I conducted my first series of teacher training seminars entitled “Departmental Seminar Series: Shaping the Way We Teach English (SWWTE)” in collaboration with Ms. Susan Strand, a Senior Regional English Language Fellow stationed in Dakar, who works at the Ministry of Education in the Bureau d’Anglais.  Working with Susan was just fantastic (she is an amazing teacher) and all three of the seminars were very successful and well-received by the teachers, so I feel that they warrant a new blog post.  Please enjoy!

The Basic Facts

Activity: Pedagogical Training Seminar for Teachers of English

Location: Fatick Region – Departments of Fatick, Foundiougne & Gossas

Fatick:  84 Teachers at Lycée Coumba Ndofféne Diouf on 12/11/2009

Foundiougne: 40 Teachers at Lycée de Passy on 12/12/200

Gossas: 13 Teachers at Lycée Khar Kane on 12/15/2009

The Participants

The participants in these seminars were all in-service teachers of English from throughout the Region of Fatick.  Some of the teachers are absolutely fluent in English, and have been teaching for many years.  For them, the seminars were ongoing professional development, and much appreciated.  Other teachers are very new to teaching, not yet fluent in English, and did not even have the luxury of an initial teacher training; they are referred to as “vacataires,” and they do not have guaranteed positions (i.e. they are not tenured).  They also receive less pay than their tenured colleagues and are often placed in the most remote places in the region, thus facing the most difficult teaching conditions.   So for them, participating in these types of seminars is a challenge; they do not have the English language level to fully comprehend everything that is discussed in the course of the day, and they do not have a background in teaching to allow them to take what they learn and easily apply it to their own personal teaching methods.  What is more, for some of the vacataires, it was the first training they have ever had outside the classroom (because they had to “learn on their feet” and just plain walk into a classroom and start trying to teach!).

The Structure

All three of the seminars lasted all day (approx. 9:30am to 5pm), and offered six hours of pedagogical training.  The schedule of each seminar was:

1. Introduction, Registration, and Pretest

2. Lecture and Participatory Activities – Subtopic 1: Reflective Teaching

3. Development of Reflective Teaching Journal and Collaborative Journal Sharing Procedures

4. Lecture and Participatory Activities – Subtopic 2: Student-Centered Learning and Learning Strategies

5. Demonstrations and practice of Student-centered Teaching Activities

6. Reflection period and Posttest

The Content

The Shaping the Way We Teach English Seminar was divided, essentially, into two complimentary workshops, one on “Reflective Teaching,” and the other on “Student-Centered Learning and Learning Strategies.”

Reflective Teaching Workshop: The teachers of English participated in a workshop designed to give them strategies to assess and improve their own teaching methods, but beyond that, it also was designed to give them strategies to cooperate, assess, and enhance one another’s teaching methods.  Good teachers are always learning – they are students of their own profession – and they continue to learn throughout their careers. One of the greatest assets that a teacher has is other teachers and this workshop focused on ways for the teachers of English to interact with one another to improve their results in the classroom.  To this effect, teachers were instructed in ways to document and assess their own work, and to cooperate effectively.  They were instructed in how to keep a “Reflective Teaching Journal,” how to efficiently and effectively setup peer observations, and how to participate in “Collaborative Journal Keeping,” where teachers select an aspect of their teaching practices to focus on, record their individual activities in regard to this area of focus, and then, as a group, share their documented experiences with one another.  The purpose of instructing on these three activities was twofold: all of them encourage reflective teaching practices, which are essential in limited resource environments, and, ultimately, they set the stage for “study groups” among the teachers, which is a stated goal of Ministry of Education of Senegal.

Student-Centered Learning and Learning Strategies: The teachers of English also participated in a workshop designed to give them strategies to incorporate “student-centered” activities into their lessons, and to develop and promote “self-learning” among their students.  Student-Centered Learning is a type of educational approach that puts the needs of the students before the goals of teachers and administrators; it requires that teachers become facilitators and coaches rather than the “leaders” of their classrooms.  This is difficult for many teachers to accept because the “traditional model” of education is that teachers give students information and instructions – and the students receive this information and perform tasks that meet the teachers’ expectations.  However, the teachers in the Fatick Region were very receptive to the idea of a student-centered approach (as they use the “communicative approach” to teaching English, a very student-centered way of teaching language) and together we worked through a wide array of techniques and activities that support collaboration and that recognize that students have ideas and experiences.  Once a “student-centered” approach came to be widely accepted, the teachers were also very responsive to the idea that in many ways, students can direct their own learning – all they need are strategies that help them “learn how to learn,” which was the second major idea in the workshop.  In support of this need, we did some demonstrations of activities that require students to organize their own strategies for accomplishing an education task.

The Results

The results of the “Shaping the Way We Teach English” seminar were very straightforward; teachers were extremely pleased with the training and gained valuable knowledge and teaching strategies that they will apply in their work for years to come.  I had a lot of fun, learned so much from working with Susan Strand, and provided some really valuable training to the teachers.  It was a very positive experience, and I am looking forward to the rest of the workshops I have planned for this academic year.