BiLin Teach: Empowering Educators in Bilingual Pedagogy
Teacher Training Workshop for Bilingual Educators
Venue: NIELAC, Guwahati
Date: 04 May 2024 – 06 May 2024
Audience: Primary School Teachers
Resource Persons: Mrs Nabanita Deshmukh and Mr Bappu Deshmukh
DAY 1: COMMUNICATION THROUGH STORIES
Ojectives:
- To assist teachers in using stories to develop literacy skills, with a focus on spoken communication.
- To guide teachers in telling, retelling, and writing simple stories for children.
- To motivate teachers to incorporate songs, games, and activities in teaching rural children.
- To encourage teachers to translate stories, rhymes, and songs into their mother tongue for use with students in rural schools.
Day 1 Summary :
The workshop began with a song and proceeded to a story-weaving activity using word cards. This led to a discussion on story definitions and structures. Participants traced the structure of popular stories to understand the importance of selecting tales that would be comprehensible and engaging for children.
The training also focused on audio-visual stories, where the resource persons assessed the participants’ kinaesthetic, verbal, and comprehension skills. Games and activities, such as the rainbow game and the story-weaving activity, were introduced. The benefits of games and the differences between games and activities were also discussed.
A chart paper activity to encourage story writing was conducted, in which participants arranged a set of silent comic strips in order and wrote stories based on the pictures. As a follow-up task, participants were asked to translate their stories into their respective mother tongues – Garo, Khasi, and Pumai.
DAY 2: LEARNING BY DISCOVERY: DEVELOPING A SCIENTIFIC TEMPER
Ojectives:
- To demonstrate how simple calculations can be performed quickly and easily
- To demonstrate how experiments could be conducted using common everyday objects.
- To develop teacher proficiency
- To encourage teachers to develop a scientific temper and thereby inculcate into children the importance of learning on their own.
Day 2 Summary :
The session began by introducing a system known as speed mathematics. In this system, one can perform multiplications very easily simply by adding numbers. To multiply numbers ending in 5, we used 25 x 25 as the first example. We write down 25 as the last two digits of the answer. Then, we take the number 2 and multiply it by the number plus 1, in this case, 2 x (2 + 1) = 2 x 3 = 6. Thus, the answer is
25 x 25 = 625
The participants were led through a series of examples (15×15, 35×35, 85×85, etc.) for practice. In the same vein, speed math techniques were introduced for multiplying numbers by 11 and 12. For multiplying a number by 11, add the number to its neighbor on the right. For multiplying a number by 12, double the number and add it to its neighbor on the right. Several examples were worked out for each of these numbers (5, 11, and 12) with the active involvement of the participants.
This session was followed by “Learning by Discovery,” a science program aimed at fostering a scientific temper in teachers and children. To develop a scientific temper, it is important for children to develop certain basic abilities. This is only possible if teachers themselves are aware of what these abilities are and how they can be encouraged in children. The ability to observe is central to developing a scientific temper. Activities focusing on observation and drawing inferences were demonstrated.
DAY 3: INSTRUCTIONAL SKILLS
Day 3 Summary :
The final day’s workshop focused on instructional skills and bad teaching habits. The warm-up activity involved participants guiding a blindfolded colleague through several obstacles to reach an object. The instructions were faulty, and it took a while for the ‘blind’ participant to reach her goal. The resource persons highlighted important points for giving precise instructions to address different kinds of learners in the class, such as using gestures and writing instructions on the blackboard. Participants were advised to use simple sentences and to have a student repeat the instructions.
Bad teaching habits, such as talking to the board and excessive teacher talking time (TTT), were also discussed, along with strategies to overcome these issues. Games like hopscotch and the word chain game were played in a novel manner to develop and expand vocabulary and to identify words.
