Photo Update from 2018 Teacher Training

By Merritt Frey, Executive Director

Last week, more than 40 Mali Rising teachers came together for 5 days of training and sharing ideas. This is all thanks to our generous supporters, who understand that a school is only as good as its teachers. Thanks to our donors, each Mali Rising school now has two teachers with more skills to share with their students!

Our Teacher Project Coordinator will share more details about the training via this blog later in January. For now, we wanted to share just a few photos from the week, showing our teachers in action as they learn and grow. They focused on developing skills to build more engaged, active learning strategies into their classrooms, ways to better support girls’ learning, and tactics for managing their huge class sizes (100 students in a classroom is not at all rare!). Learn more about the Teachers Project.

Here the gender instructor is giving some advice to one of our teacher, because one of this teacher's students is to be given in marriage to a man, but the girl wants to keep up with school instead of being married.

After the gender module, our teachers were still excited, so they continued the discussion. Some of them believed that girls and boys are equal, but some others think men are superior to women.Those who understood that girls and boys are the same were still arguing so that those who didn't understand would come to agree.

After having been enlightened about gender, our teachers thought they had better go home with evidence of what to share with other teachers so here they are earnestly taking notes.

English teachers learn from a specialist to help them hone their skills.

Science teachers learn the importance of providing hands on evidence of science concepts, in this case the lever.

English teachers work together to apply what they’ve learned to an actual lesson.

Science teachers learn how to build a pulley from available materials to demonstrate real-world science concepts to their students.

Science teachers presenting a sample lesson for critique by the trainers and their peers.

We paid special attention to helping science teachers teach physics, which is often a challenge in our schools. Here, two teachers show off what they learned by presenting a sample physics lesson.

Teachers work in teams, mimicking a style we encourage them to apply with students in their classrooms.

One of the simplest, yet most powerful, benefits of the training is simply meeting and working with other teachers from around Mali. This gives our isolated teachers a sense of community and even pride.