Teacher Training
TRAINING GOALS
By the end of the 5-day trainings, all attending teachers will have practiced and will be familiar with all the strategies in the Hoopoe Teacher’s Guides. They will understand the rationale behind each strategy and will be able to confidently use Hoopoe books and Teacher’s Guides in their classroom. Thus, KOR-Hoopoe will be able to fulfill our program goals to:
- Improve student literacy skills
- Encourage the development of higher-level thinking skills
- Ensure that as many children as possible participating in this program take at least one book home to keep and share with their family and friends
- “Repatriate” traditional Afghan literature that will restore a positive cultural memory
- Provide stories that promote tolerance and understanding between cultures and cultivate qualities that inspire wisdom
- Introduce modern teaching methods designed to teach literacy, thinking skills and problem-solving
- Improve teachers’ instructional skills in the areas of early literacy and literacy training
- Increase teachers’ experience with well-researched strategies that can be applied to all genres of literature, such as fiction, informational text, and poetry
- Improve family and community knowledge and involvement in the development of their children’s literacy
Class size is limited to no more than 20 teacher-students at any one time, but we run multiple workshops if required.
SOME COMMENTS FROM TEACHERS ABOUT THE TRAININGS:
“This was the first teacher training workshop in Herat. Actually before this workshop I did not know how to implement these methods to my teaching style. For example reading a story introducing colors, shapes, new vocabulary and repeating story is very useful. I did not know how to start and finish the story which could improve children’s critical thinking. The teacher’s guide is very useful as well. I learned the ability to read the story in a way which is heart touching to children’s and gets children’s attention and interest towards yourself and the story.” —Masooma Hassan, Teacher, Payan-e-Danesh High School, Herat
“… even though I have years and years of teaching experience and I have joined many seminars and workshops but still I learned new techniques of teaching in this workshop.” —Shakila Qasimi, Herat
“Every day we learned some thing new. By this way we also can support our culture, and will leave something for our future nations.” —Zarghoona Shaheed, Majboor Abad High School head teacher, Jalalabad
“We learnt many new teaching methods that all are useful for us. I will use it in my teaching and I am sure it would be useful for raising the capacity of teaching. This workshop was different from other workshops we attended. Trainers were very friendly and patient. Thank you very much for this interesting and useful workshop I hope that other Gandahara teachers also can get benefit from this kind of workshops. I would like to say we are waiting for this kind of workshops in the future.” —Shamsia Shefa, Majboor Abad High School teacher, Jalalabad
FOR MORE COMMENTS FROM TEACHERS, CLICK BELOW:
TEACHER TRAINING - HERAT
“I am very thankful for the teachers for their hard work coming to Herat from a long distance. I learned many things from this workshop.
- Teaching students showing them pictures, asking open ended questions, prediction, including students in the story increases children’s critical thinking. For example, teaching story with showing pictures makes it easy for the children to remember the story.
- Respecting students involving them in the story reasons in further class work participation for them. It helps children to be confident and participate in class work, and it improves children’s literacy and problem solving skills.
- Overall using new teaching techniques like using colors, pictures, numbers improves children’s reading, writing and literacy skills.”
—Khanam Marjan Nabizada (teacher)
“My view regarding the training:
- The first thing that I learned from this training was that I should be friendly with the students.
- Secondly from these stories we can teach Afghan culture.
- Third I learned how to ask children and to make prediction what will happen next.
- It is very important for the teacher to learn how to assist children in the classroom who need more help.
- Fifth a teacher should not force their students; they should be kind and friendly to their students.” —Kubra Hussaini (teacher)
TEACHER TRAINING - KABUL
Teachers participate in training activities such as Vocabulary Word Cards, Reading Aloud, Discussing the Story, Sentence Construction, Lesson Planning, and Writing & Drawing Key Ideas. Creating books in which they retell and illustrate all or parts of the story in their own words, or write their own story and then illustrate it.
“We learned many interesting things in this workshop. Here are some points:
- Giving our students enough time to discuss their ideas
- Encouraging children in positive way instead of negative
- Using the new method of teaching and changing lesson plan if needed.
- Encouraging children to make predictions.
- Talking about the author and illustrator to children.
- Holding book facing children so all students will be able to see the book.
- Making books with students.
- Acting out the story and making the character’s voices
- Increasing student ability to think.
I thank all the training staff for the wonderful workshop.” —Ghalam Hassun Dardmand (teacher)
TEACHER TRAINING – BALKH AND FARYAB
The Education department of Balkh province gave our KOR-Hoopoe Teacher Trainers an official letter of appreciation, signed by Director of Education of Balkh, Director of Education of Dawlatabad District, Faryab Province, and the Afghan American Friendship Foundation (AAFF).
TEACHER TRAININGS – JALALABAD
Mr. Ismailzai, Director of Education explains Hoopoe Books to the trainees (left). Books are handed out to students (top right). The workshop begins (bottom right).
“I am so happy about the trainers of the training, because they taught the stories of our country that was so interesting for our children and we want such training in the future too. And if we repeat the tales for children it would be interesting for them and they know that they should think about what they want to do before they do it and get advice from the elder person.
“In this training I liked the painting very much and also the Evaluation methods: with the chart in the guides, we learned how to evaluate the children in an easy way.” —Narges (teacher)
“Before of this training we didn’t focus on words but now we will emphasize on it by using flash cards. Evaluation method, that we didn’t know about it before. Story telling in a story style, with different voices was new for us.” —Maliha (teacher of Nazoana School)
Teachers model the “Writing & Drawing Key Ideas in the Stories” activity.
“This workshop was very interesting and informative especially the stories for children from our country; and the behavior of trainers and the interesting way to teach children to think.” —Sayed Naser (Maleka Suraya High School teacher)
“The workshop was very interesting because we learned many things and new methods like the behavior while teaching the children so that all pupils take part in learning process; story telling in a proper voice tone for different characters, painting.” —Madina Shinwari (Gandahara primary school teacher)
“The methodology you taught us was wonderful!
Painting was very interesting because by using the different colors the teaching process will become more interesting for children.
The evaluation chart, this is the first time I have seen chart like that for evaluation of the pupils.” —Frozan (teacher)
“Before this training we didn’t emphasize on words as much as it was necessary, now trainers taught us by using flash cards method how to easily help the students to read these words.
“The evaluation method that we don’t know about this kind of evaluation before and now we can use it for evaluation of our students.” —Najia (Gandahara School teacher)
“In this training we learned many things we didn’t know before. One was the table of evaluation of the students that we can measure the children’s level of learning.” —Nadera Khairkhwa (Gandahara School teacher)