Teach for All UAE yet to gain pace

DOHA // Almost a year after a plan was announced to attract the nation’s most talented graduates to teach in public schools, a timeline for its launch has not been set yet.

Last November, Abu Dhabi Education Council signed an agreement with the Teach for All foundation, a global network of 38 independent organisations that recruits and trains outstanding graduates to teach for two years in public schools and develop leadership skills.

Since then, progress has been steady, but slow in building a local infrastructure to recruit, support and train the teachers, the foundation’s managers said.

“We’re hopeful that there will one day be a Teach for All UAE,” said Wendy Kopp, chief executive and co-founder of Teach For All. “We’re hoping that it gains life.”

Jared Hove, Teach for All’s senior director for partner engagement, said: “We’ve continued to have interest from people who are supportive of launching a programme there,” but “there is no time parameter set on it exactly”.

Before Teach for All UAE can begin operating here, Mr Hove said, Adec would have to recruit a leader for the organisation.

In 2013, Qatar became the first country in the GCC to establish a local Teach for All programme. There, the leader is Mohammed Fakhroo, a Qatari, who traded a career in commercial investment and property to run the non-profit organisation.

“We are working as part of the solution to help the challenges that our children in the classrooms face today in Qatar,” Mr Fakhroo said. “We do this by having fantastic individuals, high achievers, to join the programme to teach for two years.”

Mr Fakhroo said Teach for Qatar received about 700 applications from graduates, but only about 10 per cent of applicants were accepted.

“Our success is based on our selection criteria. I make sure that you have most of the foundation before getting you to join the programme,” said Mr Fakhroo, noting applicants must pass a number of subject knowledge tests.

“We constantly train our fellows, so they will understand the curriculum before they go into the classroom. Remember, it’s not an eight-week thing, it’s a two-year thing, so throughout the two years, we’re constantly developing them from a teacher training perspective and from a leadership perspective.”

Before starting the programme, the prospective teachers – or “fellows” as they are called in Teach for Qatar – go through eight weeks of intensive training and then are placed in summer school classrooms as teachers. Then, they begin their full-time teaching positions in one of 17 partner schools teaching maths, science and English to pupils in grades seven or eight.

“What we do is we cultivate an interest in teaching, making it a viable career. So I make it an option for the graduates, for our fellows, who have not studied education, to have an opportunity to teach,” Mr Fakhroo told an audience at the World Innovation Summit for Education.

Although it was too early to measure outcomes from Teach for Qatar, Mrs Kopp noted that two thirds of Teach for America’s alumni were still working full-time in education. Another 20 per cent worked in other sectors related to improving education and quality of life in low-income communities.

“Teach for Qatar is addressing the educational need that exists among the local Qatari population here and something similar would be happening in the UAE,” Mrs Kopp said.