By Merritt Frey, Executive Director
Teachers are what makes a classroom a place of learning and growing!
The school year in Mali is now in full swing, so the work of our Mali staff is also geared up! This is particularly true for our Teacher Project Coordinator, Adama, who is hard at work helping our teachers. Last week, he hosted his first ever Teacher Peer Meeting, designed to help our teachers help each other.
For his first meeting, Adama gathered together eight teachers from four Mali Rising schools. This Peer Meeting focused on language teachers, so we hosted four French teachers and four English teachers.
Because the goal of these meetings is to encourage peer support, the majority of the time together focuses on teachers presenting lessons to the group for critique. Every teacher prepares a lesson for critique, and four are randomly selected to “perform.” For example, a French teacher presented their lesson on how to write a letter in French while an English teacher presented a lesson on basic welcome greetings.
The biggest feedback themes were focused on increasing active learning techniques to engage the students, ensuring equal attention to male and female students, and sticking to the objectives for the lesson. The teachers all took the feedback in good humor and felt like they learned a lot — read about one teacher’s impression of the peer meeting here.
Adama ended the meeting by exploring ideas for how the teachers could stay in touch with each other for support and advice. The leading idea was to set up a WhatsApp group so the teachers can be in contact on their own — no Mali Rising help needed!
Thank you to everyone who supports our teachers through your teacher sponsorship gifts! Because of you, are teachers are learning and growing…which means our students are learning and growing too!
