And We Are Off!

Tool Making Workshop

There has been an article about our work in a Vancouver local paper with an appeal for stickers to use as rewards and incentives. The best stickers have little or no English and are small so you get more stickers for the same amount of money. Please send them to:

Heather Best

Bukoba BILL Project

Bukoba Rural Council

Box 491Bukoba

Tanzania

Three weeks ago we had the first workshop with the 5 Ward Education Coordinators (WEC), one inspector, 6 head teachers (principals) and 6 mentor teachers from our selected schools to create the monitoring and evaluation tools. We learned from them the participatory methods the teachers were taught in teacher training (but were applying in part sometimes.) From these and our experience we created 5 categories of participatory methods: Question and Answer using the higher levels of thinking, Group Work, Whole class Activities (such as calendar time), Investigations including science experiments and projects etc. and Games, Songs and Drama. We also pooled our resources to come up with a Teacher Observation Form to be used by the WEC’s and head teachers and a Teacher to Teacher Observation form for teachers to support each other. Finally we created a KAP survey to capture the teachers’ experience of being observed. All a bit dry when written here.

We administered a baseline exam in Kiswahili, Math and English to 20% of the standard (grade) 4 students. The marking proved to be a challenge in trying to get a standardized marking scheme.  We ended up having to remark some of the language exams. A learning curve for us all.

Question and Answer Workshop

Then it was finally time to begin the project in earnest. Our first workshop was on Question and Answer. A simplified Bloom’s Taxonomy of thinking hierarchy was presented. We had lots of activities to for the teachers and head teachers to experience as well as apply in their teaching. Many of the participants could not answer why and how questions for example. They did not experience this kind of questioning in their schooling and have not had the opportunity to learn this kind of thinking. So they have to learn how to question themselves before they can teach their students.

Teacher Sharing Workshop

Following this one day workshop Christa, Louisa and I visited our schools (we each had 2 schools) to observe, support and encourage the teachers as they tried using questions that required more than just memory to answer. There was a wide scope of results from ‘got it and applied it creatively with exuberance and enthusiasm’ to ‘didn’t get it and feeling overwhelmed.’

One week later the same group met again to share their experiences teacher to teacher. Concepts were clarified and enlarged upon. The teachers really appreciated a chance to learn from each other. There is not this kind of professional development here at all.

Question and Answer Activities

There was also a consensus that we not go too fast which I wholeheartedly agreed with. Three other schools were added and these head teachers and teachers had to be caught up with what had happened in the previous workshop. Then the next 4 days it was back to the schools but 9 schools instead of 6 this time so we each have 3 schools to monitor and support.

Next blog is my experience in the schools.