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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Touchstone - CTC (Private)

On November 29th TTF Mysore conducted the second workshop in Touchstone series. Care to Connect was conducted at Ideal Jawa Rotary School. 17 teachers from Ideal Jawa, Pragathi Vidya Kendra and Rotary Midtown Academy attended the workshop. Maya Menon of TTF facilitated the workshop that added good listening skills to the teachers' repertoire.