teacher trainning

So it’s been a while since I’ve done any of this, but it has been rather quiet here with the festivals and school holidays. Also, I have had a lot of internet problems, I've got ten mins now so no time for photos or all my emails but I should have some time on Christmas day or boxing day to get round to those. Additionally, I was ill for a while, only a cold though, so I didn’t do much then either. I think it was mainly down to the environment here, it just drains you I can’t explain it and there is hardly any vegetables in meals (Potatoes don’t count but people here don’t seem to believe that) and almost never any fruit. However, I have spoken to the people here and, hopefully, that will change now. Also I keep buying loads of fruit to eat each day, although it is really expensive.

Anyway after Tihar it was little Mahen’s 2^nd birthday which was good, we had a lot of people around and a party until rather late.

After that there was a week in which all the schools were closed, so me and Barbara spent the time shopping for school resources and planning teacher training.

Yeah right so teacher training, I won’t go into too much detail as I doubt it would interest most people. We split it across two days, into 45-60 min sessions and we had either 22 or 23 teachers attend, I can’t remember exactly.

First off we started doing some work on assessment, e.g. methods and what is it used for. Then talked about how they assess children, the thing is they all knew how to assess and why to assess, but a fair number of them didn’t always do it or assessed children but then didn’t use the info. After assessment it was on to Special Educational Needs (SEN) and Health. The thing is here there isn’t SEN, children either don’t go to school or just remain in the same year until they pass the tests at the end of the year. It is a difficult area to teach but I think that many of them go the general gist of it, I mean this was 45mins on the topic I’ve had several hours and even more reading about it and still I don’t know that much. Then we got them to do a task where they had to look at a description of a child with SEN and say how they would meet their needs, they were very good at it actually.

After lunch it was on resources, only simple ones like using newspapers and magazines, creating and displaying posters, and actually storing resources and using them in the classroom. The thing is here they do have some minimal resources, like posters or pens and pencils, which volunteers have left behind. However, they are never in the classrooms just in a storage cupboard or decorating the staffroom. We also did some junk model making – I’m telling you, no matter how old people are; they are never too old to make models out of rubbish. Or maybe that’s just a teacher thing.

Let’s skip to the next day, we started off with planning. Mainly talking about the importance of long term plans and converting them into lesson plans.  Most of the teachers grasped the concept and could create a lesson plan (actual plan, not pro-forma) for themselves, but it is not common practice, usually it is pick up the text book and teach this chapter, then move on to the next one. If you have never done it another way this kinda makes sense. However, there was one dude whose school did use lessons plans (more like lesson diaries) and he hadn’t been using them for long but was very comfortable with the practice. A lot of the teachers took some of the pro-formas home with them to use in school, so I think some schools will be lesson planning soon. I’m also going to try and help them when I next visit to get them into the habit. Even if it is occasionally a tedious one.

 Last proper session was teaching methodologies, e.g. questioning, group working and seating plans. I won’t say much about this. I just hope they take it on board, especially the group working, as those children really need to talk in the lessons.

After lunch, a photographer from the newspaper turned up to get some photos for the article. I won’t be able to read it, as it is in Nepali but I’ll get it translated. Finally, we got them to do a quick evaluation of the programme. However, we didn’t practice the questionnaire first so did end up with a lot of answers which just described the session rather than their feelings on the sessions. But hey I’ll know next time, which may be soon actually, although I will be doing it without Barbara’s help, it should be fun.