Day 2 Nakuru

Posted: December 25th, 2013 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | No Comments »

Josh writes:

Hello from Day 2 of retraining in Nakuru!

Teachers were waiting in classrooms for sessions to begin at 7:00am, 30 minutes ahead of schedule. There was a positive buzz amongst everyone today.

The plan for C7 and nursery today is pretty much to roll with the powerpoints we had initially planned on, making relatively small changes to them. For C7, there’s lots of practice time slotted in–nearly 2 hours of script practice today with several different scripts, and the same tomorrow.

C7 Session 1, a review of pacing, was spot on (8/10, per me and Theresa). After a quick review of the idea of pacing, teachers broke into groups and practiced delivering a chunk of a lesson in exactly 10 minutes. Most teachers hit exactly 10–others went a little short!–but all got a solid sense of what “quick pacing” means for C7 scripts. Imagine hundreds of teachers in the corridor, rooms, and yard, grouped in “classes” of 6-10, acting as pupils while a Bridge teacher leads them in an actual C7 script with a portable chalkboard.

C7 Session 2, on circulation, also featured a quick PPT and then time for teachers to practice circulating with “classes”–this time of 12-16 “pupils.” Saw great stuff. Yesterday, teachers practicing the moves sort of feigned providing actual prompts. Today, the “pupils” are working on real English problems, and the “teachers” are giving meaningful feedback and prompts to pupils, that really last 30 seconds–rather than just a 10 second “keep working on problem 4.”

Nursery training looks great too. Lots of practicing in small groups with actual scripts. Best part of my day was seeing Geordie actively participating in several Nursery mini classes, complete with clapping along and counting to 20, which is something we need to get our nursery students to be able to do.

The coolest part of these sessions is, I think, that teachers are getting into our structures deeply enough that they’re organically bringing up issues that all teachers in the world have with moves like PPL (Praise Prompt Leave) and pacing. I’ve heard totally organic conversations in sessions–that is, totally unprompted by me–about how timers would be really helpful for teachers so that they can capture exactly 30 seconds, and about how when doing PPL, you have to position your body so that you see everyone in the room.

Again, I want to be cautious here, given what’s at stake here. But bottom line, I’m watching all of our C7 teachers execute actual C7 scripts, and am seeing very much what we hope to see across all academies in January: pupils “owning” more of the learning, thinking more during a typical class in Kenya. Still some way to go with getting teachers doing some of our teacher moves in more advanced ways. And still some way to go with getting our message right on marking, the C7 schedule, and other logistics. I’ll try to address those tomorrow.