PCELT: A Turning Point in Teachers’ Lives, with GE Foundation Funding

Amideast’s new Professional Certificate in English Language Teaching (PCELT) program has been piloted successfully in six countries—Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, and Tunisia—since its launch in May 2012, in cooperation with World Learning/SIT Graduate Institute and with generous financial support from the GE Foundation. As word of PCELT’s successes have spread, new opportunities to expand it have emerged, including the launch of programs in Lebanon and Yemen and the training of eight additional cohorts with funding from the U.S. embassies in Egypt, Palestine, and Yemen and from the Amideast/Lebanon Advisory Board. All of this is good news for a program that represents an important milestone for Amideast in furthering its goal of providing the region’s teachers with critically needed pedagogical skills so that they, in turn, can further their students’ English language learning. Given the importance of English in expanding opportunities for youth, the initiative seeks to address the shortage of well-trained, certified English language teachers at a time when MENA educational systems cannot meet this demand, and when few such training options exist in the region.  
Egyptian teachers in the PCELT pilot program.

An Experiential Approach to Teaching

The PCELT program introduces teachers to an experiential approach in which they observe, analyze, experiment with, and adapt a broad range of new teaching practices, all the while linking them to their own students’ needs and learning contexts. PCELT’s practice teaching component gives participants the opportunity to apply their developing skills in an authentic classroom, while peers observe in order to provide supportive feedback.


The response of trainers and teachers to PCELT has been overwhelmingly positive. Not uncommon among the 210 PCELT graduates to date is the experience of a teacher in a Cairo public high school, who recounts her thrill at watching her students come alive and become more comfortable with English as they work in small groups, engage in discussion and debate, and act out scenes in English—activities starkly contrasting with the teacher-centric approach typical in the region’s classrooms, and which she, too, relied on until her PCELT training.


“PCELT changed my way of thinking about teaching and just made me a different teacher,” as one participant put it.


Expansion Plans for 2014


Plans are underway to expand PCELT in 2014, beginning in Lebanon and Gaza, with the inclusion of PCELT in two new USAID projects in these countries. In addition, new courses are planned in Yemen and the West Bank through U.S. government funding. PCELT will also be featured on several Amideast public course calendars.
 

Meanwhile, Amideast is building its own capacity to deliver the rigorous, internationally recognized program region-wide. A pool of PCELT-licensed trainers has been created, local assessors have been trained on PCELT program evaluation, and the curriculum has been tested and adapted to the needs of MENA teachers. Also of note, partnerships with local ministries and other educational entities have been strengthened around the common goal of improving teaching practices among the region’s many English language teachers. None of this would have happened without a generous grant from the GE Foundation to pilot PCELT in six countries.