In 2000 the Montenegro Ministry of Education embarked on a programme of education reform. English language teaching was in the frontline of the changes.

Client, stakeholders, partners

• Ministry of Education
• Foundation Open Society Institute (FOSI) Project focus

Focus
Training of English language teacher trainers, for Primary and Secondary Schools

The project
In 2000 the Montenegro Ministry of Education embarked on a programme of education reform. English language teaching was in the frontline of the changes. The British Council was pleased to support this initiative by offering to create a project involving a set of training programmes that would increase the capacity of local training organisations to cascade training to teachers across the country.

As a result, two four-month programmes of trainer training were prepared and delivered by two British trainers in the period 04-06, for 16 primary and 11 secondary teachers. The training covered modern, interactive and communication-based classroom methodologies.

The first training programme covered teaching young learners aged 6-9, based on oral communication, with plenty of visual and audio materials and interactive play-type activity. In parallel with the methodology training, the teachers worked on the preparation of a Training Manual. This is now designated as official training material by the Ministry's Bureau for Educational Services .

The second programme, for secondary schools, aimed to enhance and modernise classroom methodologies and replace the former grammar-based teaching with interactive and communication-based teaching. This training programme also included the development of a training manual.

Today, the 27 trainers are official trainers for English of the Bureau for Educational Service in Montenegro (Department for Professional Teacher Development). They have cascaded the training to over 200 teachers so far, covering half of the total number. The trainers also appeared on national television to talk about learning English at a young age in a well-received 55 minute programme, which was re-played five months later due to high public interest.

What the stakeholders say

• "This is the best capacity building programme we have even done in Montenegro."
  FOSI director
• "The programme helped me understand how children think, how they learn and more specifically, how they learn a foreign language. Before the training, sometimes I had to use my intuition in choosing the best approach with young kids. During the training, my methods proved correct, only that now I understood exactly why I was doing it and my teaching became more structured."
  Lea Lonza, teacher trainer

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