Thinking Schools Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
A Collaboration of Thinking Foundation and Engage Now Africa
By Dagim Melese & Atsede Teshayou
Thinking Schools Ethiopia with Thinking Foundation began its collaboration with Engage Now Africa (ENA) with the first phase Instructional Leadership Training facilitated on Thursday and Friday, Nov. 10th and 11th 2016. Participants included the Wereda education bureau deputy head, leadership and experts team of ENA, school leaders (directors) of the four (4) Laboratory Schools and instructional leaders from local private schools, deputy directors, departments heads, teachers professional development experts, education quality assurance team from the local education bureau and key lead teachers from the model schools. The training focused on;
- Exposing the leadership with the Thinking Schools Model providing them with the opportunity to assess relevance, instrumentality and adaptability (practicability) of the model given concrete contexts of local government schools .
- Gain leadership support for whole school –systematic implementation of the tools, strategies and techniques across ALL disciplines and grade levels.
The training was a hands–on, highly interactive, and deeply reflective and focused on the simple, practical aspects /elements which educators could readily use in real class rooms thinking and learning about content with students. The leadership training follows from the whole school transformational change approach the model employs to engage whole school community and draw from expertise, experiences, backgrounds, wisdom rooted in local cultural resources of the educators .
Following will be facilitated whole staff trainings for ALL the educators of the four (4) laboratory schools identified by ENA (Engage Now Africa ) . This will then be supported, reinforced, consolidated and made sustainable via site visits and Training of Trainers professional development works. Below are some of the photos taken of the trainings.
Thinking Schools Ethiopia began as a grass roots project by Robert Seth Price along with lead country trainers Atsede Tsehayou and Dagim Melese. Read the chapter on Ethiopia in the Corwin Press book Pathways to Thinking Schools.