The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE) has held the first workshop of its Empowering Leaders of Learning programme.
The programme comprises four immersion workshops to be held over eight months.
It is intended to strengthen leadership capabilities and accelerate improvements in teaching and learning in 18 independent primary schools that form a partnership with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education called the Maharaty.
Ninety senior leaders from these schools have been invited to take part in the programme, made possible in part by ExxonMobil Qatar.
The one-day inaugural session at the Marriot Marquis City Center Doha Hotel was led by Dr Asmaa al-Fadala, director of Research, WISE.
Dr al-Fadala previously worked with Dr Simon Breakspear, founder and CEO of Australian-based Agile Schools, on a similar programme that supported Qatar Foundation school leaders with strategies and tools to drive sustainable change in teaching practices.
The programme has now been extended to these independent primary schools.
The overarching objective of the programme is to support the schools themselves in creating solutions towards further improvement.
The workshop series aims to complement this objective by encouraging educators to pursue an evidence-informed focus and learn from research on effective teaching practices to improve their student learning outcomes.
Participants were given a set of tasks to carry out in their respective schools before the second workshop to be held on December 11 and 12.
These tasks include teacher team building, using student work samples and exercises to collect evidence and identify concerns, and identifying improved current practices that can be emulated.
The third and fourth workshops will take place in 2017.
The final goal for the participants is to develop strategies to spread high-impact practices to a greater number of teachers and schools.

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