Teacher's Conference

Tuesday 14 November

I have been at a 2 day teacher's conference organized by Peace Corps volunteers. It was a conference with about 20 American teachers and 20 Guinean teachers. We had day-long sessions discussing many thing: problems and different teaching methods.

Here are some of the issues we exchanged ideas on:

Class size
When you have 100 students crammed into a small classroom how do you maintain order? How do you make sure students are understanding the lesson with comprehensive checks? How do you test such a big class and prevent cheating?

Cheating
What are ways students cheat? How do you prevent cheating and what are the consequences for Guinea if we as teachers let cheating continue?

Life lessons
How do you include lessons on problems in Guinea like AIDS/HIV, gender equality, deforestation and the environment, the health of children, corruption, etc... during lessons in math, chemistry, physics, French, and history?

How would you answer these questions?

We as Americans have a lot of creative answers. It was extremely interesting exchanging ideas with Guinean teachers who have experience in this school system. The differences between a Francophone educational system and an Anglophone educational system are really different. France definitely left a lasting impression on the Guinean educational system.