Aviva Halani
Exeter Academy, New Hampshire

Professional Development
TABSA 2015 Reflection

When my Department Head Alison Hobbie informed us in March that TABSA was in need of math teachers, I quickly sent Yunus Peer an email, hopeful that I would be deemed worthy of joining the team.  I was pushed in ways I had never been before.

 

Many of the concepts I was assigned from the list of priority topics we were given are not ones I teach in my own classes. I spent hours scouring the South African CAPS and Swaziland curriculum, trying to understand exactly what the teachers were supposed to know, and researching what the current educational journals recommend for best practices in those domains. I was continually adding problems then struggling to trim everything down to fit in 10 pages. I anticipated that we would have to be flexible in terms of what we covered, but I wanted to be prepared for all eventualities. If these teachers were going to be spending their winter break with us, I wanted to be sure I had given them everything I could.

I was teaching at Exeter’s summer conference the week before sessions began in South Africa, so I didn’t arrive in Mpumalanga until the day before we started. I knew Carl was on standby that first day to take over in case I was too jet-lagged to be effective, but I was determined to be fully engaged from the start.

The next three weeks were a whirlwind of the best sort and it felt as if the TABSA team had adopted me into their family. From the beginning, I was impressed by the dedication of our African colleagues to their students. Many of these teachers are aware that their content knowledge is not as solid as it could be, though this is certainly no fault of their own. To a certain extent, it is true for all of us that the deeper our understanding of a topic, the better able we are to explain it to others. Recognizing this fact, the teachers we worked with were like sponges absorbing anything and everything we could share with them. They simply wanted to learn as much as they could in order to best serve their learners.

I can’t begin to comprehend the challenges they face in their daily classes, but still they remain committed to doing whatever they can to help their learners. I found their dedication to be truly inspiring.

We spent the first week in Mpumalanga working directly with teachers, but the next two in Swaziland were different. We worked with master teachers who would then, with our guidance and support, run workshops of their own.

The penultimate day of the program was my birthday. I had an amazing day for a variety of reasons: Yunus cooked another fantastic meal, the Swazi teachers sang to me, the topics I was covering coalesced to the point that Ivy excitedly commented that “so many things in math seem to boil down to equivalent fractions,” the trainers were enthusiastic about and prepared for the sessions they would be running the next day, and one of the teachers told me that our sessions had changed their lives.

I have rarely felt as proud as I did in that moment, nor as fulfilled when thinking about why I chose to teach. I doubt Thuli was referring to anything I had done in particular (though I do think she appreciated the manipulatives I had devised to teach long division). Instead, I think she was referencing the environment and opportunity we had created.

The teachers had a chance to think deeply about the content they were teaching and discuss the best ways to teach such material. We may have guided the conversation, but they were the driving force. They were the ones making connections, between concepts and with one another. Through those discussions, the teachers seemed empowered to do similar work on their own in the future, and they demonstrated their ability when they led the workshops on Friday. I hope they are given the resources to continue to do so in the future.

I am grateful for the opportunity to have had the opportunity to join the TABSA team this year. I have learned so much from the experience and I believe that I come away from the trip a better teacher. Not only was I pushed to think deeply about material I don’t often teach, but I am motivated by our African colleagues’ dedication to seek out teaching conferences of my own.

They are my role models for the commitment to professional growth I should have in order to best serve my own students.