Our work with teachers

We work with Palestine's Ministry of Education and Higher Education, universities and UNRWA to support the teaching of English within the Palestinian education system.

• The British Council is currently supporting the Ministry's e-learning project. Gavin Dudeney, an expert in learning technologies, conducted a scoping visit in June 2014 to assess the needs for training among schools provided with devices including tablets and netbooks for use by students.
• In 2013 over 1,000 Palestinian English teachers took part in our Organising Better Learning conference and presentation series, in Bethlehem, Tulkarem and Gaza City, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education and UNRWA, sponsored by Macmillan and Cambridge University Press.
• 1,300 English teachers in Ministry and UNRWA schools in the West Bank and Gaza completed training on how to teach English with grade 1 to 5 learners in 2011-2012, based on the Certificate in Primary English Language Teaching course, related to the English for Palestine syllabus.
• Eleven universities participated in a Symposium on Online and Blended Learning at the British Council, Ramallah, and by videoconference from Gaza on June 5th, 2014.
• More than 200 final year students of English at Hebron University have completed a short pre-service course in classroom management for English teachers since 2011.

We are also working with the Ministry of Education and UNRWA on Kids Read, an award-winning partnership between the British Council, HSBC and the Ministry of Education to promote reading for pleasure in primary schools.

The programme includes teacher training and resources for participating schools, competitions and reading events for the general public.

We work with individual schools to provide tailored teacher training programmes, both face-to-face and online, for school staff.

We are working with some private schools in Jerusalem to train their teachers of English.

If you are interested in teacher training or specific courses for your school, please contact us.

Twenty-six English teachers from West Bank Palestinian schools presented at our Organising Better Learning conferences in 2013, and many of their colleagues expressed a desire to see all of the workshops they led. We hope that teachers enjoyed the choice these conferences presented for them. Watch one Ministry of Education teacher at work here.

In addition to training programmes, we work with local and regional teacher trainers to identify the needs of teachers for training, and provide expert trainers to meet those needs. Recently Nick Bilbrough, Wendy Arnold, Jamie Keddie and Julietta Schoenmann have lead workshops including Using Images and Video with Language Learners, Managing Large, Mixed Ability Classes, Pair work That Works (and some that doesn't) and In Your Own Write.