By Elizabeth Appleyard | Program Officer
The Afghan Institute of Learning has been chosen by the Afghan government to participate in a 5 year project to train teachers with a focus on teachers from rural areas. A lot of teachers in Afghanistan are not professionally trained and if they have had training it was not in modern, interactive, student centered methodologies. The new methods of teaching promote critical thinking, problem solving and emphasize student engagement. There is a great need for this type of training of teachers in the country.The work on this initiative has begun and here is the information from one teacher training which took place in a rural district of Herat Province on the border with Iran.
The teacher training seminar was 10 days long with 39 elementary to high school teachers participating (15 female, 24 male) ranging in age from 21 to 61. The teachers all live and work in a rural, remote district which is 116km from Herat and is considered an insecure area. Most of the teachers are new hires and recent graduates of 12th grade school. AIL is accepted and trusted by the community because of its long history of providing education and so was chosen to give trainings in this area.
The topics in the seminars included lesson planning, characteristics of a good teacher, question types, exams, kinds of teaching methodologies, annual plans and psychology.
Abdul a high school teacher said, “I have had many challenges since I became a teacher. One of the biggest was I was not able to make lesson plans. I was blamed by the principal for this several times. The auditors criticized me for not having lesson plans for my students. My students didn’t show interest in the lessons and I was always behind on time. I couldn’t finish teaching the book. I was worried about this all the time. I was asking myself, “Can I continue like this? Will a new teacher replace me?” I learned a lot through participation in this workshop. It has been helpful and a relief for me as most of my problems are now solved. I will continue teaching more enthusiastically from now.”
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