When Gert Jan Veeter and Jan Uitdehaag shaped the first school leadership training for Teachers4Teachers in 2007, they couldn’t have foreseen where it would lead and where the training would be in 2024. Because I’ve had to explain this many times here in Kenya, here’s a brief summary for the readers at home.
The training program is ingeniously designed, starting with 16 promising Kenyan school leaders, 3 Dutch trainers, and 8 Dutch coaches who, after two days of training, took over the ‘coaching on the job’. Currently (in fact, since 2020), there are only Kenyan trainers and Kenyan coaches, trained by the Dutch. Case closed, you might say. That’s a bit too simplistic. Because of course, there are changes, so new coaches are trained, and soon new trainers as well. The new coaches receive one day of training per visit and then go into the field to coach the school leaders. In the process, they are coached themselves by our graduated Kenyan coaches, even when we are not there. Everything interlocks and the whole becomes more and more a Kenyan responsibility. We call that ‘shifting the power’.
And now, on top of that, there is a collaboration with the Teachers Training College in Kinango with the aim of jointly making the curriculum accreditation-ready.
On Wednesday, Gert Jan Veeter and Michiel Leijser visited the training. Their findings:
‘Prior to the meeting, we were nervous about whether there was still a positive view of the collaboration. We were also curious whether the division of tasks and thus the responsibility would be fairly distributed between the Dutch and Kenyan parts of the development team (Kenyan and Dutch education professionals who are going to write the new course/training). Last Sunday, we had scheduled an extra meeting with the Kenyan T4T trainers to map out the challenges, opportunities, but also their concerns. This was a nice, equal meeting in which the opportunities and threats were honestly put on the table. With the concept program and the information from the trainers under our arm, we arrived after a long bumpy ride at the Teaching Trainers College (TTC). The welcome was warm and after a tour (the number of students had grown from 43 to about 650 in three years) and a tasty lunch, we could (almost ) start the meeting on time. Jan Uitdehaag and Belinda Oolman also joined the meeting digitally from the Netherlands. They have always been involved in writing the first concept. This was already the third digital meeting with the TTC-T4T development team. Technology is there for nothing, although live is still nicer.
We returned to the hotel enthusiastically late Wednesday evening. They were enthusiastic about the meeting. All those present were well prepared, the involvement was great. There is still a lot to be arranged, developed, coordinated, and written, but the feeling about this is positive. We had to pinch ourselves during the meeting, is it really going to work? We are facing a promising development together. Agreements have been made within the development team for the coming weeks and months. The tasks have been divided. Another online meeting is planned for December.