“What’s an example of a strategy you want me to use when I teach prepositions?” Dr. Jack Levy asks a group of 14 teacher educators from Pakistan completing a semester of ESL education studies at George Mason University.
They answer, “cooperative learning,” a technique in which students are divided up in groups so they help each other.
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Cooperative learning is one of the many strategies this group of ESL teacher trainers has learned through the Pakistan Teacher Education Professional Development Program managed by AED.
The three-year Pakistan Teacher Education Professional Development Program, funded by USAID, seeks to increase the base of skilled Pakistani school administrators and teachers in the teaching of mathematics, science and English as a second language and to promote cultural understanding between the U.S. and Pakistan. The quality of learning and the competency level of students and teachers in Pakistan are among the poorest in South Asia.
The educators, who arrived in the United States in January, have attended workshops on curriculum development, assessment tools and the latest techniques in ESL instruction. Each of them has developed an action plan on how they will implement what they have learned to improve primary education in Pakistan.
The group admits changing the mindset of the teachers they train back home will take some time. But they realize that those and some of the other challenges they face are not unique to Pakistan. Many of them have found a lot of common ground with the teachers they have met on visits to several Fairfax County public schools.
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“I did not realize that American teachers have such similar problems to us and that their salaries, too, are not very high,” said Shehnaz Akhter, an education specialist at a teacher’s college in Karachi.
One of the things she wants to change is the way students are assessed. In Pakistan, student assessment takes place at the end of the year. Akhter would like to have assessments of reading, writing and social skills occur several times throughout the year.
“The result gives us information about how we are teaching. If the result is not good, we will change our strategies of teaching,” she said.
“The teachers these educators train will end up having classrooms that are more engaging, more creative, and that will result in a greater likelihood that primary school children in Pakistan succeed,” said David Seider, project director.
“Many teachers ask students to tell them, we ask students to think. If there’s one strategy you take back, take that one,” emphasizes Levy, a professor at George Mason University’s Graduate School of Education and the project’s coordinator at the university.
“Visiting schools was helpful in understanding the strategies American teachers are using in their classes,” said education specialist Munazza Aziz. She wants to help Pakistani teachers to find new ways to teach English other than memorization
The program’s participants say the training they’ve received will go a long way in helping them improve the quality of education in Pakistan.
“If a little change can come in our education system, I think we will succeed,” Akhter said. The Pakistanis graduated from the George Mason program july 29.
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