Egypt partnership
Florida Atlantic University & Balanced Education: A partnership for change from Jennifer Friend on Vimeo.
Beginning in the Fall 2015, FAU and Balanced Education partnered to provide professional development for administrators and teachers to enhance effectiveness for Egyptian schools. Over the course of the next three years, this beginning will expand to 10,000 teachers, provide opportunity for research in school improvement, and change a complex system of education.
In 2015, the department of Educational Leadership and Research Methodology (ELRM), FAU, joined Balanced Education, Cairo Egypt, to form a partnership, bringing additional expertise in educational leadership and curriculum, as well as new perspectives to the design and delivery of professional development programs. The partnership began with a commitment to provide professional development for 10,000 public school teachers predicated on the belief that education is a lever for equity. The FAU team rallied behind a vision to improve student learning by building teacher capacity using a teacher-of-teacher model. Feiman-Nesmer (2001) argued, “What students learn, is directly related to what and how teachers teach; and how teachers teach depends on the knowledge, skills and commitments they bring to their practice “(p.103). Faculty in the ELRM department, together with Faculty from the department of Curriculum Culture and Educational Inquiry (CCEI) were responsible for creating curriculum for a professional development program to prepare teacher leaders from private international school, who would then become the first two cohorts of PD facilitators to teachers in experimental public schools across Egypt. Teachers in experimental public schools were targeted as a first step because these schools were perceived as possible vehicles for quality education to advance social mobility opportunities for lower middle class families in Egypt.
Figure 1: Ripples for Creating Positive Change in Egyptian Experimental Public Schools