Shades of Our Schools - Screening at RIE

The Teacher Foundation screened the documentary Shades of Our Schools at Regional Institute of Education, Mysore on January 15th. Maya Menon, director of TTF led the discussion that followed.

Shades of Our Schools is directed by Bangalore based director Gautam Sonti and is producted by The Teacher Foundation. The film depicts the routine incidents in Indian classrooms. The film does not show the white (really good practices) or the black (objectionable practices) of our schools. The film created with the objective of holding a mirror in front of teachers and teacher educators shows the seemingly 'normal' episodes; the gray shades in between white and black.

At RIE the film was screened for teachers, BEd and MEd students as well as for RIE faculty. Over 175 people attended the film screened in two sessions. There was an open discussion afterwards in which the participants raised questions on the accepted norms of Indian schools.

Here is the coverage of the event in Mysore Mail

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GrouPower - Touchstone Private

Sandhya and Kavita of The Teacher Foundation conducted this fourth workshop of Touchstone series for the teachers of Ideal Jawa Rotary School, Pragathi Vidya Kendra and Rotary Midtown Academy on January 10th, 2009. Teachers had the hands on experience of group work in this workshop.

The teachers discussed the benefits of group work for students and teachers. They learnt about Spencer Kagan's elements of group development and Tuckman's research on stages of group work. They used their creative juices to come up with an advertisement for a bottle of health drink.

In the course of the day the teachers learnt a number of strategies for group work including but not limited to fishbowl, carousing, think-pair-share and snowbowling.

We hope to see the teachers making an attempt to use group work when we go for the next round of school based support.

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Reading Readiness and Writing Right

The Teacher Foundation organized a one-day workshop ‘Reading Readiness and Writing Right’ in Mysore on Wednesday, January 7th. Gina Menon, Deputy Headteacher of Raynham Primary School, London conducted the workshop. 15 teachers and principals from 7 different schools in Mysore attended this highly enriching workshop. The participating schools were Geetha Shishu Shikshana Sangha , Vijaya Vittala Vidyashala, Rotary Mid town academy, Pragathi Vidya Kendra, The Learning Curve Int. School, Sadvidya Highschool and Ideal Jawa Rotary School. The workshop was for English teachers of primary schools. This workshop was supported by Sir Ratan Tata Trust.

Gina started with an energizer to get the teachers relax. The teachers then made an origami booklet with instructions from Gina. Every activity then onwards unfolded multiple teaching opportunities using local, cheap and easily available material. Audrey of the Learning Curve Int. School says that she can use the ball games in her class wherein crushed newspaper made into a ball using rubber bands is thrown around to get quick answers.

Teachers learnt to play word tennis to practice tenses and adjectives and numerous other things. Gina shared the phonics experiment that she had conducted in her school and shared the sounds of English letters. She talked about teaching capital and fullstop to 1st, 2nd and 3rd standard students.

Teachers created a big visual aid using pictures from old magazines and wrote probes for writing sentences. The teachers discussed that this ‘Big picture with keywords’ activity can be used virtually for any subject.

Gina shared many different activities for punctuations and vocabulary. Teachers liked the 2a activity to make boring sentences interesting using two adjectives. Then there was an adverb activity for frequency adverbs like never, always, regularly, and frequently.

Gina told the story of little red riding hood using paper puppets. Teachers in groups, in turn told the same story using such cool sounds effects that made all the participants laugh out loud.

Gina then shared some strategies for teaching reading comprehension. She emphasized on the importance of questioning and how teachers should start with easy retrieval questions and move on to the harder questions of deduction and inference.

Another secret that Gina shared was the ‘voice level chart’. If used as a whole class exercise it can be effectively used to reduce the voice levels in classrooms while doing the group work. Teachers thought that it was a practical idea and some of them are willing to try it out in their school.

The last activity of Reading Theatre brought out the creative elements in the teachers. They realized how dramatizing a situation helps in comprehension.

Nandini from Sadvidya Highschool noticed, “Learning language was made easy and funny”. Anjana from Geetha Shishu Shikshana Sangha says that she “wants to implement voice level charts, reading theatre and adverb games in her school immediately”. We, at TTF Mysore would love to see these ideas in action in the classrooms

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Workshops under Merugu for 08-09 completed

Merugu program for Mysore rural and Nanjangud government school teachers has been completed with the workshop Assessment and Evaluation. The workshop was conducted for both the batches together on January 3rd. The teacher response was very positive. Sudha and Pushpalatha of TTF facilitated the workshop. The teachers discussed the difference between assessment and evaluation. They talked about various ways in which they can assess the students and in turn use the assessment for improving instruction in the classroom. The teachers developed rubrics for assessment for the subject they teach.

With this workshop TTF Mysore has completed the training modules under Merugu (Touchstone) program for 50 teachers. School Based Support is now in progress.

