Working with Instructors

I would like to apologize for the delay of this blog. It was written about a week ago. But because of electricity shortage and lack of internet connection in the capital city, I was unable to upload it. Indeed, for some reasons I could not explain, it is hard sometimes to get internet connection in my country. Today, I am lucky to upload my message; so enjoy it.
As I am meeting with my participating teachers in a few weeks for two other sessions (March 25th and 27th), I decided to discuss with the instructors topics related to the rest of the training. Two high school teachers and one technology teacher and I were working on the different sessions since the beginning of the technology education professional development. Each session of the professional development has two parts: a theoretical part and a practical part. In the scope of these two coming sessions, we met twice and worked on the presentations and three artifacts (two sound instruments and a liquid thermometer) teachers will make during the next sessions. The theoretical part of the two sessions will deal with technological pedagogical content knowledge and how to evaluate students’ artifacts. Essentially, we will be discussing about how to teach technology education based on the technological process stipulated in Benin secondary school science curriculum and we will design rubrics which will help teachers to assess students’ works. A Guitar and a drum are the two sound instruments teachers will be making. After discussion, we realized that the later instruments will be easy for teachers to make, whereas the liquid thermometer will be the most difficult to make, because of the concerns related to the dilatation of the liquid. For our next meeting (March 12th), we all decided to find ideas to how to make that artifact easy for teachers to construct with not complicated equipment.
We also made class observations as pre tests in order to investigate how secondary school science teachers are teaching the technology portion of the curriculum in their classroom. As I mentioned in my dissertation proposal, most of them were not teaching technology in their class for the reasons I already pointed out in the same document. However, those who were teaching chapters dealing with technology brought up some difficulties including their lack of veritable content knowledge, the lack of teaching materials, etc. It was notified in the curriculum that students should utilize materials in their environment to make their artifacts, but some of those materials are sold or could not be found easily.
I would like to thank those who are reading my blogs. I will be delighted to enlighten any question or topic related to my dissertation. Certainly, having your perspectives will be helpful. So, please feel free to send me your questions.