Some twenty-nine teachers in about fourteen schools in the Greater Accra Region can heave sigh of relief as they have been taken through a training programme to ease their work.
The training programme, Connecting Classrooms, is a British Council's flagship global education programme which is co-funded by the Department for International Development was facilitated by an ace Life and Personal Development Coach, Ekow Mensah.
The workshop took place at the plush Alisa Hotels in Accra on Thursday, December 3, 2015 between the hours of 0900 and 1700 GMT.
According to a letter dated November 25, 2015 and signed by the British Council's Northern Regions Manager, Maxwell Osei, and distributed to the participating schools, the one-day workshop was aimed at helping "young people to develop knowledge, skills and values to live and work in a globalised economy and make positive contribution locally and globally".
The teacher-participants who were drawn from different public and private schools were taken through different activity-based discussions on how to teach their children the core skills.
The six core skills which are worthy of incorporation in the education of every child include Critical thinking and problem solving, Collaboration and Communication, Creativity and imagination, Citizenship, Digital literacy, and Student Leadership and personal development.
The ever-eloquent Mr Mensah advised the participants against using any of the bad questioning approaches. He however emphasised the need to use improved questioning strategies based on Bloom's Taxonomy to guide their students into deep learning.
The teacher-participants were made to collaborate on different levels to achieve activity outcomes. These collaborations range from a whole-group brainstorm to small group role plays. After experiencing all the different collaborative activities, the participants were asked to think about which of them were they most comfortable with and which were they least comfortable with. The outcomes varied.
The whole workshop was in three sessions with a coffee break and lunch. The least said about the buffet for lunch the better. I'm only praying that another Teacher workshop be organised at the same place as soon as possible. Haha!
Joseph Appah (PC&SMC)
-still, a teacher...
