In my last update you may remember my idea of teacher mentors – enthusiastic teachers who will continue my role of improving lessons and supporting teachers across the Lindi region of Tanzania after I’ve left.
Six teachers were chosen from various schools across the region, and since then we’ve all been hard at work. I’ve been training them on a range of different topics: from how to observe a lesson and give the teacher constructive feedback; to how to identify a child who may have learning difficulties; to teaching techniques that can be used to help learning in large classroom sizes and with limited resources.
Mentor training in action
A visit to Mingoyo School
Once I thought the teacher mentors were ready, I organised visits to schools for each of them so they could do their first lesson observations and begin mentoring the teachers. I went along to Mingoyo School with mentor Francis to see how he did.
The main lesson Francis observed was taught by Mr Ambali for his class of 14-16 year olds. When students turn 14 years old, the curriculum changes to teaching in English, even though the rest of their schooling has been done in Swahili.
From my time in Tanzania, this has easily been the largest barrier for learning, as English is often both the teacher’s and the students’ second language. It’s frustrating knowing lessons would be a lot easier to understand if it was switched back to Swahili. Despite this, I have spent a lot of time with teachers helping do lessons in English, and did a whole chapter with top tips in my teacher handbook, which I wrote a couple of months ago.
Creepy crawlies
Anyway – back to the lesson! It was a science lesson focused on harmful insects, which made the Geography teacher and young boy in me very happy. Mr Ambali taught a great lesson and it was fantastic seeing Francis at the end of the observation complementing and encouraging him.
From there, Francis and Mr Ambali did some interactive activities together, so Francis was able to explain the activities as they went through. Teaching together is turning out to be a very successful way of improving techniques amongst the teachers as they see their mentors as equals.
The class loved having two teachers and taking part in some fun activities. Francis did a head and tails game for translating key insects from Swahili to English and some ‘fill in the gap in the sentence’ activities to identify if anyone in the classroom was struggling.
We did a hands up game at the end to test how much had been taken in, with good results. One of the questions was who had suffered from malaria – you can see from the photo, all of them!
Meet Rebecca
When choosing teacher mentors one of my biggest priorities was to get female teachers involved. The vast majority of teachers in Tanzania are men, so this mentorship scheme is the perfect opportunity to improve equality and create female role models for any aspiring teachers.
I feel very grateful that we found Rebecca. From just a couple of weeks of training I can already see her potential. At first she was nervous of standing up in front of her colleagues and telling them how to improve, but she’s doing a sterling job.
Rebecca and I have organised her first observation at Angaza School in the next month to test out how she is doing, so watch out for my next update to find out how she did!
That’s all for now, but thank you so much once again for your support and wave of recent messages I’ve been getting (I’m starting to feel a little famous!). Please keep them coming, I love hearing from you.
Over and out,
Paul
