The progress of a school depends upon the quality of its teachers...

This week’s email comes from Promise Makala, our Head of Academics. Thank you, Promise!

One of our strengths at Impact Network is our ability to equip our teachers with the latest pedagogy by conducting teacher training in all our four districts in Eastern Province of Zambia. Our teacher training centers on subject-specific training and general topics and leads to the holistic development of our teachers. Training helps to increase our teachers’ motivation, commitment to teaching, and confidence in the classroom.

Through our ongoing lesson observation and coaching with our teachers, we are able to identify some challenges our teachers are facing in the teaching and learning process. This helps us to prepare continuous professional development to the challenges our teachers are facing in the classroom. For example, through lesson observation and feedback sessions in 2021, we were able to observe that some of our teachers were facing some challenges of classroom management and discipline. This led us to have discussions with the teacher supervisors on how best we help our teacher have good classroom management skills and provide responsive training.

Our teacher training involves hand-on activities which enhance knowledge and skills for our teachers. Furthermore, training includes time for critical discussions in which teachers are able to share successes and challenges they are facing in their classrooms. These discussions have helped our teachers to share and practice good strategies with each other and write some goals on how they will implement new approaches in their classrooms.

We have received positive feedback from our teachers on how the teacher training has helped them to improve their teaching skills in the classroom. Isaac Banda, one of our teachers who is teaching at Kalowe Community School in Katete District states how he has benefited from attending teacher training:

“Teacher training has helped me to improve absenteeism in my classroom. Through community of practice I was able to learn from my fellow teacher some strategies they have used to reduce student absenteeism in their classes.”

Matilda Tembo, who is a literacy teacher at Kalowe Community, also shared some benefits she has gained from teacher training:

“Teacher training has helped me on how I can use different teaching methodologies to raise interest in my learners”.

A school with quality teachers improves the performance of learners and reduces absenteeism in classes. This has led us to invest in teacher training and providing more support to our teachers through lesson observations and coaching and this in turn has improved the performance of our learners.

A school support officer (SSO) demonstrates a new technique for teaching guided reading to her colleagues at an SSO training.

Teachers in Sinda district practice hands-on math teaching strategies to engage pupils.