Teaching Techniques programme begins

After the well earned rest of Nepal's New Year's day in which our merry band toured central Kathmandu streets and Thamel, the teacher training programme started again with a new focus on Teaching Tools & Techniques. The day comprised two half day workshops on Lesson Planning and Thinking Skills, neither being "natural topics" for Nepalese teachers. Thinking Skills is virtually something that they seem to expect children to park at home while they are talked at for 40 min sessions at a time each day in school! On the other hand Lesson Planning is a totally alien concept since it requires looking ahead! The importance of Lesson Planning to NSA was outlined by Janice our Educational Advisor several months ago when she pointed out that it was the main tool that could be used to focus everything else being learned on a daily basis. In other words provided we designed a lesson plan pro forma in a way that required teachers to THINK about lesson objectives, startup, activities, (including resources), a plenary to summarise and assessment then there could be no escape from doing things in a child centred way. Jenny and Chris delivered exactly this message with two groups of 20 teachers, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, practicing the building of a lesson plan across the session. Head teachers have now been tasked with implementing lesson planning thoroughly in their schools and this will be inspected in September as part of the decision making process as to which schools "win" the computers.