Teaching English In The West Bank, Palestine: The Excellence Center in Hebron is dedicated to being a benefit to the city and community around the West Bank, Palestine. Knowing that there are more people to be reached beyond those that walk into its doors, the Excellence Center is heavily involved in community outreach. It has programs with several schools, sending volunteers to their classes and summer camps to provide English instruction. One such outreach is with the neighboring village of Sa’ir.
The Excellence Center has opened English courses with the Sa’ir Center for students of all ages. The English lessons began in the early part of July and will continue to late August. The students are divided by level of proficiency and receive two lessons a week from volunteer Excellence Center English teachers.
The goals of this program are to improve the Palestinian students’ English over the summer holiday, keeping them active and learning during their time off. Also, this provides an opportunity for the Excellence Center to reach more members of the community and improve relations with others. This service is provided with an entry fee of only 70 shekels per students for the entire program.
“As a volunteer who has the opportunity to teach in Sa’ir, I am thrilled with the steps the Excellence Center has made to have a presence there. I base my lessons on a textbook provided by the Excellence Center and incorporate many of my own original activities and assignments.
My class consists of about 15 teenage girls. In the program, there are about 40 total students split into 3 classes. There are four teachers from the Center, coming from America, Sweden, and France. The students are engaged and enjoy learning. We are delighted to teach them” Nick from the USA remarked.
“To give an example of what we do on a typical day in Sa’ir, I spent the last class learning and reviewing the ways use “used to” and “going to” in the past and future tenses. The beginning of class was used to explain the grammatical concepts. We practiced using these skills first by working on exercises out of the textbook and then by practicing with rotating partners. I find it effective to incorporate an activity or game in every lesson. This time, I had the class break into 4 groups and write a short skit using each of these structures at least twice.
The students seemed to enjoy this change of pace in their studies and the chance to be a little creative. I took notice of some common mistakes they made in their skits and took time afterward to address those. For homework, I assigned each student to write 5 sentences using the structures we learned so they could internalize the right way to use them. I believe it is critical for the students to be challenged to think and work hard but to enjoy the activities and the learning.” McKayla from the USA reported 
The Excellence Center is determined in its mission to provide as many people as possible with the invaluable skill of improving their English ability in the West Bank, Palestine. The Teaching English programs in the West Bank, Palestine aims to enhance conversational English of Palestinian future leaders in Palestine via collaboration with neighboring schools and villages. 
