Teacher Training in India-Part 1

“CBSE teachers…no way! I won’t work with them”, said an ex-colleague from an IB school.

I keep hearing about teacher resistance in India by trainers.

I've interacted with 1000s of CBSE/ICSE/ISC teachers in 100s of workshops and there was no group that I couldn't crack open to make them creative with maths. Teachers teaching from 30 plus years have written poems, danced, done role plays in my workshops and willingly. They also discussed concepts and debated on a lot of issues. 

How did I do that?

This is a long piece so I am going to write it in series. 

My way of working is as #StevenRae says, “Throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks". In other words, keep trying and observe both successes and failures. 

Initially

Initially I was the Ms. Know all! I knew it all about teaching and was the one to teach others. They knew nothing and I was god's gift to supply them with the answers. Needless to say, it was an uphill battle with me exhausted by the end of the workshops. Post each workshop I reflected on the day and discovered areas that are good and areas where I need to work. 

Turning point

Turning point for me was when I read #RohitPande of #classteacher.com, "teacher is the cook in the classroom" and I realized the truth of it. If they are the cooks, who am I? Well...I am the recipe provider. They get to cook the way they want to, I only suggest. Thus was born my 'style of connecting' to the teachers. 

Armed with this, and my content which I am proud of, I asked myself 3 questions:

1. What am I sharing?
2. How do I do that?
3. How do I assess that they have absorbed?

Any teacher who writes lesson plans would relate to these questions easily. And I worked relentlessly on these following a Plan-Train-Reflect cycle. My main aim has been “connect”. Connect with them so that they are open to learning from me and I am open to listening to them.

Over the years I found that slowly the resistance crumbled and I was able to break into any group with minutes of starting the workshop. Reflecting on it, I found that unknowingly I was using deep principles of learning and those are encapsulated in this short series of articles. 

Coming up next, "The Two principles of Andragogy that I used". 

#teachertraining, #educationmatters, #teachersofindia