My Teaching Volunteering Experiences - Observations So far

It has been over 2 months now with this NGO. Religiously, I have been developing lesson ideas, resources, planning instructional ideas and facilitating the lesson plans in the classroom. I am also simultaneously adjusting the lesson plans to meet the requirements of children. Even though i am trying hard to get these children synthesise their learning, think critically and reason out things, i still struggle on a daily basis. So while i want these children to become explorer, doer, and presenter of their learning, i gauge (almost with disbelieving eyes) the quality of our textbooks and the harshness of our medium that these teachers are subjected to.

I sit and try to think some of the challenges that these teachers perhaps associated with low-income schools face. Challenges are listed in no particular order.

• Most of these teachers are armed with the requisite degree as well as are conceptually sound. However what they lack is understanding of children development level, concept progressions, classroom management skills and infusing differentiated instructional strategies in teaching core concepts. This is the reason many a times we give them plans but they fail to execute them the way we wanted them to do.

• The NGO also runs the neighbouring low- school that is just few paces away. Unlike the NGO sections where the class comprises of appropriate age levels as well as children gets promoted/demoted/retained basis ongoing evaluations, the sections in the low-income school comprises of children of varying age levels and learning abilities. This makes it difficult for the teacher to ensure that concept is understood well by all the students.

• The school generally have 4-5 hours of instructional time everyday and several subjects have to be taught everyday. This means that there is a constant race against time. This would mean that all the lessons in their textbooks have been read at least once. And often that it seems impossible. So the thought about perhaps customising the teaching to different minds/intelligences is mentally eliminated because it is more time consuming.

• Another challenge would have to be lack of resources or perhaps not using resources to facilitate learning. Sometimes the resources are around us but hardly the teachers are making use of those resources.

• My idea of textbooks are that they need to have quality reinforcement content. Step by step the concept should be explained and cleared both through illustrations/pictures/diagrams and connected well with the procedural part. Content omissions/jumps and incomplete/misleading content can be detrimental to growing understanding level of children. Content in the textbooks are still verbose, inadequate and poorly written.

So while i continue to working, i keep thinking about these issues and keep unearthing newer issues , i am hoping to find solutions going forward.In midst of all these issues, i am thinking about our central protagonist, “the children” and the torch bearer, “Our Teacher”. 

Khushboo