Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  Students wait for class to start in a classroom in Layibi College

**Below is a piece I just wrote for work.  It appears on the IC blog.**

Riddled with holes like some sort of structural Swiss cheese, the ceiling in one of Layibi College’s older classrooms stretched out over us, offering those below glimpses of the building’s innards above.  The physics students—all sixty of them—didn’t seem to notice:  their eyes were focused on the teacher before them.  With chalk in hand, Melody Russell, 33, moved back and forth in front of the chalkboard.  As she wallpapered the board with equations, the students scribbled away in their notebooks.  Each question she asked was met with a field of raised hands.  For ninety minutes, students gave her their undivided attention.  No one passed notes; no one whispered to his neighbor; no one did anything but think, write, and answer questions.  Amazing as this sort of sustained, class-wide focus sounds, it’s par for the course among students working with Invisible Children’s Teacher Exchange teachers.

Above:  Physics students in Melody’s class

This past summer, 45 visiting teachers from the U.S. and Canada team-taught for six weeks with their Ugandan counterparts.  Working for free and paying for their flights and expenses themselves, the visiting teachers sacrificed large chunks of time and money to help students at all of IC’s eleven Ugandan partner schools.  Class after class, students enjoyed the charged, high-energy  classroom atmospheres that team teaching creates.  Students, however, aren’t the only ones who benefit from the summer teacher exchange.  Like the kids they instruct, teachers, too, draw inspiration from the experience and head home with added arrows in their academic quivers.

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Melody has been teaching for 10 years.  In that time, she’s walked thousands of students—in both public and private schools—through lab experiments and countless chemistry equations.  I wasn’t surprised when she told me she didn’t have a single major struggle during her six weeks of team teaching this past summer—she’s a pro.  What I was surprised to hear, however, was how her partner teacher, a Ugandan named Robert, was able to command a class of 105 students with little more than raw charisma.  Robert, she explained, supplemented his lecture-heavy, resource-light classes with smiles and jokes—things that, thankfully, are far cheaper and easier to issue to students than textbooks.  “Even with so many students, he’s able to create warmth in his class,” Melody explained.

Because most students in Uganda don’t have their own textbooks, teachers spend large portions of class time copying information from a textbook to the chalkboard.  (“Here, with so few textbooks, dictating is what needs to happen,” said Melody.)  Robert knows this style of teaching isn’t ideal.  For what he lacks in lesson diversity, he compensates for by making himself available to students outside of class hours.  Homework is easier when you know your teacher wants and is available to help you.

I asked Melody about the lessons she’ll take with her back to the states once her time in Uganda comes to a close.  She told me about how the experience has raised her confidence level and shown her that she’s capable of teaching high-level physics.  (In Uganda, she’s teaching high school students who are studying at university level—something she’d never done before.)  She told me about how amazing it’s been to talk over her lesson plans with Robert, to get advice from a peer on a regular basis.  Perhaps most powerful, however, has been the perspective she’s gained from her students.

Above:  Melody doing her thing

“I’m teaching kids in Uganda whose hopes of going to university are lofty dreams,” said Melody.  “I can’t wait to tell my students back home about the kids here; about how students work so hard to do well in school; about how they don’t take their education for granted.  Who knows what my American students will do with this type of news?”

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Okello Alfredo is a jovial, bespectacled Ugandan man with an easy smile.  As a first-time partner teacher with the Teacher Exchange Program, he didn’t know what to expect of his American counterpart, Brit, before they started teaching together.  With less than a week left of his team teaching partnership, and with weeks of classes behind him, he didn’t hesitate before answering my question about the program’s strengths.

“I think the program is a productive one,” Alfredo said.  “Both partners gain from each other.  I know that I have learned from Brit in areas of methodology and content.  And I see now how important it is to have child-centered classes, especially in my subject, literature.”

Above:  Brit and Raysa pose with their teaching partners and friends

Just as the bi-directional flow of ideas between partner teachers is one of the cornerstones of the Teacher Exchange Program’s success, Alfredo thinks the program could improve by allowing Ugandan teachers to visit the United States for similar team teaching experiences.  He explained how valuable it would be for Ugandans to experience North American classrooms.  Laughing, he dropped a Ugandan proverb that explained how one’s position determines one’s perspective, “If you only eat from your mother’s pot, you will never believe other mothers can cook.”

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Waiting for their physics class to start, Cesar, Geoffrey, and Felix sat in class with their shoulders slumped, exhausted from their gym class the period before.  I asked them what they thought of Melody’s teaching style.

Cesar, 18, answered, “She’s good.  She gives us lots of demonstrations that make it easy to understand things.”

The other boys nodded their heads in agreement.

Felix, 17, added, “And she doesn’t miss lessons.  She’s punctual.”

In Uganda, schools struggle with teacher absenteeism and tardiness.  Many teachers make barely enough money to survive and, hence, work jobs at other schools; sometimes they skip one class so they can go and teach another.  Although senior students often lead study groups for their classmates when teachers are absent, chronic absenteeism retards a class’ academic progress.  Six weeks of punctuality and consistent teacher attendance is, for many students, a breath of fresh air.

Alredo, too, noticed how his students enjoyed the change in atmosphere that his foreign team teacher inspired.  “Their attitudes are more positive.  They’re excited to have classes with her.  You can see that they’re eager,” he remarked.

This eagerness, when sustained by good teaching practices, can push a student to new academic heights.  The Teacher Exchange Program aims to cultivate this student eagerness by energizing both foreign and Ugandan teachers.  The echoes of this summer’s teaching partnerships—new warm-up activities, focused review games, creative content demonstrations, and smiles, among others—will ring out in classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic for the next academic year.  These reverberations are what the program strives to orchestrate.

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Patrick, the articulate yet soft-spoken Program Manager of Schools for Schools, sat down with me recently to talk about developing facets of the Teacher Exchange Program.  In late December, six Ugandan teachers—chosen from an applicant pool of 22 candidates—will fly to the U.S.  For one month, they’ll team teach with American teachers, swapping teaching strategies while also absorbing the energy of their host schools.  After a four-day orientation in New York City, the Ugandan teachers will move into teacher-hosted homestay arrangements and begin teaching.  Although it’s being run as a pilot project, the Ugandans-to-U.S. component of the Teacher Exchange Program is primed for success, thanks in part to the folks who are organizing it.

In explaining the purpose of the December trip, Patrick looked me square in the eyes and said, “I believe in the power of exposure.  There is nothing that educates like traveling.”  He said this with such conviction that it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.  Patrick believes in this program.  It’s obvious.  When this type of support for the Teacher Exchange Program permeates IC senior management, and when the teachers themselves commit to investing in their skill sets and students, transformation is inevitable.