Like most other weeks, this week started on Monday. As a general rule, I’ve never been a huge fan of Mondays or mornings and this particular Monday morning was no exception. My translator was not at work until 9am so I spent the first hour and a half trying to understand what my Deputy Director was saying (in Khmer) about a meeting with school directors planned for the afternoon and what I wanted to say in this meeting. Not being 100% sure of what was being said, and becoming more and more frustrated, I waited until Soroth arrived and sure enough I had unfortunately pretty much understood the gist quite accurately. So I had a few hours to prepare something to present to about 40 male School Directors that afternoon...!
I’m not sure whether it’s safe to admit, but personally I think that I work best under some pressure. After a small rant and rave (to myself of course!) about the lack of forward planning, being given no preparation time, being given no meeting agenda etc etc, I began to have an idea. I mean, what would any primary school teacher do with a class of children in the same situation? Well, depending on my mood at the time, I’d either play a game (educational of course!) or give a dictation (to keep them quiet and kill some time!). I quickly decided that the latter idea would be a lot less fun and a lot more problematic given the language barrier, so opted for an educational game. Luckily for me I had got hold of some planning beforehand and noticed that student-centred methodology was on the list of things to implement in 2008 (just like that!), so at least the focus of the game could be in some way related to the district priorities... blah blah blah!
And oh what fun we had! We played a team game whereby a sentence was read out in Khmer and each team had to decide whether it was student-centred or teacher-centred. (For example, ‘students copy the lesson from the board or a textbook’, ‘ students make up their own stories’, ‘the teacher stand/sits at the front of the class’, ‘the teacher circulates the classroom, helping students’). They wrote their answer with a reason onto a post-it note and stuck it on what they thought was the correct side of the board. There were prizes, of course, and the most chaotic part of the game was sorting all these men into equal sized teams! It was just like playing a team game with a bunch of Year 5s at home! I don’t mean to patronize my Khmer colleagues, but the similarities were uncanny! They copied each other, tried to stop their opponents being faster to the board by holding onto each others trousers and talked over each other incessantly! I even started giving bonus points to the teams who got their answers to the board the quickest and the team who listened the best to the other teams as well as giving minus points to any team who hadn’t switched off their mobile phones!
It was fantastic fun and gave me quite an insight into their understanding of student centred teaching methodology. I was pleasantly surprised by how accurate their answers were and how well thought out their reasons were. They were fiercely competitive but also really good at working together and discussing their ideas. I think that part of the problem is that they are not given these kinds of opportunities very often. More often than not, meetings that I have experienced have been much like the lessons I have observed: one person speaks from the front of the room and everyone else writes down every word spoken. There is little opportunity for discussion, sharing ideas, disagreeing with one another without losing face. You are told, and so you do! You never question why? Or how could this be better?
So, I’m hoping they all had fun, experienced a participatory approach to meetings, were introduced to inclusive loop training as well as clarifying the differences between student centred and teacher centred learning, know which one benefits the children most and why and have an active training tool and game which they can all take back to play again with their own school staff in order to cascade knowledge and understanding. Yeah... and who am I kidding! One step at a time!
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