REED – Teacher Training Initiative
Teachers are the single most important factor affecting how much students learn. More than just conduits of information, they equip children with the tools to analyze, problem solve, and effectively use information. Research shows that the quality of teachers is a major determinant of children’s learning and well-being. Going from a poor-performing teacher to a great teacher can increase student learning by multiple years of schooling.
– Ezequiel Molina, Senior Economist, World Bank
Karma, Saldang School graduate
During 2018, the NGO REED – Rural Education and Environmental Development Centre Nepal, visited schools in the Upper Dolpo to assess the quality of education. Most project teachers are not professionally trained. They are people from the villages who completed high school, at minimum, in Kathmandu and have returned to help their villages as teachers.
REED proposed a three year teacher training program that would provide a path to certification for teachers that are not fully qualified. Nine NGOs contributed to this training effort.
After our teacher training meeting with REED
Sixty teachers from the Upper Dolpo received ten days of training in Dunai in the Lower Dolpo. Part of the training program included follow-up in the field to help the teachers implement their new skills. Feedback from the 2019 training was excellent! Unfortunately covid has put the training program on hold. We are hopeful that it may be continued before the next school season.
This is an exciting initiative and we are proud to be part of it. It will improve the learning outcomes for students and the professional outcomes for these teachers.
Teacher Training and Poverty
An interesting note!
The 2019 winners of the Nobel prize in Economics sought to explain empirically which interventions work to alleviate poverty and why. “The goal of our work is to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence.”
They illustrated that a true barrier to student achievement was teaching methods that were insufficiently shaped to student need, and that money spent on teacher training helped students learn more in school and yielded long lasting and invaluable results, not just for the individual students, but for lifting the community out of poverty.
Dawa, Saldang School graduate
“Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have.”
― Margaret Mead
