Holidays = training

As of this week, Primary Schools are on holiday in Rwanda (this is the end of academic year holiday).  In just over one week, Group Scolaire students and Secondary Schools will have joined in, but for now they are busy with National Exams, which students have to sit at the end of each year in order to decide if they can progress to the next school year.

Unlike in England, school holidays here are not necessarily a time for rest and relaxation.  Teachers are expected to be available for training during the break.  Last year much of this training was focused on providing English language training, and it was assumed that this would be delivered again this holiday, but so far we do not think it will.  So that means that there is much time for us to deliver other training sessions that schools in our districts have requested.  Here in Ngoma District, Denis and I attended a Head Teacher meeting two weeks ago to find out what they wanted.  English language came up, as did using visual aids and active methodologies.

Upon further discussion with our DEO (District Education Officer), Denis and I discovered that there may be a mentor scheme launched in schools in the near future.  FWe were keen to seize upon this idea and we decided to develop a training session that targeted potential mentors.  So it was that we found ourselves delivering training this week to at least one teacher from every Primary School and Group Scolaire in the District.  We had booked the Petite Salle at the District Office and had photocopied our resources, procured a blackboard from the local church and were raring to go.  We returned from our meetings at VSO in Kigali on Monday evening to a flurry of text messages and phone calls – did we know that Tuesday was now going to be a holiday?  We did not know this, so tried to discover more, only no-one seemed certain if it would be a holiday or not.  We decided to go ahead and see what happened.  We arrived early to set up on Tuesday and contrary to all my expectations that people may not turn up, or if they did they would arrive very late, there were already two participants waiting in the room.  A whole hour early!  They helped us set up the room and slowly participants began to arrive.  We were expecting 30, but by 9:30 we had 19, which we decided was good all things considered, so we started our training session.  For the session on Wednesday, we had an excellent turn-out of 35 out of 36.

We began with a session on classroom language and polite use of English.  Because of the differences in language, sometimes children can sound quite abrupt, or demand things, so we taught participants some of the preferred phrases and language of request in English – for example saying “may I borrow” rather than “give me”.  We then moved on to a model lesson on the importance of trees (P4 Science curriculum).  In this session, I had to get participants to be my students and we spent about one hour modelling reading, writing, listening and speaking skills and a variety of active methods for the lesson.  Some of these things seemed like small things, but in the feedback at the end it was interesting to hear teachers state which aspects they wanted to take back and ensure they used in their own lessons.  One of these was giving students thinking time.  But, I suppose, as I pointed out, as teachers we are sometimes a little afraid of thinking time...if students do not immediately shout out the answers we are looking for, we get a bit worried we have not taught the content. I explained that what I have seen so far in Rwandan schools, is that some students are so enthusiastic and shout the answers out straight away, so that others never get the chance to think through answers themselves.  So it is good to enforce a minute of silence – or more- in order to allow students to think independently.  We also played a sentence jumble game.  I have seen my students in the UK get enthusiastic about these, but doing this activity with the groups of teachers was hilarious!  The competitive spirit was well and truly alive.  I had people elbowing others out of the way to get to me first, queue jumping to be the first in line to show me a sentence in order to get the next...everyone wanted to win!  So many teachers said in their feedback that they wanted to do this when they returned to their schools.  I hope they do, because if their students enjoy it half as much as they did, there will be lots of happy, active students out there!

Explaining the sentence jumble game

We completed our training session with the use of visual aids.  There are an increasing number of visual aids in classrooms in Rwanda.  Most schools now have sets of textbooks and posters and more, but there is not a great deal of training provided on how best to use these, so they often just end up as something to look at or be presented to students.  In groups, we had teachers come up with a list of suggestions for ways to use the rice sack posters to help students learn.  We encouraged participants to think beyond the obvious and consider a range of subject areas.  They had some great ideas and this was really encouraging.  For example, we had one poster of a home in a compound.  In the compound were a family and each of them were doing a different job – pruning plants, cutting trees, sweeping, cutting grass, clearing manure, burning rubbish.  We had a huge range of suggestions – it could be used in English to teach tenses by describing the actions in the picture in past, present simple, present continuous, future...it could be used in English to do some creative writing by writing a story about one or more of the people in the picture; it could be used in Social Studies to teach about the need for hygienic activities around the home, or the importance for caring for the environment, or about gender equality; the list of ideas went on and it was great to see that these teachers had many ideas and were thinking creatively.  Once we got going, the ideas were just flowing and we came up with long lists of ideas for six posters.  This was another useful thing that teachers felt they could make good use of back in school and that they would try to think more creatively about how to use the visual aids they had.

These teachers are going to help myself and Denis deliver two more weeks of training at the end of November/beginning of December.  They will support us and present sections if they feel confident enough to do so.  The hope is that, once we leave at the end of our placements, we will have left behind a core of people who will continue mentoring and advising teachers in the district so that our work becomes sustainable.  It has been a busy but productive couple of days and I look forward to working with the participants we have met.