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

My Teaching Volunteering Experiences - The Beginning

The Start Point

It was while I was working with  Content Design & Development function of a certain organisation, where i was entrusted with the task of developing Primary Math Content (Grades 1 to 5) for their digital product that I felt an innate need to understand how children learn. Prior to this, I was happy researching concepts in mathematics, developing working prototypes of those researched concepts, demonstrating the product to teaching communities to stir interest and need as well as sell the product. At this organisation, i become aware of the fact that “there are different learning styles”, “every child learns at his/her own pace”, also that “concepts taught should be developmentally appropriate”, and so it is imperative to create learning modules (activities/lesson plans/projects etc.) that caters to these diverse needs of our learners. This way learners will be able to maximise their own learning potential. While i understood these salient points and what defines a true learning cycle for an individual, i was too driven to make the product market ready. So even though, i had these pointers haunting me every now and then, i continued dishing out math activity ideas and scripting lesson plans (storyboards).

Obviously I am on a learning trajectory and will continue to do so but what really disturbs me is our own level of understanding of children. I realised that my lack of understanding of children was acting as a bottleneck in developing good quality content. I truly and genuinely want to contribute to effective learning solutions and be part of product bandwagon in long run that systematically captures the learnings of a child as well as provides scope for improvement. These thoughts were good enough to trigger me and so I decided to work with children for a while. So that’s how this NGO happened to me. At NGO's adopted low income school, I am currently teaching Mathematics and Communicative English to Grade 2 and 3 children.

Now while i am trying to plan my lessons, i am also trying to squeeze time in-between to put together my observations. So far, i have not been able to come up with right templates to note down generic and subject specifics observations. I hope to develop right templates soon so that I can share whatever i gathered so far in a concise way. 

If anybody has suggestions or references relating to good classroom observation templates, then please do share them with me. 

Khushboo