Al Baharwa, Egypt
By Didi Anandarama
The Nile River School Children’s Centre hosted a week-long teachers training for the local school teachers in Al Baharwa village in Egypt. The training involved a combination of theory, practical activities and discussion. The attendees were twelve teachers and assistants.
The programme included daily creative movement and examples of English lessons. The workshop and presentation sessions by Suzi Balaban were on “The Learner, Growth Mindset and Motivation” and on “Your Challenges, Needs and Wishes (using Aladdin’s lamp)”. This gave the teachers a chance to write up their ideas and empowered them to improve the learning outcomes of their children. Another session was on: “Assessment, Formative and Summative”.
Corina shared her experiences on fun teaching activities with young children. Marwa gave workshops on Creative storytelling and creative writing. Joireya, a Montessori expert shared very valuable child psychology methods with children. Didi Anandarama explained the classroom management at Nile River School and emphasized correct English writing skills. Finally on the last day Engy did an interactive closing evaluation workshop of this teachers’ education week. It was our first Teachers’ Training in Baharwa and all were surprised at the rich, varied and valuable presentations. Thanks to all the presenters and also to Hadeer who persuaded them to come all the way from Cairo to share their knowledge and experience.
Suzi’s observation:
“The activities engaged in during the training included pair work, group work, whole group discussion, physical movement, videos and powerpoints, role play, making and using play dough, finger puppets, question and answer ball throw.
The teachers engaged in animated discussions about their own experiences at school as well as their teaching experiences. Opinions were expressed on the problems of the education system, including bad management, corruption, cheating, violence in the classroom (verbal, emotional and physical), negative learning outcomes in government and private schools and even in the parallel system of private lessons.
They are proud to be teaching in the community school in Baharwa and see a real opportunity for change. Their wishes were the freedom to use teaching materials suitable for the children’s environment (as opposed to the one-fits-all national textbook), more family participation, school trips and visits to familiarize the children with outside society, and teaching crafts.”