By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Manager

We are just a few short days away from opening day of school in Mali!  Teachers are busy preparing first classes, weeding schoolyards, buying supplies, and generally getting prepared. As Mali Rising’s Teacher Project Coordinator, I too have been hard at work getting ready for the new school year.

One big change is coming in how we target our teacher support work. For many years now, Mali Rising has been helping teachers improve their skills. We host teacher trainings and peer meetings, intensive trainings, provide learning materials, and try to boost teacher morale through activities such as annual teacher awards.

Each year, we strive to improve our support of our teachers. This year, we are tweaking the way we offer two of our key strategies – peer meetings and trainings. In the past, we hosted perhaps a dozen scattered peer meetings throughout the year and five or six schools benefited from an intensive one to two day teacher training. While our teachers loved the support and showed improvement in their skill ratings, we felt like this “scattered” approach wasn’t providing quite enough coherent support.

So this year, we are trying something new! We’ve selected 10 (out of our 25) partner schools to receive year-long focused teacher support. These schools will each participate in 3 teacher peer meetings and 2 teacher trainings.

Why do this? Most importantly, the changes will allow us to offer deeper support all year long to a set of teachers. Rather than attending perhaps 1 peer meeting and getting a training every 3 or 4 years, teachers will be able to learn all year long and really strengthen their skills. We’ve all gone to a training only to come home and find we’ve forgotten everything within 2 weeks! This way, we can reinforce new skills and ideas until the teachers feel comfortable implementing them. The changes will also allow us to see the difference between schools that participated in the intensive year and those who have not yet done so. 

When we announced this new approach to the ten targeted villages, they became very excited. They are all looking forward to working with Mali Rising Foundation and hope to show great improvements in their results.

PS Don’t worry, our other schools will benefit from the targeted intensive work in future years!