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 CASE STUDY: Improving Teacher Professional Skills Teaching by Doing in Machinga A visit to St. Therese School would make one think that the school is on holiday as the grounds appear empty. However, meeting the head teacher, Mr. Felix Khwalala, one is told that both pupils and teachers in fact are present and they are busy in their classrooms. I was interested in observing the teaching of English to Standard 1 pupils. As usual, there were shouts like 'Me Teacher! Me teacher!' trying to capture the teacher's attention. Yes, each child wanted to read and touch either an object or a flash card or act on an instruction given by the teacher. Learning was happening as children followed instructions said in English.
"At first I used to have problems because I was not used to teaching an infant class like Standard one. Honestly, I did not know what to do.Through a cluster based teacher in-service training conducted by our mentor teacher, Mrs. Esther Mawerenga, I acquired skills on how to conduct pupil-centered teaching by involving the pupils themselves in learning by doing". I then wanted to learn more from a Chichewa lesson taught by Mrs. Leah Makonde. In her lesson, she asked children to read syllables like - ka ke ki ko ku, ha he hi ho hu and others. In her hands, she had a lot of flash cards. The cards were passed on to the children who were in turn matching them with the words that were written on the chalkboard.
At the end of the lesson, I saw the teacher holding a notebook and a pencil in her hand. She then started calling out pupils' names. One after the other went to the front of the class, picked up a flash card, and read a Chichewa word voluntarily. Each time the pupil read, she wrote something in her notebook. This process went on and on until most of the pupils had a chance to read. When a pupil failed to read correctly, another pupil was called in to assist. At the back of the classroom, there were some color displays, well designed and each color was in a column of its own. The colors displayed were - red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. On some of the colors there was a picture of a happy face and against each face there was a pupils' name. I noted that you were writing something, what were you doing actually? I asked.
"You mean when I was asking pupils to read and when a pupil read I was marking in my notebook?" |
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I asked the English teacher, Sr. Gertrude Chitanje, to tell me the secret behind successful interactions.
During the lesson, the pupils got into groups of five. The groups were asked to identify the same syllables that were on the chalkboard from the flash cards. "Tiribe chimenecho! Tiribe chimenecho!" one group shouted meaning "We don't have that syllable!" It was indeed amazing. Children were able to read and recognize the missing syllables from the flash cards provided to their group.