Teaching the Teachers

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to do some work with some local teachers through a great organization called The Foundation for Tomorrow. This organization is dedicated to high quality education for orphaned children. They offer a scholarship program which allows children to attend boarding schools once they have aged-out of orphanages. They also have several partner schools with whom they work closely to help improve the quality of education the children are receiving. A colleague of mine connected me with TFFT when I expressed an interest in helping with teacher training. And so, on Saturday, I gathered in a hot, tiny little classroom with 12 local science teachers to offer a session on science teaching, and the L.E.P. model in particular that I was so blessed to have learned from Dr. Art Stinner and Brian Lewthwaite.

To give you a bit of background, a Tanzanian classroom looks much different than a Canadian classroom. I have not been to visit a government school, but it is not unusual for them to have more than 50 students in one class. (The teachers I worked with this weekend teach at private schools, so their class sizes are more in the range of 30 – 35 students.) Teachers are not paid that well, and therefore it is not a very sought after profession. The requirement to teach at a certain level is that you have passed that level yourself. Therefore many primary teachers have not completed secondary school. In secondary school, there is an almost singular focus on preparing students for the national exam. Constrained by limited education and training, large class sizes, limited resources, and time, traditionally teachers have taught science very algorithmically, and students tend to memorize a lot of isolated facts without great depth of science understanding. Enter the L.E.P. model.

I was really excited to introduce a new approach to science teaching to these teachers. I put a lot of effort into planning three sample lessons that would have knocked Brian's socks off. My first surprise came first thing on Saturday morning when I arrived at Usa River Academy and met the first teacher who was going to be participating in my session - she teaches grade one. Oh. Didn't prepare for that. (I was asked to prepare for secondary science teachers and perhaps a couple upper primary level teachers!) It turned out that about half of the participants were primary teachers. I'm not sure they got as much out of my kick-ass lesson on limiting reactants as I had hoped! And of course, this being Tanzania after all, the power cord for the projector wasn't there. By the time it arrived, the electricity had gone off, so no projector. No matter, we finally got started (about 40 minutes late)…. Karibu Tanzania!

I knew that this type of approach to teaching would be really foreign to these teachers. It was difficult to get them to discuss approaches to teaching rather than science content. I don't know whether this was an attempt on their part to defend their abilities, or an effort to clarify their understanding of scientific concepts, or whether the approach was just too different for them to really take in. At any rate, there seemed to be a few teachers who were quite keen to at least try making some adjustments to their approaches to lesson planning. I will facilitate a follow-up session in February to see how they have implemented the L.E.P. model in their classes. I am hopeful that slowly, slowly they can make some changes. I wish Brian would have been here to help me out!

And the busy life carries on in my own classroom, where currently there is a large pile of marking, lab equipment everywhere, and a stopwatch ringing. Kids just think it is so funny to set the timer on those things to ring after they leave and annoy me …. J