The American International School of Lagos (AISL) recently hosted the Nigerian International Schools Conference 2012 at the school’s Victoria Island campus. About 300 teachers and school administrators from 34 schools in the greater Lagos area took part in the one day professional development programme geared towards the learning needs of students age 4 – 12.

In a chat with journalists, the Director of Curriculum, American International School, Lagos, Mrs. Gaye Lantz, spoke on the purpose of the conference and other issues. Excerpts:

According to Mrs Gaye Lantz, “the purpose of this year’s conference which is about the 20th in the series, is to provide high quality professional development to our Nigerian education colleagues in the greater Lagos area. It is to provide teachers in our community the teaching strategies based on American philosophy of instruction. And many Nigerian schools are eager to learn strategies that are different and add to the strategies that they already have.

“So the title of this conference is: Developing Conceptual Understanding because we know that students need to be able to think at higher levels in order to be problem solvers. No longer is it adequate for a student just to be able to recall information. Children have to be able to think and solve problems.

Asked whether the teachers actually put into practice what they learn from the conference, Mrs. Lantz said: “We hope so. It is hard to know because we don’t have a way to follow up. We have over 200 Nigerian school administrators and teachers attending and of course, our own staff will be there so there will be about 300 people. It is hard for us to ever know whether or not the Nigerian staff who come to this conference actually implement the strategies they learn in their schools. We don’t know that.”

She, however, noted that a mechanism could be put in place to get feedback from participants. “We encourage the heads of the schools to attend because as you know, it takes the leader to start a change.  If you have teachers coming from the schools and they go back to their schools and want to do something different in their classrooms, if the owner of the school or the director has to determine what goes on, it’s very difficult to initiate change. Real change comes from the top. We have about 15 heads of schools coming along with their teachers, which is wonderful,” she stated.

To aid them in following up the teachers after the conference, Mrs. Lantz said all the registration was done by email “so it has been very efficient. That has not been the case in the past. Through the emails survey, I can send a benchmark day; say in three, six, or nine months, to get reactions from delegates as to what strategies they have actually implemented.”

Continuing, the Director of Curriculum said they try as much as possible not to have a clash with the Nigerian system. “One of the issues we’ve got to think about is this: many of the teachers want to use different strategies, the question always in my mind as a professional developer is: Is that honoured or valued by the school they are teaching in Nigerian curriculum because there has to be harmony between what they are learning and what the Nigerian education system values. We do not want to ever have a clash where I am learning this because in the American system, they do this but the Nigerian system says ah, ah, we do not value that.

“So I have been very clear with the schools that are attending that you need to make sure that what teachers are learning is valued back at your school because you can see there will be a big problem if you expose people to a strategy they cannot use; a strategy that is not allowed to be used in their system; whether engineers, doctors, teachers, it doesn’t make any difference. There has to be congruence or an alignment.”