Dedicated teachers across Pakistan are striving to provide quality education for their students. Moshin Moosa is one such teacher from the rural region of Balochistan. Last summer, Moosa came to the United States for six weeks of professional development training through the Teaching Excellence and Achievement [6]-Pakistan program. He arrived as an English teacher dedicated to his profession and returned home as something else, he said: a “teacher educator” poised to influence his school, his colleagues, and his community.
The rigorous professional development program at University of Northern Colorado [7] which included a field experience in a classroom at John Evans Middle School in Greeley, Colorado, equipped him with new teaching skills and helped shape his personality as a teacher leader.
Moosa now applies his new skills in lesson planning and instructional technology in his classroom. His students do group work — a technique he did not use before his U.S. experience — and he now uses pre and post-assessments to evaluate their progress. He is also more confident managing the large class sizes common in his part of Pakistan. “I feel my students are learning more now than they did before,” Moosa said. “TEA made me more confident in my profession.”
Moosa’s TEA experience already resonates beyond his own classroom. After returning to Pakistan, he shared his US experience with his headmaster and school colleagues and delivered a weeklong training for junior teachers.
Moosa introduced new techniques in lesson planning, teaching and evaluation methods to his colleagues. “This helped my school to build a trained team,” he said. Citing TEA’s impact on his colleagues and students, he called the program “a beacon of hope for my community.”
To date, 68 teachers from across Pakistan have participated in the TEA program. TEA is a program of the U.S. Embassy Pakistan [8] and Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs [9] and is implemented by IREX.