Transforming Refugee Education towards Excellence

Launched in 2019, The Transforming Refugee Education towards Excellence (TREE) programme is a joint initiative of Save the Children and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) implemented in Jordan in collaboration with the Jordanian Ministry of Education (MOE) and in partnership with Community Jameel, Dubai Cares, and Hikma Pharmaceuticals. The overall objective of the programme is for children in the MOE schools to grow socially and emotionally, together with their teachers, and to become more engaged learners as a result of teachers having improved wellbeing and adopting improved teaching practices.

TREE, a five-year program, engages teachers, principals, MOE representatives and other education professionals to co-design, prototype and test a new Teacher Professional Development (TPD) intervention focusing on improving teacher occupational wellbeing and the quality of teaching practices in relation to creativity, innovation and the use of diverse learning resources. TREE’s TPD intervention consists of a set of TPD blended learning courses and tools being developed using iterative user-centred methodologies that utilize the design thinking approach, which places teachers at the centre of the TPD intervention’s development process. This ensures that teachers’ most relevant needs are identified and addressed effectively, so they are better able to address students’ wellbeing and learning needs. The program replaces traditional professional development techniques, which rely heavily on expert training and follow-up, with a 50:30:20 evidence-based approach. This approach involves three key aspects: expert training (20%), peer-based learning (30%), and self-learning methods (50%).

TREE’s TPD courses are being integrated into the MOE’s national TPD system, and are meant to be delivered to teachers by MOE’s capable and trained supervisors with the initial support of Save the Children Jordan.

The main outcomes of the TREE program: 

• Strategic: Moe’s teacher professional development system strengthened
• Outcome 1: Moe buy-in and support of teacher wellbeing and TPD best practices are secured
• Outcome 2: Improved teacher occupational wellbeing
• Outcome 3: Improved teaching skills and practices acquired and adopted by teachers in target competencies

In TREE, we believe in the importance of building a firm and relevant evidence base upon which Save the Children and other national and international stakeholders can build interventions that are context-specific and implementable in local contexts, namely the Jordanian context. As part of our contribution to these efforts, and in order to achieve the above outcomes, we have started two research studies thus far: The Teacher Occupational Wellbeing study, and the TREE TPD Evaluation study. While the former aims to ultimately evaluate the occupational wellbeing of teachers in public schools in Jordan, the latter mainly aims at evaluating the effectiveness of the TREE TPD intervention in boosting participating teachers’ wellbeing and improving their teaching quality.