Observations

Having all but concluded my observations in the classrooms I’m now looking forward to putting our training together for next week. Over the last three days I have seen some encouraging evidence of results from last year’s training in August. I've seen teachers developing the practical activities that we started last year and a real willingness to try out new approaches to managing lessons. From the feedback sessions I've had with our teaching team I’m confident that there is a commitment to pushing on with our agenda for change.

One of the real challenges of developing training programmes is to practice what you preach. If lessons should be interactive, lively and challenging training sessions should be the same. I have, fortunately, been able to build up a large bank of resources to support learning from a very wide range of sources on the Internet. Some of them need a bit of tweaking to make them suitable for using in Kenya but the principles behind the games and activities are fairly universal. My hoarding instinct is ideally suited to Google searching for these kinds of materials.

As I've been trying to find resources that match our current priorities this year (literacy and numeracy) I have been struck, again, by the constraints that most teachers in our area work under. Text books are available (though they don’t always find their way into the classrooms) and many teachers are very skilled at producing their own wall charts and teachings aids. The absence of television and high cost of good quality magazines and other media seriously hamper teachers who wish to expand their pupils’ horizons and knowledge of the world beyond Kosele. There are those who would argue that this isn't necessarily a bad thing but in a global society ignorance is, I think, a dangerous thing.

I have often read about the ‘poverty mentality’. A lowering of aspirations and expectations in the face of sustained economic hardship. It occurs to me tonight that one of the challenges of raising educational standards in rural schools like ours isn't so much the unwillingness of teachers to make more effort. It’s a much more deep rooted problem that draws on their own experiences and lack of access to the curriculum enriching resources that we take so much for granted in our classrooms in the UK. It’s a cultural gap that is difficult to cross.

I’m planning to introduce our teachers to the popular UK TV game show Countdown during our training next week. It amazes me that such a simple format has been popular for over twenty years. The two contestants in each episode compete in three disciplines:  letters rounds, in which the contestants attempt to make the longest word possible from nine randomly chosen letters; numbers rounds, in which the contestants must use arithmetic to reach a random target number from six other numbers; and the conundrum, a buzzer round in which the contestants compete to solve a nine-letter anagram. Perhaps that’s the secret to crossing the cultural divide – start off by keeping it simple.