By Merritt Frey, Executive Director
Our science teachers hard at work at Mali Rising’s 2018 Teacher Training.
Here at Mali Rising we really believe that good teachers make a good school. That’s why we have a special Teachers Project devoted directly to providing the support and training our teachers need to deliver great education in the classroom. As part of this work, we host an annual 5-day training for about 40 of our teachers.
Each year, we tailor the training based on pre-training evaluations of teachers in the classroom. This makes sure we are delivering something of actual use to our teachers! This year’s pre-evaluation was conducted by a retired, expert teacher well-known in rural Mali for his skills. He evaluated 12 Mali Rising teachers and found the following areas were the most in need of improvement:
Using teaching strategies that involve active learning techniques, as opposed to lecture and rote memorization.
Encouraging interaction among the students and with the teacher, including group work.
Regularly applying formative and summative evaluations to gauge student learning and progress.
Providing positive support and feedback to students.
Ensuring girls and boys are treated equally in the classroom.
As always, our teachers can also use help with managing their huge class sizes — often a teacher has 100+ students in a classroom!
So, now our staff and a great teacher training consulting firm are hard at work crafting a training agenda to serve the needs of our teachers. The training will be held at the end of December, so stay tuned for updates from the training and from the post-evaluation!
