out of the box

The last two weeks were hard work. When I came back from my meetings in Ilorin I had to finalise the preparations for my 3 day workshop. I had to organize the 3 day workshop for my National Volunteers and desk officers from the four states I work in. I is always nice to have this annual meeting with my volunteers. They are young and enthousiastic about their teaching; Eager to learn and bright. So preparing this workshop was a lot of work but with the idea in the back of my mind that it would be appreciated enough no matter what. In the preparation I have had help from Vonny and Lucy, the two other vso teacher trainers in Nigeria at the moment. Lucy gave me some ideas about the content, which she already had used before and Vonny came up with loads of games I could use to activate the participants. With all this in my mind I started preparing 4 weeks ago, first planning and budgeting, then working on content. It is a lot of work, especially when there are not too many people you can share your ideas with, as Lucy and Vonny had their own temporary assignments. 

In the end everything worked out, I named my workshop ‘out of the box’ as the aim of the three days was to get the participants to look at teaching as a creative process. So I tried to get them busy with things that were new or unusual for them. The first day started with an artist, Stanley, he had an session on creative writing and using paint to make teaching materials. He did get the youngsters enthousiastic about their work. It was really nice to see everybody concentrating on their circles and letters and drawing. This activity was unusual as even in schools children are not stimulated to be creative, most schools do offer art classes but are more about theory. There are hardly any activities during those lessons which foster creativeness. The artist came back the second day to allow the participants to finish their work. The results were surprising, there was quite a different in performance, but everybody was proud and that was nice to see.

 







In between the sessions delivered by Stanley, Vonny and I organized 5 sessions about teaching and the use of teaching aids and games during the lessons. The first session was about early childhood learning. Questions like what did you learn before you went to school? How did you learn it? From whom? And Why? It was a nice exercise to go back to the childhood, to the basics of learning. With that we started letting them do simple games like ‘Finding your Friend’. In the end of the first day all participants did have a well prepared game and group work ready for their own lessons. As home work they had to prepare a full lesson plan with a group work activity and proper lesson objectives.

The second day we started with a recap activity ‘inner outer circle’ to recollect some information from the sessions of yesterday. Inner outer circle is about asking questions and giving answers. It was a nice energizer for the morning. After that we had a session about child centered lesson objectives, how to write SMART objectives before every lesson and the importance of lesson prep if you want to do group work and other activities. The younsters had to check if their own lesson objectives were SMART enough. After that I invited one national volunteer to deliver his lesson for the group, to see if he had understood the homework and if the others could see the good and bad things in his preparation. It turned out to be a good lesson of which we can be proud of, especially if this is the result after one day of the workshop. After lunch Vonny had a session about self-esteem. The major question in this session was ‘how can a teacher influence the self-esteem of a pupil?’ For the answer to this question she let all participants think back to their own personal stories. When were you in a situation that the teacher misused the power he/she had over you? To our surprise some people came forward to tell their personal story, of which Fatima’s is still tuch in my head as her story sounded much like my own encounter with mr Van de Veen when I left primary education.

The third day I did not have to do much, I had invited two facilitators from Bauchi, they work for Father Leo’s NGO, Sharing Education and Learning for Life. This whole day was about personal leadership in the classroom. A nice day of reflection and self-development. 

All and all I think the workshop went well till that point that we had done the evaluation and were giving out the money for travel allowance. Because as always the allowance was to small and there was a need to discuss this en plain public with my guests in the room. Like I didn’t know the allowances are too small, like I don’t know that Nigerians always seem to think you have to get paid to come to a workshop instead of paying to be allowed to enter (like in our own culture). A workshop like I had organized for those three days, they should at least pay 350 euro a person as we provided them with accommodation, food and drinks (water and tea) for four nights in a hotel.

But now after a few days my disappointment is gone and I look back on a good workshop. I want to thank Vonny and Lucy for helping me prepare and Stanley, Jonathan and Moses for their sessions and all participants for their active participation.