Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - During its annual media gathering, the Association of Queen Rania Al Abdullah Award for Excellence in Education (QRAE) announced the launch of the first cycle of the School Counselor's Award in the governmental sector for 2014. This comes as the third award under the Association’s umbrella, stemming from one of its strategic objectives which aim to expand horizontally to recognize distinguished educators.

The Association further announced the launch of the ninth cycle for the Distinguished Teacher Award, and the commencement of the applications' phase for both awards, which will end on the 24th of April, 2014.

The Director of QRAE, Ms. Lubna Touqan, commented saying, “The launch of the School Counselor's Award aims to promote and reinforce school counselors in the Jordanian society and to recognize their key role in supporting students to grow to become productive and intellectual citizens who are positively committed to their communities.”

Ms. Touqan also encouraged all school counselors to study the Award’s criteria which will help guide their work in the field, serve as a self-assessment tool, and once the counselor decides to go through the whole experience of applying to the Award, it will also prove to be a rich professional development experience. It is worth noting that there are almost 1,900 school counselors in the Jordanian educational public sector.

The award’s criteria were competently developed by a panel of Jordanian counseling experts after having reviewed similar awards both regionally and internationally. The Association also held a number of brainstorming sessions with public and private school counselors to further ensure the development of the Award’s criteria, so that they reflect a proper understanding of the Jordanian counseling environment and the need to raise the bar of excellence amongst its players

Distinguished Teacher Award in eight cycles from 2006-2013, with a total of 214 distinguished teachers:
Region Females Males
Midland 79 13
North 60 11
South 43 8

Distinguished Principal Award in three cycles – 2009, 2011, 2013, with a total of 20 distinguished principals:

Region Females Males
Midland 4 1
North 6 2
South 7 0