Provide professional development training for teachers, instructional leaders (in coordination with SSOs and their professional development plans and with Education Institute and Curriculum Standards Office staff).

Developing the Curriculum Standards and Supporting Their Implementation 109

The Institute agreed that special support was needed to implement the standards, at first for Arabic only, and later for all four subjects. The Institute engaged CfBT to provide standards implementation support in the other three subject areas. The agreement with CfBT focused on four main tasks:

1. Provide professional development training for teachers, instructional leaders (in coordination with SSOs and their professional development plans and with Education Institute and Curriculum Standards Office staff).
2. Design and provide schemes of work.
3. Work with the operators of the next generation of Independent schools (Generation II, scheduled to open in September 2005) on their development of educational plans for their schools.
4. Evaluate the educational plan section of the Independent school contracts for the next generation of Independent schools.

These tasks were to be carried out from July 2004 through October 2005. As the final version of the standards would not be available until January 2005, the SSOs and Independent schools worked with standards in draft form for the first semester. These standards had already gone through much review and revision and, as it turned out, needed no significant alteration to become the finished product. The participants and the Education Institute judged the standards implementation support training as highly useful.