Teacher Training in India-Part 1
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:
- What am I sharing?
- How do I do that?
- 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
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