By Hindaty Traore, Girls’ Project Manager

Sue Taylor Middle School in the remote village of Diorila has a problem – too few teachers for the number of students. Imagine a school with 90 middle school students, and just one or two teachers! Mali Rising Foundation decided we needed to work with the village to address this problem.

The school in Diorila has long struggled with a high dropout rate and poor educational results. Through discussions with teachers and interviews with students and parents, we found that the village felt a large part of the problem was the lack of teachers. At times there was only one teacher for the whole school – leaving two of the three classrooms with no supervision or instruction. All too often, the students in the unsupervised class or classes would disrupt the class trying to work with the lone teacher. This made students feel like their time in school was wasted and encouraged drop outs.

Last year, Mali Rising was able to work with the mothers of the village to assist them to use income from the Mothers’ Loan Fund to hire an additional teacher…so now there were at least two teachers! Although this improved the situation, it was still challenging for two teachers to manage three classrooms and 8 subjects.

With the support of a generous donor, this year we piloted an experimental solution -- recruiting two Teaching Assistants who to help our teachers with the students. The two assistants are named Halimatou Sissoko and Mariam Touré. Both are mothers in the village and both a literate -- Halimatou attended high school and Mariam studied accounting for several years.

The job of the Teaching Assistants is to monitor students during lessons so that students can concentrate, supervise classes where there are no teachers to make sure students do exercises given by the teachers, monitor students during homework, and check often to be sure students have completed their homework.

I asked one of the Assistants, Mariam, to share her thoughts on her experiences so far:

“My name is Mariam Touré. I am married and the mother of four children. Just now I was with the students of the 7th grade because there were no teachers. The director gave them an exercise to do and I was there to watch them. If there are no teachers in class, we monitor the students during homework, we take care of the classes by overseeing reading sessions, lesson learning, and exercises,” said Mariam.

Mariam continued, “If there is a teacher in the classroom, we assist them so that the students can concentrate on the lessons given by the teacher. We do this by monitoring any students who are talkative or disruptive. The math teacher often gives math exercises and I watch them. Often I do little games of questions and answers in general knowledge with the students.”

When I inquired about challenges or problems, Mariam was positive, “We don't have any difficulties at the moment. The only small problem is that the students are a little rude but with the help of the principal we manage to control them. I think teachers and students seem to appreciate our work which motivates us more to do this work.”

“With my colleague Halimatou, we rotate often. I come in the morning and often in the afternoon. The day when I have to prepare food at home in the morning my colleague Halimatou replaces me and we have no problem at this level,” Mariam explained.

Luck Kamaté, Principal of the Sue Taylor Middle School in Dirorila, says he is very satisfied with the work of the two Teaching Assistants because they help them better organize the students during lessons. According to him, when the Assistants come, the first thing they do is to identify student absences. Then they work closely with the students and keep them focused. “We now have an ease of giving our lessons because the class is calmer and more participative. This also allows us to help students who do not have teachers to do exercises,” said Mr. Kamaté

So far, I believe this experiment is a true success. It is a constant challenge to find teachers to serve at this remote school, but village-based Teaching Assistants can help fill the gaps so that students still get great value from their time in school.