Tutors give "added value"

Though we say it ourselves, converting some of our salaried Nepali teachers in Kathmandu into NSA Tutors has been a masterstroke! Now, instead of working as teachers solely in their own schools, they do other work to spread our methods and learning for other teachers around all seven schools too. In addition we have gained extra trust from their respective communities who fund 50% of their salaries alongside us so as to continue their employment as in-school teachers.
They each have a three fold focus on Personal Development, Training Workshops, NSA Projects, with a major emphasis on the first of these. We are extra encouraging about their own personal learning in all sorts of areas such as teaching methods, child psychology, assessment strategies, English language learning, managing & reporting ............. Each month they write a monthly report to advise us of their work and achievements which in turn helps us to do a summary with a few examples on this blog.
Their Personal Development is a bit scattered at the moment, quite naturally, as nobody has ever placed so much emphasis on it with them. Perhaps the best example is of Babita who is focusing on various aspects of child psychology. This month she has examined the stages of child development in three different age bands across physical, social, emotional and cognitive aspects. All valuable stuff showing how age banded children should be approached differently.
They each have 2-3 projects: Bashu's current projects are aimed at helping us to prepare for next year's teacher development week and include sorting holiday schedules, identifying specific needs and getting nominations for various workshops from all seven schools. An additional topic requires him to become our expert on Global Schools Partnerships. Krishna's projects are subject specific and are related to the English and Maths curricula as well as creating advisory notes on setting up English language clubs in school. Babita's projects relate to teacher training and identifying the current national training curriculum in Nepal together with what the teachers in our seven schools think they need more of.
In the last few days they have collectively run another one day workshop on Child Centred Learning which follows on from the longer workshops run by our UK volunteers from Cumbria last April. The workshop was run for teachers from our two central Kathmandu schools, Kesh Chandra and Himalaya schools and the photo is of one of the sessions. As you can imagine, this is REAL added value work as they spread their skills across maybe 100 Nepali speaking teachers who could not attend our English medium workshops. Priceless!!