SPEP - Support to the Palestinian Education Programme

SPEP (Support to Palestinian Education Programme) is a project funded by the Italian Cooperation, managed by UNDP "United Nations Development Programme- and involving the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MoEHE), 24 public schools with different grades, 4 local Universities (3 in West Bank and 1 in Gaza Strip) and relative Districts and the University of Bologna. The main concept for the SPEP intervention is that of a comprehensive developmental process focusing the school itself and leading to school growth and improvement of the quality of education in the Palestinian Territories. SPEP aims to strength the capacity of the school for self-improvement supporting, through a partnership between schools and universities, the develop of a process where the school becomes able to self-evaluate in the field of effectiveness of learning and teaching, students participation, management, ICT skills, teachers relationship and satisfaction, leadership, environment, networking, relation and involvement of parents and community, continuing professional development of teachers and principals. Collaboration between the schools involved in the SPEP should create a supportive environment that encourages the adoption of change and increases the sustainability sharing of good practices, expertise, resources. Each school develops its improvement plan with specific action plans, target and tasks, each with clearly identified success criteria in order to evaluate results: microgrants are available to develop specific project related to the school’s needs. Local Universities, coordinating with the MoEHE, work each with 6 schools visiting them regularly, helping in identifying standards and targets for the quality of education and in planning the improvement, training teachers in different areas, monitoring, advising and reviewing. The University of Bologna, Department of Education, has a technical advisory role in the ICT component supporting and working together with Palestinian Universities and schools and coordinating with UNDP and MoEHE. The University of Bologna’s role (L.Guerra coordinator and scientific referent, E.Pacetti coordinator in Palestine) is to implement the ICT knowledge and a critical practice in the schools providing relevant pedagogical models of the use of ICT, tools (software, videogames, learning objects) and methodologies, orientation, material, best practices, and is monitoring the pedagogical experimentation of the use of ICT in the daily didactic (in classroom) with a bottom-up approach respecting schools, teachers and students within the Palestinian context, using technologies and pedagogical/didactical models sustainable: stressing therefore the use of technologies with a low economical impact and open to a variety of cultural interpretation. The bottom up approach aims to innovate the pedagogy in the classroom, via the integration of ICT in the teacher’s practice using both our general pedagogical models and models locally experimented in a critical and original way (compared to the traditional know-how): in this approach it is important to help teachers to reflect and elaborate on their own performances and produce as a result learning material to be newly utilized in their contexts. The year 2007 (2nd year of the project) focused on: Phase 1: Activation of the process (January-August 2007): due to the specific Palestinian context the scheduling changed and Phase 1 was postponed until August 2007. Phase 2: Implementation of the intervention (September 2007-December 2008) Phase 3: Evaluation, dissemination and generalization (possibly January-May 2009). The project will end in 2010 with a final Conference in Ramallah about "ICT and education".