Feedback is the breakfast of champions!

An email today from one of the teacher delegates on our Foundation course has given so much positive and useful feedback it just HAS to be transcribed here:

"Today I have learned lots about values and even ran a V4C session myself. Before attending I had no idea about how values could be taught in a professional and practical way, it is so important for us. By using this technique children will learn not only about values but also will develop listening, questioning, language and other cognitive skills. 

I have never seen or heard of this running in any school in Nepal. But with young children being at a specific development stage can learn to be more creative, can become more disciplined, cooperate more etc. In my opinion V4C will be the best technique to use with primary children and should be used in all our schools as it is so child centred and makes us better facilitators as teachers. "
This tells us exactly what we need to know from our 4th Foundation course since launching our Academy programme. It gives us the courage to continue on this path and to rebuff the doubters who snipe at our syllabus. This sort of feedback will also reinforce our case with grant foundations and potential donors who ask us if we have conducted needs-analysis or how we know we are doing the right thing. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, and ....... the most important meal of the day!

Ridiculous Ministry comment!

A short report in today's Himalayan Times has almost sent us into orbit with its muddle headed pathetic thinking, which is just plain WRONG. Read it for yourselves and judge whether this man has ever been anywhere near a school in the last decade and how he concludes that embracing new technology and digital methods is the way forward. It's like building a roof of a house before the foundations and walls have been built! How about improving teaching standards first, how about some simple training in child centred learning for existing teachers, how about getting teachers to discover and use basic resources readily available first ...... ??? What planet is he on!!!

HIMALAYAN NEWS SERVICE

KATHMANDU: Education Secretary Kishor Thapa has vowed to innovate classrooms of schools and universities in Nepal after coming back from a three-day conference in London.

Thapa said educational programmes should be aimed at embracing new technology and digital methods to upgrade standards in Nepal.

The focus of annual conference, organised by UK’s Education Ministry, was on classrooms changes due to technological innovation of this decade. 

Secretary, along with Nepali Education Minister, had attended the gathering of ministers of 60 countries and other 10 representatives. 

“Children and teachers are using smart boards in the classrooms in developing countries. Teachers can take many classes at the same time, eBooks can be the reading materials and exams can be of internet-based,” said Thapa, talking to this daily.

Keeping our feet on the ground

The third Foundation course in our initial series of five has just been completed with another 21 attendees, five days spread over 6 days because of a break in the middle caused by yet another national strike!

This course was exceptionally pleasing because we had 5 Head Teachers attending who now realise that in order to motivate their staff through the programme and to implement some changes, they need to know the content themselves. There was some reluctance at first; "I don't need this I'm already trained, I don't need this I don't do any teaching etc" but with more of their teachers returning from our courses they seem to be getting the message. So, that's 9 of the 15 registered school's Heads now having attended, let's hope we can get the remaining 6 trained this month on the next two Foundations.

The courses are going well from a content and organisation point of view too, no major adjustments needed and all the delegates enjoying and buying in to our view of the concepts and skills needed to develop the Nepal education system and Nepal schools. 

Word of our programme is spreading too with some renewed interest from the Ministry of Education who want to talk to us again about spreading the programme even wider (!) and a stream of enquiries from other schools not currently registered and NGO's or agencies asking about a "partnership" with us.(whatever that means) Keeping our feet on the ground is our motto for the week/month/year/5 years!

NSA Education Experiment #1106!

Organisations either grow or decline, but they never stand still. This was one of the first principles I ever learned as a young organisational psychologist and I was never sure whether the original quote came from someone in the Isaac Newton mould (a scientific truth) or from the Buddha himself (one of the Noble Truths). In the end it didn't matter, because it's true; all organisations MUST grow or in fact they will decline, and this is the principle we have applied to NSA from Day One in 2007. Growth is as much about intellectual development as increases in income, resources, and influence, and this is why I must often drive colleagues to the point of insanity by constantly instituting "experiments" in schools, on courses, at events, just to see what will happen and whether we can develop "a better way" or a "new/additional way" of doing something.

We currently have two such experiments underway in Kathmandu, which if successful could make educationalists really sit up in Nepal. Both are being conducted by Babita in two of our partner schools and involve the topics of Phonics and P4C. When she was in the UK recently Babita received a lot of specialist training in these two areas and we are currently running a 12 weeks pilot programme where Babita teaches these two topics for half a day in each school every day.Class 1 & 2 are receiving Phonics lessons to learn to read and speak English, and Classes 3-6 are receiving P4C sessions (renamed by us to V4C,Values For Children). We have conducted perception tests on Classes 3-6 in each school using MALS and QEQ and will retest after 3 months to see if there is any change in the child's perception of their education, the school, their teachers and so on. Separately Babita will continuously assess the children in Class 1 & 2 for progress through Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the UKs Letters & Sounds syllabus. 

Will we see any difference in test scores? Will the children's English speaking ability improve? Will children's behaviour change influenced by regular values-based lessons? We certainly hope so, but this is the sort of experiment we MUST conduct before we have the right to train Nepalese teachers in any depth in these topics. We need evidence we can present to the Ministry of Education if we are to grow to our next stage of development, evidence we take for granted in the UK, but this is not acceptable if you are trying to influence a whole country to change!

We cannot leave this article without acknowledging who set us down this path, and we are very grateful to Dr Sue Palmer at The Phonics Academy for her development of our knowledge and thinking about phonics, to Lizzy Lewis at SAPERE for her encouragement to use P4C in the first place, and finally to Jason Buckley, The Philosophy Man, who patiently trained yours truly in the basics of the P4C technique. We would encourage anyone interested in these subjects to visit their respective websites:

The Phonics Academy  

SAPERE

The Philosophy Man