The Academy launched

A few days ago our first marketing meeting was held at the Greenwich Village Hotel, Kathmandu, to introduce the Head Teachers of 15 government/community schools to our teacher training programmes. The initial course, Foundation, is of 5 days duration and covers topics such as Educational Psychology, Values, Lesson Planning, Classroom Resources. Every session is extremely practical and focuses on techniques to make the classroom child centric.

The meeting was run by Dr Champa Metters (Trustee) and Ms Babita Shrestha (Education Consultant) supported by 2 Heads from our supported 7 schools. The background to NSA was highlighted followed by our methods and results since we began delivering teacher training. A Q&A session mostly focused on "how do teachers become motivated to implement the training when they have become set in their ways and have no incentive to change" which is very difficult to answer in a country where teachers have a job for life, cannot be fired, and where Heads have never had any management training in how to handle such situations. Our answer is that we CAN advise on this but by opening up our training to all schools in Kathmandu it will be impossible to work extensively with each registered school as we have done with 7 schools over the past 5 years!

When the meeting was finished 9 of the 15 registered immediately for training and since then the remaining 6 have emailed or delivered their registrations by hand. The first Foundation course will begin on November 6th and our initial plan is to run 5 such courses for 100 teachers by the end of March 2012. This will allow us time to fine tune materials to suit non English speaking teachers before we start to run two courses per month. Before this of course we need to find more schools to register but it seems, according to our two partner schools/Heads, there are now approximately 45 new schools waiting to register!

Not a bad start.