Re-Mapping for Sustainability: Capacity Building for International Educational Development

Project Read is a USAID-funded project that deploys mentors to work directly with teachers in the classroom. Mentors are assigned individual teachers with whom they work for the duration of the project, conducting monthly individual sessions. The mentoring process begins with an 8 to 16-hour training session, followed by individual monthly mentoring sessions. During mentoring sessions, mentors conduct an observation of the teachers as they practice skills necessary for literacy acquisition. Mentors fill out a checklist adapted from Levesque (2005) to measure if teachers and students engage in activities promoting phonological awareness, alphabetic principle, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and other dimensions. The checklist also contains a qualitative section for mentors to comment on teacher classroom management skills and the conditions of the classroom. Additionally, mentors fill out a journal-style notebook to record observations. Following the mentoring process, mentors guide a critically reflexive praxis with teachers, asking open questions about their subjective evaluations of the session's efficacy and overall outcome. Mentors communicate positive observations, strategies that need improvement, and suggest specific activities based on the aspects of the class that need improvement. When teachers are unfamiliar with suggested strategies, mentors agree to model the strategy so the teacher may learn the new skills with the students. Teachers and mentors negotiate specific agreements on things to work on in the classroom, with each subsequent visit evaluating if teachers are implementing the agreed-upon strategies. Mentoring session outcomes have shown that teachers primarily need to broaden their skills repertoire in activities that teach phonological awareness and increase vocabulary in students. Following agreements with mentors, the project has seen improvements in activities related to these skills. Initially, there was some resistance to the mentoring process, with teachers feeling that it was lengthy and worried about overt criticism of their teaching skills. However, due to the nature of this practice, teachers have come to favor this approach, reporting that it provides practical tools to improve their practice and values mentors' abilities in showing them how to use already available resources in new ways. The mentoring and critically reflexive practice activity informs and shapes the theoretical training sessions held for new teachers the following year of the project. For example, during the first year of implementation, it was observed that teachers worked on literacy skills when not working directly with curricular content and Ministry of Education materials. As a result, the training sessions for the second year of implementation focused on teaching how to use MoE materials already available with the skills proposed by the project. This practice allows teachers to develop a more critical approach to their teaching style and become active participants in their skill-building process.