171. International Conference on Quality Education – Reflection

Posted on August 30, 2019 by Umes Shrestha

icqe

The inaugural session, even though very traditional, had one major highlight for me. The speeches in Nepali. Yes, it was an international conference with participants from several other countries and I saw them putting on headphones for live-translation. Very impressive stuff RBF.

I am not a huge fan of speeches by big people because my heart is among the teachers and in the classroom. Therefore, I had chosen to attend workshop sessions rather than other presentations and keynote speeches.

On the first day, I attended two workshop sessions: Collaboration to Promote Learning, and Storytelling.

Right place, right time:
The first session ended up becoming quite a memorable one. Vani Rana, the facilitator was good. Really good. When I entered the room, I could see that she had pasted three white chart papers on the board, arranged the tables for four participants each, and placed necessary writing materials on the tables. Anticipating a few more participants to walk in, she said, “Let’s wait for a few minutes.” She then asked us to write our names on a paper and draw an image that symbolizes us. Else, we would have taken out our cell phones and played Lolo.

icqe2

As she began the session, she asked the participants to express their commitment for the session so that everyone a productive time. This was also, I think, well thought of. I have seen many teachers and trainers jump right into the content without making sure that everyone is in the same page. As a result, the participants don’t know what is expected of them, and how they are supposed to behave.

Another interesting thing – she asked us to fill up a form titled “Discussion Partners”. We were to find three participants we didn’t know previously, and fill up their names on the form. They would be our partners for the discussions coming up. This ensured that I had three different partners for three different activities. Loved this idea. I can quickly implement this idea in my class, even when students are unwilling to choose partners beyond their usual circles.

The way she debriefed in between the activities also helped us understand the purpose behind the activities and the theories of collaboration. I went out from her session with several takeaways and facilitation ideas I could implement right away.

Wrong place, wrong time:
The second session was on Storytelling and I thought I was in the wrong place through out the session. For some reason, I could not stay focused on the activities. I suppose I made an error in choosing the session as the stuffs turned out to be too elementary for me and I lost my interest right away. The other participants, mostly school teachers from different parts of the country seemed quite engaged and enjoying it though. So, I don’t want to take away any credit from the two facilitators.
In the moment, my mind was full of questions. What if the participants of our own workshop sessions felt the same? What if they felt bored and out of place? What would I do? What would I feel? Is it possible to engage everyone all the time?

Embracing Ambiguity:
And, it was my turn. My session on “Helping Students Embrace Questions rather than Answers” was scheduled for 10.00 AM to 11.30 on Day 2 of the conference. I had designed the session based on the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) initiated by the Right Question Institute.

icqe6

I had done a session on this theme once in different teacher training program and it hadn’t gone that well. Primarily because I was not able to communicate enough the purpose of QFT. So, this time I was a bit cautious about how I might go about it.
Another challenge: I didn’t have any details of the participants – number, background, and expectations. However, assessing the workshops I had attended on Day 1, I could imagine they would generally be teachers from pubic schools and from outside the valley. Essentially, I was going to shoot arrows in the dark.

So, reached the room 30 minutes early. Checked the name list of the participants. Apparently 26 had signed in. Went in and started arranging the desks. A few volunteers came for help (Thank you). Udgum (Educational Designer, EA) also lent his hands to set up the projector and the sound. All set and checked, we went outside to meet others.

9.55 AM. I walk in and see the room full of people. Didn’t expect that. Had to arrange tables for 8 more people. 90 minutes later, as I was packing my stuffs in, I felt the arrows somehow landed on the target.

(Oh by the way, we also had a poster presentation on teachLAB, during the conference. Udgum was supposed to stand by it for 8 hours each day, and explain the poster to the participants rushing by. I’m sure no one saw him do that though.)

Creativity in Consistency:
After I took off my facilitator’s hat, I went in to attend two more workshop sessions. One was on Metacognition and Comprehension Strategies by Richa Singh, Rato Bangala School. For the past 2 years, I had been reading about metacognitive activities and implementing the insights from Coursera’s “Learning how to Learn” course. (And also the bible on metacognitive activities: Make it Stick – The Science of Successful Learning.) I was glad to know that teachers at RBS were implementing this concept in their teaching and learning.

