By Adam Kone, Teacher Project Director

Once teachers in Mali leave their teaching program, they very rarely recieve any additional training or support. I’ve known teachers who have taught for more than 20 years and never had a day of addtional training ! That’s why Mali Rising steps up to train teachers – to be good at your job everyone needs a refresher and to learn new skills now and then. Each year, we focus intenstive training and peer support on a group of about 30 teachers.

Amidou Diarra is in our intensive training group this year. He was more than thrilled to take part in it knowing how improved he could make himself. Let’s hear from Mr. Diarra after the his second teacher training:

“First of all I am very excited to be at today’s teacher training ! When I was told by my principal to come to this teacher training, I felt exceptional and honored by Mali Rising Foundation because as a teacher in Mali I do not have this opportunity very often.

I have been teaching English at N'Goko Middle School for three years. I like my teaching job because I have good relationships with the whole village and my colleagues at school. I also like to teach because of my students. They are respectful and participate well in my classes, which really motivates me as well. I enjoy teaching students my subject and my goal is to help them be as good at English as I am…or even better than I am !

Talking about this teacher training, I feel so proud and honored today that I am out of words to express how useful this training could be to me. As I said earlier, there are fewer training opportunities for teachers and when I have a chance, I always take it because trainings are always a chance for me to improve myself.

I learned from today’s teacher training how to provide active classes by engaging my students in classroom, how to better organize my students in group work or pairs, and how to motivate girls and help them participate in my classroom as well as boys. One of my favorite topics at this training was also how to increase [student] questions in my classroom. I like this topic because it has always been challenging for me to get students to ask more questions during my classes. With this teacher training, I learned some good strategies and I feel more confident that I will succeed.

I am determined to help my students with what I learned from my peers and the trainer at this training. In my opinion, the more teachers are trained, the better the students are ! So when I learn, my students will learn too. My goal is to make my students become successful in school – this will make me proud of myself and of my whole life as a teacher.”