Today we went to see Laura, a volunteer living and working in Masaya, which is the big city near us. The PC came to pick us up at our houses and then we went to pick up Laura. She is living in the city, in a small casita on the grounds of family. We then drove to her school, which was quite far away. She was super honest and up front. We went to watch her teach a class. We had to take notes on how she interacted with her coteacher and the students, what she did to encourage participation, classroom management, etc.
We noticed some cultural differences
· The girls sit at the front of the class and the boys in the back
· It was a lot of the teacher reading from a book
· The students took notes only when directed to do so
· There was little classroom management. Two phones rang and nothing was done and people were always talking in the back.
Laura did some great things like
· Ambiguous Picture - a dinamica to prove that everyone is creative (we also had to participate and I had to draw mine on the board)
· One of the other activities was for the students to make something out of recycled objects (soda bottles, chip wrapper, etc.). They had 10 minutes to work on it. She had students of another class show off their projects made of recycled material that they spent a lot of time on. Both were lamps.
Will you be teaching students in a classroom like this?
ReplyDeleteDuring training, it will be very similar.
DeleteOnce at site, which is in 11 weeks, it may or may not be the same. Most likely it will be but I haven´t been to schools outside of this region.