by Marie Heath
Just outside the Linjani tribal village, about three hours from Arusha, Tanzania, down a long stretch of dusty, rutted roads, sits Promise Village Academy.
Inside its classrooms, the air doesn’t buzz with projectors or the tapping of laptop keys. Instead, it echoes with the sound of chalk on crumbling plaster, voices reciting lessons in unison, and the soft scratching of worn pencils against well-used composition notebooks. Add to that the high-pitched screech of metal chairs dragging across concrete floors from an automatic response each time an adult entered the room as every student stood tall and greeted in chorus, “Welcome, teacher.”
In this remote region, where the Maasai children live and learn, I found a classroom unlike any I’ve seen before, primitive in resources, yet rich in potential.
When I first visited in February 2024, I came to offer something I had spent years delivering in schools across the United States: the formative training based on the 7 Steps to a Language-Rich, Interactive Classroom book. But what I didn’t realize was how much I would learn in return.
Continue reading “Bridging Worlds: Supporting Maasai Teachers in Tanzania with the 7 Steps”
