Last week, our Mali staff was in the field again. They traveled to a group of our farthest-flung schools near the border with Burkina Faso and the Ivory Coast to conduct a pre-training evaluation of eight teachers at four schools. What did they learn?
A Classroom With No Books? No Way.
Auction for Action at Thursday's Soiree
We've all done it -- got carried away at a charity auction and come home with a strange trinket we can't fit anywhere in our house or a gift certificate for an adventure we can't imagine ever taking. We shrug and tell ourselves the funds went to a good cause. So why not just directly decide where those funds will go and spare yourself donating the dusty trinket to the thrift store two years later. That's the concept behind the Auction for Action at Mali Rising's Soiree this Thursday.
Inside Peek: A Chat With Hindaty, Girls Project Coordinator
Strong. Motivated. Empowering. These are just a few of the words that come to mind when we think of Hindaty Traore, our Girls Project Coordinator. Hindaty first joined our team as a volunteer intern, where her passion and drive was clearly evident in the work she did. After almost two years, she was hired as a staff member and since then, continues to dedicate herself to the Girls Project.
The Results Are In...
Partnering With Our Teachers To Improve Skills
Over the last several years, we've begun investing in our teachers. Why, you ask? Well, fundamentally teachers are what make a school a school...rather than a pole barn filled with screaming teenagers. A more nuanced answer though is that we had seen how little training and support were offered to our teachers, and how isolated they were in our small villages. One way we are supporting our teachers is through an annual 5-day professional training. But how do we know if that training is actually helping our teachers and hence our students?
School Snap 16/17: Eagle Environmental Academy
Bringing Teachers Together To Learn Together
Have you ever attended a job training or professional development seminar, only to return to work and find yourself totally buried again? (If you don't say yes, I've got my suspicions about you.) That's very much the case for Mali Rising's dedicated teachers -- although they long for additional training, when the finally receive it they'll come home to a classroom full of as many as 100 teenagers...and that can make sticking to new ideas and practices hard. That's why we're adding something new to to keep the lessons from our annual teacher trainings alive in the classroom...
Inside Peek: Look Inside Our Teacher Training
This Week in the Field: Teaching Teachers to Teach
This is a big week for our teachers in Mali. All this week, 36 of our teachers will attend a teacher training with professional experts. They'll spend 5 days learning the best teaching techniques, how to incorporate active learning into their classrooms, and how to manage their huge classes (sometimes as many as 100 students in a class!). For those of us here in the states, this might sound humdrum. But for teachers in Mali, it is a big deal....