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Teacher Treasure Hunt

The Teacher Foundation, Mysore had organized a Saturday forum called 'Treasure Hunt for Teachers' on December 13th. The objective of the forum was to introduce the teachers to our Teacher Resource Centre (TRC). Kavita, the centre coordinator conducted the forum.

Our TRC has been functional for over an year. Unfortunately not many teachers have made use of it. Hence we planned this saturday forum as a number of learning centres where teachers could explore the variety of resources that our TRC had to offer. The Saturday Forum was for Maths, Science and English teachers. Kavita briefly talked about TTF and the objective of Saturday forum. She gave an idea of all the centres available for teachers. Each centre had a small task that the teachers were expected to complete. Kavita told them that they would not be able to go to all the centres for the lack of time. The teachers had 15 minutes at each centre.

The teachers handled multiple resources at the centres like How to make and use visual aids, word and meaning games, strategy games, science activities, 100 ideas, classroom management, thinking with fairy tales and fantasy.

The teachers played the games, browsed the websites and went through the books. They came up with ideas about using these resources in their classrooms. Kavita conducted a whole group discussion in last 20 minutes. Teachers shared their ideas about the learning centres.

There was a discussion about teachers of the same school taking turns to come to the TRC. The teachers suggested that TTF should organize the saturday forums for a particular subject, ask teachers to bring the material and create the activities for classroom use. That way the learning at the TRC can be directly translated to the classroom.

Overall the teachers were very enthusiastic about the learning centres. TTF, Mysore hopes to conduct more such Saturday forums over the coming months to bring more and more teachers to TRC.

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Touchstone - Mindful Learning (Private)

On December 6th TTF Mysore conducted the third workshop in Touchstone series for private school teachers. In this half day workshop teachers learnt about brain principles and brain based learning. Sandhya Gatti from TTF Bangalore conducted the workshop.

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Buzzing Classrooms

The Teacher Foundation organized a one-day workshop ‘Buzzing Classrooms’ in Mysore on Thursday, October 30th. Monisha Diwan, head of TTF- Mumbai conducted the workshop. 41 teachers from 9 different schools in Mysore attended this activity-oriented workshop. The participating schools were Geetha Shishu Shikshana, Oxfo kids, Maharshi Public School, Vijaya Vittala Vidyashala, Rotary Mid town academy, Pragathi Vidya Kendra, ABC academy, St. Joseph’s and The Learning Curve Int. School.

Monisha started with an energizer and kept the energy levels high till the end. A teacher from Geetha Shishu Shikshana Sangha said, “It was the best since Monisha did not let us rest in peace and filled our day with activities”.

Each activity was followed by a minute of ‘Thinking Cap’ work where in teachers had to connect the activity to the classroom. They would then share their ideas about using the activity in other subjects with the whole group.

Teachers found their partners with the sticky note compound word game and in the process started interacting with teachers from different schools. They thoroughly enjoyed the ‘Dig it’ activity and acted as detectives. As they shared the profile of the person whose bag was missing we got to witness the creativity in teachers.

The teachers were unanimous in their opinion that ‘Diffy Definitions’ could be easily used in any subject. Some of them exhibited their talent in dramatics (and creative writing) with the role-play opportunity in ‘Living Photographs’. Monisha elaborated on using this particular activity to inculcate empathy in our students for the people who suffer in bomb blasts, floods and other disasters. Sharon from The Learning Curve noted that “The printouts / pictures etc. that were given, could be shown on the ppt instead of passing around for all to see (saves time) and color on screen is better than the B/W printouts.”

The activity on questioning was thought provoking for all the teachers. They discussed at length on Bloom’s revised taxonomy, HO/LO questions and OL/CL questions. Math Train was quite challenging but when it was time to break for coffee the teachers didn’t want to let go of the challenge.

Story ball was a fun way to begin the ‘ends’. Again, we witnessed the teachers’ creativity when they started giving interesting twists to the story. Most of them said that the students are much more creative than themselves. The teachers were very attentive when it was time to ‘correct the teacher’. Monisha told them that their students would love to do the same. ‘Order! Order’ was another great activity that emphasized the group work and understanding of the processes. The teachers were new to ‘Pictionary’. They thought that it was an interesting game for vocabulary in any subject.

At the end of the day the teachers wanted more such workshops. Soumya from Vijaya Vittala said, “It was a useful training as it can be used in the daily classroom situations in our lesson where we can keep the child buzzing”. The real success of the workshop would be teachers using these (and more) activities in the classrooms to keep the beginnings, middles and the ends interesting for the students. We at TTF are hoping for the same from Poornima’s (The Learning Curve) comment - “I have already planned for next 2 lessons – the passing the ball activity and the treasure hunt”.

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