Teaching in Action

Nestled quietly at the foot of Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro, Mwenge University College of Education (MWUCE) is making big changes to education in Tanzania. The college’s faculty has a unique vision for education in its country: to encourage the use of student-centered, participatory teaching techniques in order to foster critical thinking skills in students. This is vitally important in a country where most instruction is done through rote memorization, and where the utilization of critical problem-solving skills is therefore not often encouraged. Year after year, MWUCE’s graduating class of teachers scores among the top results in country-wide teaching examinations. However, these very same graduates face enormous challenges as they try to start using these interactive, participatory techniques at their new schools: many must juggle class sizes surpassing 50 pupils, very few will have any teaching materials at their disposal, and their fellow teachers often frown upon their extra efforts to increase and improve learning in the classrooms.

In order to help support these teachers who are pioneering the use of these critical pedagogical methods in Tanzania, AfricAid has partnered with MWUCE and a leading expert on Tanzanian education, and the program’s creator, Dr. Frances Vavrus, formerly of Columbia University’s Teachers College and currently on the faculty at the University of Minnesota, to implement the award-winning “Teaching in Action” (TIA) program. Along with her colleague, Dr. Lesley Bartlett of Columbia University’s Teachers College, and other experienced teachers and current Ph.D. students (including Ms. Bethany Hinsch, Mr. Brent Ruter, and Mr. Matthew Thomas), the Tanzanian and U.S. facilitators work with secondary school teachers from across the country and in a wide range of subjects. This teacher-to-teacher mentoring program has been developed to prepare its participants to serve as model teachers with expertise in participatory, student-centered teaching methods. These methods are now required of teachers under Tanzania’s new education policies, but are unfamiliar to most of them.  That is particularly true of those teachers who have gone through “crash-course” teacher training programs that have been instituted by the government to help provide teachers for the 1,000-plus secondary schools that have been built there over the past five years.

The TIA participants stay on the MWUCE campus for a week of intensive in-service training designed to address the challenges they’ve encountered during their time as teachers, to assist them in developing active, participatory teaching materials tailored to their current needs, and to provide moral support and encouragement for their continued use of the progressive pedagogy they studied during their time at MWUCE (or are introduced to at these sessions). Participants are given the opportunity to use case study methods to address common teaching challenges and spend time preparing model teaching portfolios to be used in their own classrooms and as models for their colleagues back at their own schools.

Importantly, the TIA program is monitored and evaluated over time, including site visits to schools at which the seminar participants teach. These visits include classroom observations, student questionnaires, interviews with heads of schools and teachers, and focus group discussions with students whose teachers have and have not participated in TIA. These evaluations, coupled with input from participants as to the impact of the TIA program on their teaching, on student learning, and on their school as a whole, are utilized to continually refine and enlarge the TIA program.

The TIA workshops are held on an annual basis, the first of which in 2007 was attended by Ashley Shuyler on behalf of AfricAid. The participants in these seminars are already making important changes for many students in Tanzania, and will continue to do so over the coming years; in contrast to encouraging mere rote memorization, these teachers are helping their students to develop the critical thinking skills that will enable them to become the leaders of their communities and nation.

The importance and value of this program was recently recognized through its receipt of the prestigious Ashoka Changemakers Champions of Quality Education in Africa award, co-sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

Your donation will help enable a Tanzanian teacher to attend a week-long seminar. If you would like to help sponsor participation in the TIA program, please click here.