Teacher Trainings, Exposed

Summary: A recent discovery found that teacher trainings are nothing but a ruse that allows government school teachers to skip school and chat with their peers.

Every year, government school teachers are required to attend 20 days of official, government-sponsored training. We just started working with a handful of government schools, so upon hearing that the teachers had been pulled out (without replacements) for 6 days of training, one of our staff members decided to see how these trainings are run.

We entered with low expectations; over the course of this year, my idealism has learned to cower in the face of reality. However, we quickly realized that even our low isn’t low enough. Here’s the low-down of why:

• The trainer herself is just a teacher from one of our DSH spoke schools.
• In the 2.5 hours coworker “X” is present, the trainees (government school teachers) do nothing but gossip and chat with one another. After about an hour, the trainer asks X if he’s ready to give his presentation, assuming that’s the reason he’s in attendance.
• When X asks to see the program outline, trainer says she doesn’t have it and sends him one of the head government officials, who also says she doesn’t have it and sends him to her boss. Her boss, assumed to have the program outline (the veracity of this assumption is moot), is not even on site.

My former self would’ve assumed that this was a one-off situation; I now know better. This is the fourth day of this training, and to still not have the program outline anywhere on site is ridiculous and inexcusable. Never mind the fact that the trainers are likely unqualified to train their peers, and uninterested in doing more than participating in the gossip session.

This is just another example of a mediocre idea (pulling teachers out of schools to ‘train’ them) that fails completely in implementation.

Reminds me of a quote that goes something like this: “Which is the greater human evil – laziness or indifference?” Unfortunately, both are equally detrimental to the effectiveness of the DSH model, and we haven’t yet figured out a way to overcome either of these challenges. I suppose both can be overcome with the appropriate incentive system, though it does make you wonder whether you really want a teacher to have external (as opposed to internal) motivation for teaching.