Uganda 2017

This year marked the start of our facilitator training phase of our model in Kayunga District. Following team and host recommendations, we continued to include a leadership conference to garner support and move towards systemic change to better deliver quality education.

Principal, Head Teacher & District Officer Conference:

94 Head Teachers, Principals, as well as a District Education Office representative from the Kanyunga District attended the conference. During the day we familiarized participants with EBB and the work done in their schools. We discussed ways in which student-centered learning methodologies increase student achievement and benefit their schools; we identified ways to motivate teachers and support their use of student-centered methodologies; and we exchanged ideas about how Principals, Head Teachers and Education Officers can exercise their leadership in implementing these approaches in their schools.

 

Facilitator Training: 51 teachers and Head Teachers took part in 4½ days of training that helped them to:

• define Collaborative Learning, explain the rationale for the methodology, identify and use some appropriate activities for the classroom, taking into account local context, etc.;

• define Differentiated Instruction, explain the rationale for the approach, and identify some appropriate ways of differentiating in their classrooms;
• co-design a workshop for teachers, with Canadian support, (Collaborative Learning or Differentiated Instruction);
• provide some peer support and mentoring: describe the role of a mentor and how to give some helpful feedback;
• identify some basic principles of evaluation; administer and compile surveys completed by colleagues; and identify some future directions for program sustainability.

 

44 completed the required content for certificates – 9 from St. Stephens (a district 7 hours from Kayunga). Redfern Kegonge, one of the trainers from Kenya, joined us during this week to support the training and add context and personal experience for the new facilitators.

 

Teacher Workshops: We delivered four 1-day conferences to 222 teachers that covered both Collaborative Learning and Differentiated Instruction. The format of the teacher workshops was altered to allow the 35 Kayunga facilitators to all have a chance at delivering one workshop. The facilitators were divided by geographical region and then by collaboration or differentiation workshop. The rationale was to have facilitators in each region who had experience facilitating one or the other topic, which meant 4 or 5 facilitators per workshop. This modification was discussed while in Uganda and prior to start of the program.

 

Three of the four days were hosted at Uganda Martyrs’ Secondary and one day was hosted at Busaana R/C Primary (30 minutes away) to relieve the inconvenience of travel for those teachers. At the end of each day, the EBB team debriefed with the newly trained facilitators and provided feedback.

A big thank-you to the EBB Canadian and Kenyan volunteers and our new Ugandan facilitators!