The Hindu : Kerala / Thiruvananthapuram News : U.K. teachers get a feel of State’s classrooms

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Oct 27, 2007
ePaper

Kerala

Kerala - Thiruvananthapuram

U.K. teachers get a feel of State’s classrooms

Staff Reporter

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Eleven teachers from seven schools in the city of Bristol, England, are in the city to study, among other things, teaching and evaluation methods and corrective measures to address behavioural problems in schools in the State.

The teachers — who deal with children of different age groups — on Friday visited Lecole Chempaka, at Edavakkode. The visiting teachers watched as the school’s students begin their day with a meditation session. They later sat in various classes and held informal interactions with the students.

The vice-principal of the senior school at Lecole, Meena Nair, said on Friday that the teachers from Britain were impressed with the value education component in the school’s curriculum. “Our practise of giving out-of-class assignments — to be done on a ‘scrapbook’ — impressed them.

“They also wanted to know whether we give detentions to students who do not hand in their assignments on time. We told them that we did remedial work on our children instead of giving detentions,” she elaborated.

On Wednesday, the group visited the Christ Nagar Higher Secondary School at Kowdiar. School vice-principal Thomas Mani told The Hindu that the teachers spend the day observing various classes in progress and by interacting with students, teachers and parents. “Two of them went to the kindergarten classes, one teacher went to the UP section and the rest went to classes two, three and four. We welcomed them to the school at the morning assembly,” Mr. Mani said.

On Thursday the group visited the St. Thomas Schools. The visit is being organised by the firm Quality Management and Employment Consultants (QMEC). QMEC is doing the job for ‘Best Practise Network of UK’ under the programme ‘Teachers’ International Professional Development’.

This programme comes under the UK Department for Education and Skills. Jeyakumar Thomas of the QMEC said here that the teachers aimed to develop and sustain best practices in education.

“This kind of study tours open up opportunity to our schools to develop an interaction with the visiting teachers and to learn from them while they try to understand and comprehend the good practices we follow.

Some of the areas they are interested in are learning in primary schools, transition from primary to secondary education, teaching and learning strategies, classroom management, thinking skills, creativity, behavioural management, social inclusion and behaviour support,” he told The Hindu in a e-mail on Wednesday.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Kerala

News Update

Stories in this Section