Rajan- There's no pun worthy of this man

Last week we made a three day alteration to the regular LRTT course. We decided to be brave and really test out the impact that we have had on the 65 teachers that we trained on our course. This involved revisiting the teachers in their schools, observing their lessons, giving them feedback and planning with them.

 

Jack’s day was an incredible experience. It started with a two hour drive to outside Kathmandu then a 30 minute hike up to the top of a hill. Perched on top of this hill was a large school filled with excited students, not even fussed by the incredible view over the cliff at the end of their playground. Jack went there to meet Rajan, quite a reserved guy but with inspirational ideas. Jack observed Rajan teach an English lesson to 30 students using some ideas from the LRTT course about group work and peer learning. At the end of the lesson, Rajan asked for feddback from his students, “What did you think about my teaching today.” A very brave thing for a teacher to do, but their response gave Jack butterflies in his stomach. They replied, “You didn’t teach us Sir. We taught ourselves.” If this wasn’t enough, Jack found out that Rajan is running whole-school training sessions on his experience of the LRTT course and plans to observe and give feedback to each of them. What a hero:

 

These three days allowed us to observe and coach over half of the teachers from the LRTT course. These opportunities were the best experiences for us and the most powerful for improving teaching in each of the teachers. We all saw some great lessons and clear implementation of the strategies we had delivered during the course.

Dan and Kay had a brilliant experience when revisiting their school. They were asked after a leisurely lunch to spontaneously teach a class of 76 year 7s! To deal with this they used a Nepali teacher tactic of walking into the classroom and asking which page the students were on. They ended up delivering a lesson on Nepal’s monsoon season group work, peer assessment and creative writing- transferable skills, eat your heart out! They left the class with ALL 76 year 7 students asking them to mark their books.

 

 
 
 
 



After the observations, we headed back to Teach For Nepal House with high spirits. But we have to remember all our empathy we learnt at our schools in the UK. These teachers have such a challenging task ahead of them and we are all so admirable of their commitment and dedication in this context.


The charity we are partnered with, Volunteers Initiative Nepal invited back to their offices for a lovely closing ceremony, complete with Tikas, scarves and t-shirts. We took them out for dinner to a traditional Nepali restaurant. Traditional Nepali was an intriguing experience- tiny clay pots of rice wine, Nepali dancing and a peacock with a penchant for pecking people until they gave it money.