8.11.09 Part 3

Teacher Training

This month saw the first bit of teacher training from CRD – hurrah! There’s been some research that we started some time ago into current teaching at the Demonstration Primary School that is attached to the College and we haven’t followed up on it yet. The report isn’t quite completed, but the Headteacher came in saying that the teachers had a training day coming up and could we step in with some training on classroom management. We jumped into action. I put together some key areas to cover and after a discussion with the team on what we were going to do, we decided who would be responsible for each part of the training. We submitted the proposal and budget (for pens, paper, refreshments) to Mrs Monde and she was more than happy to approve it.

So, the day came, the team was there, and we carried out a morning session on discipline and aspects of managing a classroom to 40 teachers. Lots of the morning was spent encouraging them to input so that experienced teachers could share their skills with less experienced one. After the initial input in the officer,

I was keen to see the rest of the team take over facilitating the workshop, however I did have a role and that was to act the part of 2 different behaviour management styles in a role play that the teachers then critiqued. The first teacher that I ‘played’ was frustrated, disorganised, shouty, unaware of the pupils’ names and distracted by someone at the door (this caused a lot of laughs as someone commented that it looked as though I was going out for a beer). The next teacher was controlled, organised, fair, had a good knowledge of children’s abilities, laid down the ground rules of behaviour at the start of the lesson and gave lots of positive encouragement to those doing the right things. Obviously, I’d like to think that I, as a teacher, have all the qualities of teacher number 2 and none of number 1’s, but I’m not sure if that’s the case!

Anyway, it went down well and we had lots of positive feedback. What we need to do now is to get it all written up in a report and plan what we want to do next. So, this week will be report writing week. We also need to finish off and plan a set of training for primary school teachers across Akwanga on early reading. We started this concept quite some ago, but once we’ve done it we can submit it to the local education secretary, because November is the month where budgets are decided. So, we’ll be quite busy.

Random

Sometimes you never know what your day will bring you. I was in the office the other day when Tashi called me. He was in the State capital, Lafia, for a meeting and asked me to go and see the Chairman of the Local Government (Stanley). Apparently he had some money to give to Tashi for his NGO, Beter Leven. When I met him, he said not to worry about the money, but that he had lots of guests arriving from Abujaand they were interested in seeing the women at Beter Leven and the training that they have been receiving on tailoring and dying. So, I returned later to meet the guests. It turned out that they were about 50 from the Defence College in Abuja and were doing a study tour of Nasarawa State looking into ‘youth empowerment’. Many were quite high ranking (Major Colonels etc), so I sat at the back and tried to blend in (not that that was going to be possible in any lifetime). Then, as it turned out, there would be no time to go to Beter Leven, because they were due to meet Mrs Monde at the College, so I went with Stanley and attended this meeting. It was interesting to watch and nice to see how those in Government or authority are taking an interest in what is going on out in different communities.