Speaker
Description
Teacher supervision remains one of the key educational practices around the world for ensuring teacher professional development and quality learning. In many Sub-Saharan African countries, such as Niger, it raises multiple questions on the extent to which it contributes to the advancement of education. The purpose of this presentation is to shed light on the current practices of supervision in Niger in order to underline its real effects on in-service EFL teacher learning. The presentation draws from a small-scale qualitative study grounded in cultural historical perspectives to explicit the nature of supervisory relationship and how these are mediated by contextual factors. The study gathered data from 25 EFL teachers and 25 ELT advisers who reflected on supervisory interactions, the helpfulness of advice and guidance provided by ELT advisers to EFL teachers, and the existence of policy on supervisory practices. The analysis of those reflections reveals the existence of major gaps that impede the effectiveness of teaching and teacher professional development. This outcome strongly suggests a near-future endeavor for experimenting and disseminating practices of clinical supervision and lesson study in order to offer more avenues to EFL teachers to make decisions on their classroom lives and their own professional development.
Biography
Hamissou Ousseini is an Associate-Professor of English language education at the Teacher Training College of Université Abdou Moumouni in Niger. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of East Anglia (UK) where he conducted research on initial teacher education and teacher professional development. He obtained his MA in TESOL from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 2013. Dr Ousseini’s research interests include Teacher Cognition, Lesson Study/Action Research, Translanguaging, and issues relevant to ELT Methodology.
