School teachers gain life-skills education, expertise in experiential learning objects course

Birzeit University’s Center for Continuing Education (CCE) has recently concluded a two-month capacity-building program for school teachers and advisors across schools in Palestine under the center’s Experiential Learning Objects (xLOBs) project. 

Organized together with the Palestinian Ministry of Education and funded by UNICEF and the International Development Research Centre in Canada, the program featured discussions and seminars on ways to incorporate the center’s specially-designed interactive lessons that integrate concepts related to life skills and active citizenship into school curricula.

The xLOBs project aims to create an interactive, participatory learning environment in Palestinian classrooms. Now in its first stage, the project has created 560 interactive lessons for students in grades one through four and 300 lessons for grades seven through ten. 

As part of the project, workshops, seminars, and training courses were organized for more than 1,200 school teachers, with xLOBs integrated into the curricula of 340 schools across Palestine, engaging around 50,000 students. 

Ayoub Elayyan, director-general of supervision at the ministry of education, stressed the importance of the xLOBs project in stimulating creativity and encouraging knowledge-production in Palestinian classrooms, noting that the project helps create a learning environment that connects what students learn to their practical lives. 

Osama Mimi, head of the Learning Innovation Unit at CCE, explained that the center, as it is working towards institutionalizing experiential learning objects in Palestinian educational institutions, has recently established a national team to facilitate its implementation. Comprising experts from Birzeit University and the ministry of education, the team aims to entice Palestinian students and teachers to produce new knowledge and export creative, twenty-first-century educational models to improve life skills in the region.