I am off to Finland next month following a successful UCET travel scholarship application! Thanks to UKLA colleagues, I made contact with three Finnish colleagues linked to the University Of Tampere Teacher Training School in Hameenlina who kindly agreed to host a visit . The focus of my study is to what extent key societal aims and values impact on teacher training models and what if anything we can learn as a result. I will be in Hameenlina for 10 days talking to a range of teacher trainers , teachers and hopefully visiting some schools as well . When I get back I will be publishing my findings and presenting at the November UCET conference! That's the plan anyway ! I will keep you posted once ofsted have visited ! Good luck with the website - it looks great .
60 children to a class is the norm in most of the developing world. The teachers have little training. The blackboard dominates. You don’t see many computers (maybe the lack of electricity is a contributing factor) and books tend to be limited to textbooks, shared between four children squashed into a double desk. It’s not surprising that teaching is mostly from the front of the class and focused on literal comprehension.
But on a project I’ve been monitoring in Burkino Faso (West of Ghana, used to be Upper Volta), in typically impoverished conditions, teachers in remote village schools are busy helping their children to write collaboratively, with the aim of producing hundreds of texts to form class libraries.
This is a radical departure from the usual approach to writing with its emphasis on instructing children about genres, spelling, conjugation and sentence structure, an approach inherited from the French colonial system. Instead the children have been brainstorming.
I’ve been hugely impressed by how the teachers have taken to this new approach. They’ve given up every Saturday morning for project meetings over a period of several months. And my recent 10 day visit was planned for their school holidays, so that teachers from all the project schools could come together. They even got all the children in the relevant class to come in for demonstration lessons. That’s one thing not many of us have had to do…
I’m hoping to go back in July to see the libraries in action.
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