Education in Senegal is expanding.  A publicly funded basic education is (to some extent) guaranteed, and there are more and more students enrolling every year.  Hundreds of new schools are being built, with many more in the years to come.  Beyond that, a good education is highly valued; people want to learn, and they want to learn well.

As more students and schools are brought into the rapidly expanding system, a conundrum has arisen: “how can Senegal continue to rapidly increase the size and reach of its educational system while simultaneously maintaining (and even improving) the quality of the education that that system delivers?”  The key ingredient in resolving this conundrum is, quite simply, good teachers.

For Senegal, however, this creates another problem.  There is an overwhelming demand for new teachers but the national system for teacher training lacks the capacity to deal with this staggering demand.  There are simply not enough institutions, funds, or experienced teacher-trainers available to produce the number of new, well-trained teachers that the growth of the educational system warrants.  It is a truly difficult situation, one that has no clear solution and that is being dealt with by the governments of many countries in Africa.

So, the government of Senegal, rather than allowing the new classrooms to sit empty and the new students to go without an education, has instituted a policy of hiring teachers, “vacataires,” who do not have the luxury of an initial teacher training.  As I had briefly discussed in one of my previous blog posts, most of these new teachers have a limited academic background; some are fresh out of high school, while others have only done one or two years of college, usually in fields other than teaching.  These teachers also do not have “tenure” and receive significantly less pay than their more experienced colleagues.   For less pay, they are expected to just walk into a classroom and teach under some very difficult conditions; the average class size in the Fatick region is around 70 students per class and students must often share the available desks and schoolbooks.  On top of that, they are usually placed in schools that are in the most remote parts of the region, making travel, and oftentimes life, more difficult than what they are used to.   Theirs is a tough job indeed.

So in support of the “vacataires,” IFESH has funded and organized a series of large training seminars, Initiation à la Conception et à la Mise en Œuvre d’un Projet Pédagogique, or “Introduction to the Design and Implementation of a Pedagogical Project,” to support the professional development of these new teachers.  These seminars, which are being conducted in collaboration with the Coordination Nationale de la Formation Continuée, or the “National Office for the Coordination of Professional Development for Teachers,” will take place in ten (10) different regions of Senegal, providing 500 new teachers with an extremely valuable, and otherwise unavailable, introduction to effective teaching practices.

The seminars themselves were designed to be a “crash course” in the “art of teaching,” and have five main objectives, which are:

1. To help the new teachers plan and conduct classroom activities

2. To help them develop learning objectives for their classes which meet the national standards

3. To give teachers strategies for writing well-structured and effective lesson plans

4. To provide basic classroom management strategies

5. To introduce assessment methods for monitoring and evaluating student learning and achievement

Each seminar features a number of highly informative and practical lectures, a range of participatory activities (including brainstorming sessions, group work, and presentations), as well as a pretest and post-test, which are given to document the teachers’ pre-existing knowledge of teaching practices, as well as that which they acquire in the course of the three days of the workshop. The seminar sessions last for eight intense hours a day, providing these new “vacataire” teachers with 24 hours of important pedagogical training.

The seminar here in the Fatick Region took place on February 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th, 2010 at the Pôle Régional de Formation de Fatick. 49 teachers (originally 50 but one was too sick to come!) participated in the activities, learned a lot in a short period of time, and had a lot of fun in the process!

Here is how things went, in photos.  Please enjoy!

The teachers worked hard and learned a lot

Teachers taking the pretest

Lunch after a morning full of activities

Teachers and trainers pose for a "family photo"

A group of happy teachers

Teachers lining up to collect stipends and classroom resources

Assessment tool: "Barometer of Student Moods"

The Seminar Team (from left to right): Hamidou WATT - National Coordinator for Continuing Education, Abdoulaye FAYE - Teacher Trainer, Ousmane NGOM - Teacher Trainer, Maba BA - Coordinator of PRF Fatick, Demba SARR - Teacher Trainer, and Michael LEASER - IFESH

One of the teachers presenting on her group's ideas

Teachers were expected to collaborate during the many group activities

The teachers work hard in a plenary lecture session