Teachers Can Teach Teachers Best!
By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Coordinator
This school year, we will host 18 Teacher Peer Meetings, where we bring together teachers to help each improve their skills. With so much work going into organizing these meetings, I always want to check in the teachers to make sure they are useful for their work. At a recent peer meeting, I had a great conversation with one teacher who was brand new to the idea of Peer Meetings – Abdoulaye Doumbia.
New teacher Mr. Doumbia presents a lesson to a group of his peers for critique and feedback.
I spoke with Mr. Doumbia at an English teacher Peer meeting in April at our Leon W. Pete Harman Middle School. The peer meeting brought together six English teachers from six different schools, who all had a great excitement to come together and share knowledge.
Mr. Doumbia was one of the participants who had chance to share with us how useful he found the meeting. He teaches English at the Mindful Bunch Middle School in the village of Kafara. This is his very first year teaching, and he is very excited to be serving his school.
According to Mr. Doumbia, the Teacher Peer Meeting was something he has never experienced since he began teaching. He said, “There would have been a little chance for the teachers in my area to meet and learn from each other without Mali Rising Foundation’s help to do this.”
Mr. Doumbia pointed out that this meeting was especially helpful to him as a new teacher because it gave him the chance to meet with well-experienced teachers who provided with him important feedback. Mr. Doumbia added “I’ve never volunteered to teach my peers like this before and I found it very interesting and helpful in improving my skills.”
Even though he is a new teacher, Mr. Doumbia felt brave enough to also give some pieces of advice to his peers. Mr. Doumbia told them that teachers are also learners just like their students. Therefore, they must be doing on-going research in order to give the best services they can. In addition to all that, Mr. Doumia said he could understand his peers’ feedback at the meeting better than the teachers who taught him while he was at teacher’s training college.
I also had a chance to talk about Mr. Doumbia about his family. Mr. Doumbia is married and father of two kids. Abdoulaye loves his wife and his two kids very much. Unfortunately, Mr. Doumbia’s family lives about seventy kilometers away from him. He gets to see them at least twice a month. His kids loves oranges and mangoes and always ask for them when their father comes to see them. Therefore, whenever Abdoulaye wants to see them, he brings those fruits to his family to make kids happy. He believes he needs to see them twice a month because if he goes any longer it is just too painful to miss them that much.
Mr. Doumbia from the Mindful Bunch Middle School made clear that he was grateful to Mali Rising Foundation for inviting him to such a useful English Teacher Peer Meeting, and he hopes to join many more such meetings in the future.