11 Mar 2015
Doha, 11 March 2015. The ‘Aspire For Education II’ Conference that took place at Aspire Academy on March 9 and 10 was heralded as a great success for the organizers and 200 delegates from Qatar, the Gulf Region, Arab countries and other parts of the world that gathered in Doha to address the topic ‘Academic Support – Collaboration for Success’. The two-day event successfully raised awareness about the needs of students with learning disabilities and offered participating teachers multiple ways to enhance their learning.
“The attendance was amazing and even after long days of lectures the participants were eager to join the workshops. The reason is simple – the issue we discussed at this event is currently a hot topic in schools all around the world and teachers are very interested in sharing and exchanging ideas. We hope that the participants will stay in touch with us and that this event motivated them even more to keep themselves up-to-date when it comes to further education for teachers,” said Badr Al-Hay, Director of Education and Student Care at Aspire Academy.
Dr. Gad Elbeheri, an applied linguist and one of the event’s speakers, who worked for a number of prestigious organizations before becoming Dean at the Australian College of Kuwait, praised the conference for its perfect organization and the good selection of topics. “It’s very important to raise awareness of these issues and to collaborate in order to find the best ways to work with students that deal with learning disabilities. Therefore it’s also important to firstly identify the strengths of the children to be able to enhance their performance. Teachers can only benefit from knowing the developments in these topics from around the world and what training programs are available.”
“I am currently doing my Master in Special Education and in the course of my studies I have heard a lot about how countries like the US approach these topics and about their ways of including students with learning challenges, but here I had the opportunity to find out what this important topic means to Arab countries,” said Aysegul Pala, a teacher from Turkey with experience in dealing with autistic children.
“It was a very good conference, because it’s important to be able to support students in the best possible way and events like this help teachers like us to grow and to stay up-to-date,” said Mahdi Nawneh, Math teacher at Naser Bin Abdulla Secondary Independent Boys’ School in Doha. “We gained a lot of good inputs and I will use them to get deeper into the topic and then decide what approach is the best fit for me,” added Alaa Ali, who is teaching at Salah Edeen Primary Independent Boys’ School.