TEACHER TRAINING

Three decades of war drove thousands teachers into exile.  The Taliban repression of all educational opportunity other than religious training for boys meant that a whole generation of new teachers was lost to Afghanistan.

Now UNICEF and other international organizations help the Ministry of Education train many new teachers, but the need is still acute.  Older women with little education themselves step into the need.  Young girls teach even as they go to school themselves.  A number of private organizations have stepped in to fill the gap in teacher training:  Afghan Institute for Education, Save the Children, and others.

My good fortune was to meet and travel in the spring of 2008 with Camilla Barry, a popular and talented science teacher from my home town of Mill Valley, California, who has been going to Afghanistan since 2003 to bring simple but effective ideas about teaching science.

This year she spent three weeks in Afghanistan with her son Nicholas, working in partnership with Parsa-Afghanistan in Kabul and Shuhada in Bamiyan to train teachers in schools they support.  She has a gift for using available tools such as popcorn, flashlight bulbs, and empty plastic bottles to teach real scientific inquiry.  The content is fun, and amazes the teachers as well as the students, but it is the method that matters:  how to analyze and how to ask questions.  There is little in current Afghan methods that illustrates or encourages experiments, or learning by doing rather than by rote.  But the teachers respond to this new approach with tremendous enthusiasm.

Click the images below to view galleries about these trainings:

Gathering Materials	Teaching at Parsa
Teaching at Bamiyan