The next session was titled “Encouraging Creativity through Music & Movement” and this blew my mind. When I entered the session, I saw there were already over 30 participants sitting around in a circle and the facilitator Ms. Lavina Chong was ready with a ukulele in her hands. After a short introduction (she is a Singaporean educator with 19 years under her belt), she started teaching us a song and asked us to incorporate our hand gestures and tapping. And progressively, she demonstrated several variations on how we could incorporate body and movement in a single song. While she was at it, in her typical Chinese/Singaporean accent, she tried a Nepali version of the same song and that seemed to create a bond among the participants. In the 90 minute session, everyone jumped, danced, moved around, and played with cups and ropes.

icqe3

Through out the session, I felt like I was back in the kindergarten and wished I had a teacher like that. I had several flashbacks of my school days which are just a series of blur moments, nothing memorable.

So, what made this session so awesome? I believe a) the facilitator Ms. Lavina, b) the ukulele, c) her jokes, and d) the participants – all adults who were giggling, laughing, playing, dancing like kids.

Then a question hit my mind. Was she doing anything revolutionary? Nothing like it. So what made her so good, so special? Two things, I believe. Passion and consistency. And through those two emerged her unique creative take on using music and movement to teach kids and train teachers.

And to wrap up:
From the three sessions I participated and one that I conducted, I strongly feel that teachers need to come together more often. Beyond conferences, seminars, and workshops . There is so much to share and so much to learn from each other. Not just for the methods, classroom tips, and not just for the handouts, we need to meet and tell empowering stories to each other. Care each other. Respect each other. In our society, where teachers get blamed for almost every wrongs in the education system, we need to look out for each other.
Gratitude to Rato Bangala Foundation for selecting our proposals of workshop and poster presentation.

135. The Fantastic FAB8 Conference

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Umes Shrestha

On Sept 25-27, 2015, I had a wonderful opportunity to participate and present my paper in the FAB 8 NeuroELT Conference held in Kyoto, Japan. I wrote a small reflection of that and it has been published on the EFL Magazine. Here’s the link.

And, here’s my visual-reflection as well.

A Photo Reflection of Fab 8 NeuroELT Conference from Umes Shrestha

134. Reflection: Story Writing Session at 20th NELTA Conference

Posted on November 2, 2015 by Umes Shrestha

A major late post 🙂

Let me start my busting some myths about story writing – these myths are based on my frequent interaction with English language teachers and students.

Story writing is difficult.
Stories have to be long.
Stories have to be good.
Only storywriters can write stories.
Stories always start with “Once upon a time…”
Stories are always in the past tense.

I believe story writing can be fun and easy once we understand the basic (universal) framework of all the stories. There are certain elements that are universal – elements like plot, dialog, setting, characters and so on. Similarly, there’s a very familiar framework (plot diagram) that consists of Exposition, Rising action, Climax, Falling action and Denouement. However, story writing can be taught with an even simpler framework and this was the topic of my presentation/workshop during the 20^th Nelta International Conference (Feb, 2015).

My session was scheduled on the second day of the conference. The concurrent sessions were maddening as there were almost 12 sessions running at the same time. And I was not expecting more than 10 participants in my session. But I guess luck was on my side (or may be my presentation title was catchy enough) that almost 50 people flooded into my room. I couldn’t have been more ecstatic.

So I started by sharing my views about story writing: it does not have to be a sweat job. Every one of us is wired for stories and every one of us is inherently a storyteller. We just don’t like taking that step, because many of us think that stories have to be long and epic. However, when we write stories, we should aim not to be the greatest storywriters ever (although we should aim high). We want to be familiar with the story elements and dynamics and may be if we stretch our creativity hard, we could achieve that aim eventually.

I asked the participants: what’s a story? And many raised their hands and with it, many threw their definitions. One participant even came up with the classic Exposition… Denouement definition. All were okay but I showed them Lisa Cron’s definition of a story:

A story is how what happens,
affects someone,
in pursuit of a difficult goal and
how he/she changes (Cron, 2012).

In simple, a story has a character (with a desire, wish, intention); the character comes across a challenge (problem, obstacle) that obstructs his desire; the character then makes a crucial decision and takes an action on how to overcome the challenge; and at last there’s a transformation, a change in the character or the situation.

Character – challenge – action – transformation

And, to illustrate this framework I wrote an impromptu story on the board.

