Project in Guinea Helps Teachers Foster Professional Development

Guinea is a nation of stark realities where nearly 55 percent of school-age children do not attend school. It is in this tiny nation on the west coast of Africa that Assistant Dean Jack Schwille has spent the past year implementing a program to improve the quality of teaching.

Schwille and his colleague, Martial Dembele (Ph.D. ‘95), have been consultants on a World Bank-funded program that is unique in that it seeks to empower teachers to determine problems in pedagogy and to develop ways to address them.

Schwille has helped the Guineans implement a professional development program that organizes teachers into teams to determine their needs and to develop plans to meet those needs. "This approach fits very well with the orientation we have here in the College toward teacher development and more reflective teaching," he said.

With the help of Schwille and Dembele, the Guineans have developed a small grants program for which teacher teams submit proposals for funding of professional development activities.

Schwille has helped the Guinean education officials develop parameters and manuals for the program, and take it from the conceptual to the workable. Instead of starting nationwide, the Guineans launched a pilot program in one region of the country last fall.

The teachers in the region were organized into 289 teams, and response was tremendous. All teacher teams submitted proposals, and a regional jury eventually chose 54 teams.

"They tended to see all their problems as material," Schwille recalls. "So we said that was fine. ‘We’re going to help you with the material problems, but we want to also know what are your nonmaterial problems, your pedagogical problems, and of those pedagogical problems which one would you propose to work on in this project?’

"It turned out that the vast majority of projects that were funded were in reading. We didn’t expect that they would be so concentrated in one area because they were free to propose anything. But the teachers feel, and the authorities also agree, that reading is a big problem area."

In Guinea, French is used in school. But shortly after their independence, Guineans had tried to use their national languages. "So teachers had often gone to school to learn the national languages and after a change of policy had to learn better French," Schwille said.

And what types of things did the teachers propose? Schwille said they invariably included buying new textbooks, but they also requested curriculum guides and access to workshops and resource personnel.

Both men say the project has gone well so far. Though it is early, the project has already paved new ground, they say, by asking teachers to take the lead in professional development.

Another effect, Schwille said, has to do with the Guinean educational system. The project has used facilitators who must visit the teacher teams regularly. The facilitators are regional and national education officials, and the requirement that they work with the teacher teams has begun to subtly change their role from administrative to one more given to instructional support and leadership.

"This project has already been a huge challenge, but it has also been very rewarding for us because the Guineans have come through in ways in which we didn’t fully anticipate," Schwille said. "In general, they have done more than we expected of them by selecting an exceptional team of people both at the regional and national levels to work with teachers. There has been a large group of people with extraordinary capabilities who have demonstrated a commitment that we have not seen in other projects."