Training Teacher’s to be Child Friendly

Lately my job has been going to different schools in the area and teaching about child-friendly schools. This is basically showing teachers other ways to teach besides lecturing the students for 8 hours a day. My co-worker and I taught teachers how to use teaching aids and about the active learning method. We talked about using role play activities, puzzles, and the game of BINGO. That was training number 1. A month later we went around to all the schools again evaluating and checking if they had tried to use any of the teaching aids. We then discussed how the process went and how to make things better. Most of the teachers had tried to use these aids and the ones that tried had little to complain about. Sadly in one of the schools not a single teacher tried any of the methods. This was very discouraging for both me and my co-worker. It meant that the hours we had spent before training them were pointless. They said they could not use teaching aids due to lack of time, too many students and a lack of materials. We attempted to resolve these problems and taught four more teaching aids; board games, word blocks, letter blocks and the around the world flash card math game. The teachers seemed to like all these ideas and promised to try at least one in the next month. It was really fun teaching these games. The teachers had never heard of or played a board game before in their entire lives. So I made a simple board game to show them how it works then had them all come up with their own games. This also involved teaching how to make a dice out of paper. The word blocks games is a packet of cut up English words, a team of 4-6 people receive these letters and must make as many sentences as possible with the words provided. The team to come up with the most correct English sentences wins. The letter block game is similar. Each team is given a packet of letters and must spell the word said the fastest. All in all I have really enjoyed my work the last few months teaching Child Friendly Schools in Rwanda.