Week 34:Training
on Tina's Journal (China), 18/Oct/2009 14:18, 34 days ago
The first Team Leader Trainer course ended yesterday after a week of intense study and practice. I think the trainees were rather relieved to finish and most of them happily let their hair down at last night's goodbye party. I certainly felt a little sad to say goodbye as I do not know when I'll see most of them again. So how successful was the course? Well, the trainees had to deal with new concepts and ideas the whole week through and learn in a way many of them aren't used to. Firstly, the main aim was to learn ways of facilitating and guiding other teachers in their professional development. Very often discussions in school meetings will involve just listening to a leader, and teachers will not have the opportunity to state their ideas and opinions. In this course, we gave the teachers techniques to be able to bring teachers together to discuss and share teaching related issues. Each teacher on the course is the team leader of the English department in their school which gives them the authority to lead meetings and bring teachers together. Of course, some of them will come up against resistance by some leaders in their school and it will be difficult to get people to open up to new ways of doing things. However, I noticed this week an improvement in the way the team leaders started to grasp ideas. Inthe practice sessions where I observed some of them facilitating their own meetings, I could see that they were getting the'idea' and getting to grips with a more communicative way of doing things. As well as the practice sessions they had workshops to attend exploring concepts from inclusion to teaching life skills. For some of the teachers it was very hard going as they didn't just struggle with the fact that have an elementary level of English but also many of the concepts are new to them. A lot of the ideas were explained in Chinese and they discussed in Chinese between themselves. I am not sure how much of a difference doing this course will make in their schools, but I do believe some of the teachers will definitely use the methods they have learnt. I think that, in itself, is a positive thing because just by being analytical and critical you can open up other people's minds more. I enjoyed being part of the course and facilitating some of the sessions and just getting to know the teachers. At the closing session the teachers presented us with two banners one of which I am holding in the photo. It recognises and appreciates the'expert knowledge'from Simao Teacher's college. During the course I gave a model lesson at Simao No4 Middle School. I enjoyed meeting and teaching the kids there. I would like to go and do the occasional lesson with them totally natural and unobserved, as they really enjoyed being taught by a native english speaker. I also want to keep up the teaching practice. Being based here as a trainer means I don't get much of a chance to do any teaching on a regular basis. It was quite a tiring week. Concepts that are basic to the society which I grew up in, are not'basic' here in this part of China. Therefore, something that I might feel is a'simple' point or idea is not necessarily'simple' here. I and my feet really appreciated my Chinese reflexology session today :-)