By Adama Kone, Teacher Project Manager
At a recent Mali Rising Teacher Peer Meeting one teacher stood out from the crowd…and all because of a peanut plant!
I recently organized a Teacher Peer Meeting for teachers ten teachers from a group of our parter schools in the Bagnieuda area. This peer meeting brought together teachers from a vareity of subjects that are taught in a Malian middle school, including biology, English, chemistry, physics, French and math. At Peer Meetings, teachers volunteer to presnet a lesson to their peers and then they are critgued by their fellow teachers so they can improve.
During this recent Peer Meeting, science teacher Djibril Tounkara from Lareen Mellor Middle School is te one who stood out to me because of his use of a peanut plant!
Mr. Tounkara has been teaching biology at Lareen Mellor Middle School of Kassela for over six years and has been very helpful to students at his school. Mr Tounkara is so helpful that he even works with students even on weekends sometimes. He is very dedicated to helping the children of his village. Over the last few years, he has taken part in several Mali Rising Foundation Teacher Peer Meetings.
Here’s what Mr. Tounkara told me about himself and that peanut plant:
“My name is Mr Tounkara. I am married and I have three children. I'm thirty seven years old.
Today, I'm very excited to be here at this Mali Rising Foundation Teacher Peer Meeting again. I feel like I am really see the usefulness of these peer meetings because they have helped me improve my teaching skills a lot, and as a result of that now my students like me better.
In the past, I used to have problems when I stood up in front of the large size of my class. Can you imagine that I have over a hundred students in my one classroom and I used to be nervous while in front of them. But thanks to my participation in the Peer Meetings, I don't have this problem anymore and feel I feel so grateful for this!
Mr. Tounkara presents his lesson to his fellow teachers at a recent Teacher Peer Meeting.
I presented a lesson on the peanut plant today and all my peers liked it, despite a few shortcomings. The thing that impressed my peers the most was the fact that I actually brought a peanut plant to classroom today in order to help them understand my lesson better. As a biology teacher, bringging the object of my lesson into the classroom is a must in my opinion, because the students will barely understand the lesson without the object to see and even touch. Whenever I have to teach a lesson, I make every effort to bring the materials into the classroom for students to see and touch, as this helps them better than simply writing and reading things to them.
I encourage all my colleagues, especially the biology teachers, to be more helpful to students by taking materials into their classrooms.
I would also like to thank Mali Rising for giving me the chance to take part in several teacher peer meetings and trainings in order to help me help students have better lives.”
We may not see bringing real world materials into the classroom as all that earth-shattering, but in Mali this can be a creative act! Many teachers still use out-dated lecture formats but teachers like Mr. Tounkara understand that students learn in different ways and will get more out of lessons that engage them! This is one of the core ideas we work on with our teachers, so we salute Mr. Tounkara for making it happen!
