Academy first Foundation course kicks off

Six months ago she was a primary school teacher at Bal Bigyan school, Patan, doing some occasional tutoring work for us. Then she decided to give up her job and train to be a full-time Education Consultant working for NSA. Now after three months extensive training in the UK she has just run the opening day of the Academy's Foundation course on .............................. Educational Psychology!

Babita Shrestha took a big chance by giving up her job, but today she probably realises what a good decision it was; and so do the rest of us.

Our Educational Psychology workshop covers three broad areas related to child centred learning; The Child, The Learning, The Methods. More specifically we explore the psychological concepts important to each such as diversity, motivation and development stages of the child, cognitive, social and moral aspects of learning, and finally learning processes, classroom strategies and assessment strategies as part of the teaching method. Quite a lot to fit into one day, but with a mixture of theoretical inputs and activities the message is very clear that child centredness is a MUST for introduction into Nepali primary schools.

Tomorrow is all about Values in the school and ethical standards that should be shown by teachers and developed in the children.

And, oh yes, at 4pm the TV crew from News 24 turned up. But that's another story!

Three Teams set for first Academy programme

Two days to go before we run our first Academy programme and some recent meetings have led to the creation and role clarification of three teams essential to our success. The past month in Kathmandu has shown us just how complex our operation can be with a need to coordinate policy, finances, marketing, delegate bookings, venue organisation, resource materials, course delivery .......... This last item is merely the tip of the iceberg!

The first team is UKNSA and consists of the five Trustees who have responsibility for policy, fundraising, strategy, curriculum development, annual budgets, annual objectives. Most of this is handled in the UK with regular communication to Kathmandu.

The second team is KNSA based in Kathmandu and comprises the Operations Director and two Education Consultants. Their main role is to plan, organise and deliver our schedule of programmes based on annual objectives from UKNSA. Finances are strictly controlled with a monthly reporting system for spending and activities in place.
The third team, SNSA is new and comprises teachers from two selected schools we will continue to support materially and with advice. Lalit Kalyan and Himalaya schools are attempting to be model schools for our methods and techniques and also are places where we can test things out in a Nepali setting. They have provided us with two teachers each, previously trained by us who will act as part time tutors on our courses.

As you might expect it is the interdependence and collaboration across these three teams that will make for a successful Academy and achieving our ultimate goal of influencing the Ministry of Education to change!

Consolidation phase begins with technology

Our five year programme of development for 7 Kathmandu schools has now entered its Consolidation phase which will run for approximately 12 months. The purpose of this phase is to ensure school independence and avoid a complete reliance on our aid. During this time we are actioning the following elements:

1. Re-testing 300 children to assess the impact of our teacher training implementation
2. Formally inspecting those schools that have met our communication and implementation criteria since last April
3. Reducing our material aid of exercise books over the next 6 months
4. Completing the series of Tutor workshops ie Classroom Resources and English Intermediate Teaching
5. Delivering two specialist courses next April 2012 on Values For Children and English Early Learning (Phonics)
6. Providing technology to some schools to be utilised as a teacher resource 

Since last April we have monitored communication and implementation in each school and have selected 3 schools to be provided with "technology" to support teachers rather than for children to learn computer skills. Specifically we have provided up to four fast Core I5 PC systems, plus adsl connection, plus a laserjet multifunction printer, plus an inkjet colour printer with full installation support and four days training to each school. In all cases the systems have been loaded with the Linux operating system and a full suite of open source software.

The main purpose of the technology as already mentioned is as a resource for teachers so as to design, download or create teaching materials for use in child centred learning sessions.

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.