On Tuesday 29 September 2020, we celebrated the closure of our Council for Business with Britain (CBB) Teacher Training project at an event at the Ministry of Education. The event was attended by Professor K Kapila C K Perera, the Secretary to the Minister of Education, Ms Sarah Hulton, the British High Commissioner, Ms Roshanie Moraes, President, Council for Business with Britain, Mr Mark Prothero the CEO HSBC Sri Lanka and Maldives, Ms Maheshi Weerasuriya, Director, English and Foreign Language Branch, Ministry of Education, and Ms Helen Sykes, Acting Country Director, British Council.
This project has been running since 2005. It grew out of 6-weekend workshops around the country and developed into the annual delivery of English language teacher training to approximately 200 English language teachers nationwide. Over 2000 teachers have been trained through this project. The course is a distance teacher training course with study sessions run by the trainers at the 31 Regional English Support Centres across the country leading up to the University of Cambridge Teaching Knowledge Test.
As part of the project celebration, the publication, A Celebration of the CBB Teacher Training Project: 2005-2020 Case Studies from across the country by the Council for Business with Britain and the British Council, which illustrates the impact of the project on the lives of the teachers, mentors and students on the project was launched. The case studies are based on interviews carried out over a period of 3 months. The case studies are geographically inclusive of all parts of the country and span the 15 years of the project. 31 teachers and 20 mentors talk about their personal experience before, during and after the project. The publication is a testimony to the success of the project and illustrates well its legacy.
Its legacy is the cadre of trainers and teachers it created who then impacted hundreds of thousands of pupils. This publication collects their often very personal stories. They talk about how the project impacted their lives, their schools and their pupils. Within their narratives are the techniques they learnt, like the use of the correction code to make error correction more motivating, resources they added to their teaching baskets like realia and puppets, and teaching skills they adopted like more communicative lesson planning and using concept checking questions to check the understanding of meaning. Their stories show children becoming more confident in their use of English and becoming more motivated to use English. Teachers also cite the increase in their pupil marks at the end of term tests and in O- and A-levels. The case studies clearly illustrate the move from teacher to student-centred classrooms and a corresponding increase in teacher and student confidence.
The collaboration of the Council for Business with Britain, the Ministry of Education and the British Council demonstrates the potential of state and private organisations to positively impact on education and is a role model for future collaboration
The publication is now publicly available. You can view A Celebration of the CBB Teacher Training Project: 2005-2020 Case Studies from across the country by the Council for Business with Britain and the British Council in the downloads section below, or by simply clicking here.
We hope that the case studies will contribute much to the field of teacher education in Sri Lanka.