, and adapt a broad range of new teaching practices – continually linking these to their own students’ needs and contexts. PCELT’s practice teaching component gives them the opportunity to apply their developing skills daily to students in an authentic classroom.

The participants are selected following a detailed process that involves recommendations by educational partners, an application with writing samples, TOEFL scores, and interviews to measure attitudes towards professional development and commitment to the rigorous course. – TradeArabia News Service