Young teachers being inspired to be professional teachers

“INSPIRE Internship Programme” was targeted for students from Education faculty with Major English and initiated at the premises of the public trust school, Prajwal Shiksha Sadan Lower Secondary English School, Hetauda-6, Chaughada.

Our intern programme aims to ease the interns’ transition from a student to a qualified professional. It enables interns to create a child-friendly classroom addressing the real needs of students and their diverse learning styles. A skilled teacher can make a significant contribution towards the quality education for the holistic development of the students.

The 1st phase of the 3-month-long programme has covered all four language skills, provided opportunities for the interns to practise mini-teaching, arranged and supervised teaching observation, introduced the use and importance of classroom language and the scheme of lesson planning in order to equip interns with all practical teaching tools to be able to start their supervised teaching practice in the 2nd phase.

The intern programme included both “experiential” and “awareness-raising” practices. Experiential referred to first-hand experience on classroom teaching and awareness-raising practices included providing tasks and procedures to the interns. Experiential practices incorporated mini-teaching, classroom observation. To encourage more awareness-raising practices, the class was conducted on a workshop mode. It helped interns to experience the learning activities themselves before implementing it to the class. They were engaged in hands-on learning activities and a variety of teaching and learning strategies which they could simply take back to their classroom teaching. After each activity interns were encouraged to modify and think of other variations of it to maximize their creative potential and have their ownership. The class incorporated group works, presentation, research and interactive discussions in addition to the individual work and self reflection.

We believe teaching is not just imparting knowledge. It’s more about knowing a child as an individual, catering individual needs and addressing the need of that particular age group. Thus, the course incorporated topics related to child friendly practices, child development and its characteristics, positive discipline, classroom management along with teaching different English language skills and aspects on primary level. In addition, the use of classroom English was also emphasized to enhance interns’ own language proficiency.

The Intern Programme conducted a group meeting for veteran teachers and interns to clarify the rationale behind observation, share and listen to each others’ expectations, roles and responsibilities before the observation itself. This meeting played a crucial role in shifting the traditional view of observing classes into a more participatory approach, and making both parties comfortable and safe with it. Interns were assigned in different classes to observe the English language class.
In pre-observation, veteran teachers shared their lesson plan, briefed about their class activities to the interns. In observation, interns observed and recorded their observation in their observation sheet. In post observation, interns shared their observation with the teachers and interacted more about what they saw and its purposes.

Self-reflective practices like filming and writing dialog journal everyday were the regular features of the programme. Filming was a crucial aspect in our programme to help interns reflect on their classes and encourage them to develop reflective practices in their teaching and learning process. Interns’ classroom presentation and mini-teaching were regularly filmed and shared. This provided them with an opportunity to be self critical and discuss pedagogical knowledge and skills.
Moreover, interns wrote journal based on their observation class and instruction class in which they mainly shared what they had learnt, what difficulties they had faced and their concerns regarding any teaching or learning topics. This journal was their everyday assignment and facilitators gave feedback in daily comments.
Interns prepared and edited their portfolio based on homework assignments and handouts as a bunch of useful teaching materials for future use. It contains tasks and activities related to the four basic language skills with brief description and variation of each classroom activity, their objectives and the teaching materials.

Interns found warm-ups and projects most entertaining and useful. Not only did these activities enable them to acquire the necessary skills to conduct a variety of learning games, but these activities also strengthened their self-confidence and shaped their personality through contextualized role-playing.

The feedback given by Interns proved the programme to be successfully running and the interns are all grateful to be part of it. The programme has been able to make a significant change in both their personal and professional life.

Andrea Kun and Pratistha Shrestha, facilitators of the INSPIRE Teachers Programme.