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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