Certificates of success!

The last day of our first Foundation course is best summed up by one of the delegates, plus a few photos:

"The training ended as a big success and I now understood more about psychology, values and V4C.  It certainly helped me to build my competency and confidence level. Binju and I often talked about the training on the way back to our homes each evening. Babita also  proved herself as a bonafide teacher trainer with all this showing that the future of NSA is bright and it will be true to its name. This afternoon I have already taken a class on V4C in class Eight and they enjoyed it a lot."

Chandra Mohan Joshi

Values for children ....... continued

Day 4 of the Foundation course and the second day of V4C. Today was about using two more kinds of stimuli, objects and stories, and these were each first demonstrated by Babita with a group of 20. Then, two groups were formed and each ran a couple of sessions with object stimuli and a couple with story stimuli.

Tomorrow is the last day, Classroom Resources in the morning and Lesson Planning in the afternoon.

We're on our way home and will summarise in a couple of days.

Values 4 Children-a new technique for Nepal!

Day 3 of the Foundation course and a continuing focus on values with a new technique being introduced which is 100% child centred. Based on the well known P4C process we have adapted some elements so that Nepali teachers can develop a core set of values for their school amongst children AND staff. 

We have been trained in the UK on SAPERE courses and are using the 10-step process of Jason Buckley (The Philosophy Man) who kindly provided us with lots and lots of his booklets for our training last April. The process uses stimuli to initiate a group discussion (on values) which can commonly include pictures, objects and stories.

Our Foundation course dedicates two full days to V4C and works on the three areas of stimuli, 10 steps, values. Today Babita ran two sessions using pictures as stimuli with the course split into one half as students and one half as observers. The session itself and the resulting feedback were both very lively as this type of discussive facilitated process is very new to Nepal and a far cry from sitting in silence and copying stuff from the blackboard. In the afternoon it was the turn of the teachers to have a go and two more full sessions were run using picture stimuli with full debrief reviews held afterwards.

The teachers have gone home very excited with homework to find and bring in an object that could be used as a stimulus, goodness knows what we will get! So, tomorrow, two sessions plus practice using object stimuli, then two sessions plus practice using stories as stimuli. Watch this space for a full report.

Values in education

The second day of our new Foundation course with a shift of focus to values. We first ran this as a one day workshop last April as part of our school management programme and subsequent work and discussions with the schools showed just how important the workshop was. Originally catalysed by Sujeev Shakya's best selling book "Unleashing Nepal" in which he emphasised how Nepali youth had lost many of the country's traditional values we decided to give the subject some prominence in our programme.

Today was all about the teachers understanding values and their influence on our personal behaviour and we conducted a number of activities to help delegates think about their own values and behaviour. From this we examined the issue of organisational values in a school and how this might affect student-teacher relationships.

Tomorrow we use the concepts from today in a new technique V4C (Values For Children) in which teachers will learn how to run practical classroom sessions which stimulate children of all ages to discuss respect, discipline, freedom, cooperation, friendship, achievement, learning, and any other value important to the school.

We must acknowledge the assistance we were given by SAPERE in being trained in their Philosophy For Children process and the flexibility they showed us in using their materials and tools.