Teacher Training
Specializing in building the capacity of in-service educators working in underserved areas of Pakistan, DIL’s Teacher Training Program:
• Addresses gaps in content knowledge among teachers who are themselves products of a weak education infrastructure
• Provides teachers with pedagogy workshops demonstrating best practices in student-centered teaching that prizes critical reflection, supplanting the rote learning to which many teachers were once subjected
• Employs Mobile Taleem, which provides teachers with unlimited access to instructional video lessons in Math and English, leading to 47% growth in content knowledge in the pilot for the program.
MOBILE TALEEM
Mobile Taleem (named for the Urdu word for education, تعلیم) provides primary English and math teachers with access to hundreds of lessons via mobile smartphone, elucidating concepts vital to a quality education. Videos can be viewed offline by participants anytime and from any location. The project addresses the problem of content knowledge gaps among primary teachers, particularly in rural areas of Pakistan.
The content is homegrown, locally relevant, and owned by DIL, which makes this simple, effective intervention highly scalable and cost-effective.
The boundless capacity of mobile devices for storing and accessing content makes Mobile Taleem an innovative and economical alternative to in-person training or library development, especially in rural settings, where independent travel for female teachers contravenes cultural norms. Mobile learning circumvents these obstacles by empowering teachers to assume ownership of the tools and the learning process thereby enabled.
