Production, part deux

So, the day of the additional one-day workshop came upon me quicker than I expected and it was suddenly time to present the directors and key staff of the 10 other core schools with a workshop which would fill them with excitement, understanding, motivation and the skills needed to turn a pile of stationary materials into wonderful teaching and learning resources.

Daney and Vuthang pretty much ran the show and we spent most of the morning engaged in activities which were hoped to better the participants’ understanding about how children learn and why teaching and learning resources can help the learning process. The afternoon was spent reading the Learning Outcomes of the 4 subjects studied at primary level: Khmer language, mathematics, science and social science. This, again, was the risky bit. There was a lot to read and some of my colleagues wanted to get on with the making part straight away. In fact, I had quite a disagreement with one of my colleagues over this but I really stuck firmly to my guns , trying to explain that participants needed to think about what their children had to learn before they decided how to help them learn it.

It really helped that we held the training at Chey Oudom primary school as they really provided an excellent model . The school is very much in the early stages of development but already has much more child-friendly leaning environments to boast. The participants were quite impressed with the amount on display in the wooden classrooms and also with the amount of learning games and teaching resources the teachers had made. It was great to see the Chey Oudom teachers explaining it all to them (instead of me or Vuthang or Daney). I really showed me that they have a greater sense of pride in their work as well as understanding. Whether the resources and games are all being used in the lessons is another story but this is on my to-do-list to support in the coming months. What is important is that the classrooms are more meaningful centres of learning, the teachers are enjoying creating resources and developing their classrooms and the students are enjoying the results!

I definitely found the participants harder work this time, perhaps because they were from a mixture of schools and didn’t know each other so well, so it helped a lot that Pam and Sokphal were there to offer some moral support and take photographs. And they too were really impressed with how Daney and Vuthang worked together like a little team.