The Science of Learning Finds a Home in Rural Tanzania
2018
Project Manager
Quality Teacher education has been identified as a central challenge in developing countries, where teachers are tasked with building the future of their societies in under-resourced, structurally ambiguous systems, under conditions for which they are rarely prepared.
In developing countries, teacher training places little emphasis on the practical and pedagogical techniques that equip educators to effectively cope with the barriers they and their students face to education.
It is not uncommon for teachers in developing countries to instruct classes of 100 students, with just a few textbooks. Children walk long distances, as much as 25 kilometers, to attend schools without running water and electricity. Female students miss as many as five days a month due to period poverty. Children who fall behind feel great pressure to leave school, at all ages.
Teachers are overwhelmed, underpaid, and under-resourced.
In the Global North, groundbreaking research in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and education have shone a light on zero-cost practices that facilitate--and impede--deep learning.
These practices focus on how the human brain supports learning, social-emotional learning, beliefs and mindsets, executive functions, and non-cognitive factors that contribute to one’s ability to learn. These tools facilitate deep, enduring, and transferable knowledge. This has been evidenced across different settings, where students’ educations are susceptible to social, emotional, or economic forces that might otherwise negatively impact their academic performance.
Four expert teacher educators from the US, Brazil, and Kenya conducted a needs analysis for a group of 60 head teachers serving 15,000 children across 4 rural school Wards in Tanzania. When the reports came back, the team developed and lead two, four day workshops for the educators, adapting the groundbreaking pedagogical moves to the teachers’ contexts.
During the Workshops, Participants Learned About:
The Science of learning
Social-emotional earning
Backward mapping lesson plans
Classroom management without corporeal punishment
Motivating students
Integrating their new strategies into existing lesson plans
Participants Reported:
After the first training, participants reported that two specific pedagogical techniques—small group work and think-pair-share—were new practices conducive to their own learning; they were also the most frequently cited tactics that they brought back to their own students and classrooms.
During and after the second training, participants wanted to dig deeper into effective learning strategies, concretizing these strategies to incite student motivation without corporal punishment. The educators were keen to adopt these strategies-in-action across various classroom contexts.
After the training, participants reported having felt, overall, that exposure to new methods of teaching and a sensitivity to student-centered approaches the most valuable for their practice. They reported applying these new methods. This sensitivity was responsible for improvement in teaching since the training.
All participants were interested in attending another training, and, particularly, to know more about how to intrinsically motivate students.
What people are saying about Hannah:
Our project in Tanzania was challenging - we had little time to organize the trainers, the logistics of the training, the permits and the invitation to several education districts. Besides the huge pedagogical undertaking - a 4 day training without electricity in the science of learning in Swahili - we had little over two months to prepare and coordinate with the 60 teachers on the ground.
This project would not have happened with Hannah’s diligent and thorough work, ensuring everything was ready when we got there, ran smoothly and had an incredible post training follow up.
I would not do another project with such complexity without her involvement!
— Leticia, Team Member
Chief Education Officer, Camino Education, Brazil
Hannah has an enviable gift: she makes the complex appear seamless without oversimplifying the task. In 2017, I had signed on a teacher educator project with a not-for-profit based in Tanzania. It was during a conversation about the project that Hannah volunteered to coordinate the series of workshops for 60 Tanzanian educators in a rural village near Kilimanjaro. She understood our organisational needs and then brought insightful and innovative administrative ideas and solutions to the drawing board. Hannah will challenge your thinking, provide you with fresh, spunky perspectives and, where appropriate, she will coach/advise you to develop and co-create responsive solutions. The success of our teacher professional learning workshops, subsequent evaluations of our successive trainings and the ongoing impact that Mindset Education has on the field, is due largely to her excellent support. I am honored to work with her. Hannah comes highly recommended.
—Naheeda, Team Member
Co-Founder of Mindset Education
