By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Manager

Teachers face many obstacles while doing their job. These include a lack of training or teaching materials, crowded classrooms, and challenging parents.  To help teachers in our partner schools improve their work and help students succeed in school Mali Rising Foundation provides teacher training, peer meetings, materials, and more. Of all the support we offer, one teacher told us peer meetings are his favorite. Why?

Arouna Traoré is one of the teachers who has been an active participant in our peer meetings and trainings this year. At a recent gthering, I asked Mr. Traoré to tell us what he thinks of the peer meetings. Here is what he told me:

I'm Mr Traoré. I am forty—five years old and I have two children. I teach Natural Sciences at Cliff and Nita Bailey Middle School. I've been teaching here for about four years. I'm very proud to be a teacher and of what I have been doing for this whole village.

I am delighted with the partnership between Mali Rising Foundation and my school because I feel much improved now thanks to Mali Rising teacher peer meetings and trainings. I've taken part in five peer meetings and two trainings, all organized by Mali Rising Foundation. I feel more comfortable now in front of my students thanks to Mali Rising Foundation. I also managed to help some of my teaching peers thanks to Mali Rising Foundation.

Every time I attend a Mali Rising training or peer meeting, I feel empowered in how to start a new lesson and better engage my students in my classroom lessons.

At today's peer meeting, I just presented a biology lesson on pigeons that my peers really enjoyed. They also gave me good advice on how to get students interested in the lesson from the beginning of my lesson. They also suggested good ways to appreciate students who ask or answer questions during classes. Today, I also feel less shy in front of my colleagues during the presentation of my lesson because I really used to be very shy in the past when it came to teaching a lesson even to my students, let alone my peers!

The peer meetings are my favorite activity from Mali Rising Foundation because it allows us to improve faster and in a more fun way. It also allows us to get to get to know our colleagues from other schools whom we didn't know before. I get to know many other teachers thanks to these peer meetings and teacher trainings. When I chat with other teachers at our tea breaks, I sometimes share with them some of the good techniques I learn from previous meetings, knowing that we all struggle keeping our students focused in classroom and to get them to questions during our classes. For instance, today my peers told me that I could have told them this: whoever ask at least two questions on this lesson would get two extra scores during our next evaluation! I agree that this would have only kept the class more focused but also encouraged them to ask more questions then learn more.

So, I am thankful to Mali Rising Foundation and I hope this activity will continue in order to help all teachers improve themselves and be able to help students more.

Learn more about the Teacher Project.