In November 2024, Joshua Muskin, Managing Director of Geneva Global’s education and programs efforts, conducted two training workshops for 63 teacher college lecturers, university professors, and regional education leaders from Ethiopia’s four southern regions and Afar Region, in the East. Invited by the five Regional Education Bureau Directors, the aim was to reform and strengthen how the five Colleges of Teacher Education train future and current teachers and school leaders to deliver the country’s new(-ish) competency-based curriculum.
Ethiopia, like many other countries, is endeavoring to ready teachers to implement the new curriculum with methods that are incompatible with competency-based teaching and learning. Teacher training continues to emphasize the acquisition of theory and techniques as abstract notions, neither explaining competency-based instruction as practical strategy nor relying on competency-based methods themselves to convey and model the approach. Muskin’s training relied on two basic tactics to strengthen the participants’ capacity, confidence, and commitment to deliver the new curriculum in a truly competency-based manner. The training began with a sequence of captivating, competency-based learning tasks that the participants completed in small groups as if they were primary school learners. The aim was to give them at the same time a practical and emotional experience of the kind of learning they are readying their teacher trainees to deliver. The training then turned to engaging the participants, in groups, to design their own competency-based lessons and learning tasks for a variety of topics, critiquing each other’s work with each new lesson.
At the end, the participants created to plans for putting the training into practice upon returning to their respective colleges. Specifically, they committed to convincing their college leaders to embrace the new approaches, to train the full faculty, and to beginning to experiment with the different competency-based methods in a first group of courses, expanding the courses as they grow their capacity and confidence. Geneva Global is optimistic that the training will yield meaningful change having seen the same training inspire true change in Oromia’s thirteen colleges of teacher education following a similar training in March 2024. We look forward to sharing more as this story evolves.