Rakesh always wanted to be an actor (character/wish)
But he didn’t have any talent for acting (challenge)
Finally makes a decision to join an acting institute (action)
He become better at acting and is offered a role in a movie along with Rajesh Hamal (transformation)

This is simple and easy and has all the elements of a simple story. Then, it was the turn of participants to come up with a story based on this “four-sentence story” framework. I asked a few of them to come in front and share their four sentence stories. With these four elements established, they could stretch them into longer versions with dialogs, different settings and multiple challenges.

Then I shared how to tweak this idea in the classroom so that students easily write their own stories. One idea is to play a word-chain (antakshari) game in groups and come up with a bunch of verbs, adjective and adverbs. For instance: students in a group of four can be asked to play word chain for verbs and adjective

Verb: dance – eat – try – yawn
Adjective: beautiful – lazy – young – gorgeous

The point is, the students can ‘create’ their own list of vocabulary and use them in the story. That’s the challenge for them and as Marc Helgesen, one of the conference keynote speakers said, “Students need appropriate level of challenge” (Sousa D, 2011). Creating their own vocab list gives them a cushion as well as a challenge to work on.

Or another tweak – a group forms the first sentence, the second group writes the second sentence and so on. The final story usually turns out to be unexpectedly funny and students love that.

That was all I could share in the 30 minutes time slot given to the presenters. And I think I made my point pretty clear that story writing can be simple and fun. I really appreciate all the positive interaction and encouraging feedback I received from the participants. Thank you, if you were there.

References:

Cron, L. (2012). Wired for story: The writer’s guide to using Brain Science to hook readers from the very first sentence. CA: Ten Speed Press.

Sousa, D. A. (2011). Differentiation and the Brain. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press, p. 114.

125. IATEFL 2015 Reflection 1 – Donald Freeman

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Umes Shrestha

Donald Freeman absolutely blew my mind with his opening plenary session. It was a very eye-opening session in which Freeman weaved stories to illustrate how we justify or give reasons to what we consciously and unconsciously do in the classroom. Freeman talks about three specific myths that have somehow become ‘frozen in our thought’ and we take them for granted in our action as well. Here’s an excerpt (mixed with my own tidbits) of his session:

Myth 1: Myth of Direct Causality There’s a myth that students learn through teaching only, that learning has direct relationship with teaching. Similarly, students are evaluated based on how they perform, and teachers are evaluated based on how students perform. In other words, good students mean a good teacher, bad students mean a bad teacher. Freeman used a metaphor of pool-game where the white ball (the teacher) propels the other balls (students) into action (learning). The myth is in thinking that there’s a direct cause and effect relation between teaching and learning. But teaching has a ‘relational connection’ between teaching and learning. A teacher’s move connects to student’s move and it connects to the teacher’s move and so on, and forms a spiral of seemingly disconnected interrelations. Teaching does relate to learning (that’s the myth) but it also informs learning, shapes possibilities and creates opportunities to learn.

Myth 2: Myth of Sole Responsibility The myth that as a teacher one is solely responsible for making learning happen in classroom. That when things work and don’t work, we are responsible for it. Many a times, we as teachers do think and act as if we are the ones responsible for everything that happens in classrooms. I make the lesson plans. I make the critical decisions. I prepare the questions. I check the exam answer sheets. So in some ways, whatever happens in the class is my responsibility as a teacher. That’s the myth of sole responsibility. Freeman disproved this myth with the help of a chess-board metaphor. The moves a teacher make opens up the moves the students make and then it opens up what the teacher does and so on. In reality, responsibility is not solely own, it is distributed. Moreover, distributed responsibility means distributed opportunities, both for the teacher and the students.

Myth 3: Myth of Proficiency as the goal The third myth is that the goal of classroom teaching is student proficiency. What’s right about this myth? Yes, teaching and learning in the classroom has to improve towards proficiency. What’s frozen about this idea? The relation between what we do in the classroom and the way we think about how it travels outside. One prominent example is that the goal of English language teaching and learning is to reach the native-speaker proficiency.

Freeman asserted that both ideas of native-ness and proficiency are mistaken. Native-ness is a geopolitical concept, not a linguistic concept. Proficiency, which is very appealing, is also conceptually problematic. Freeman labels it as a “usefully wrong idea”. “Language is like water, not like ice”, it is ever changing and therefore the goal of reaching proficiency is problematic. We have to re-think proficiency as Plural and that they are always situated in particular context and therefore bounded by a particular social practice.

Here’s what I am taking away from his session:

Myths indeed have some elements of reality in them, but as teachers, we have to challenge them, probe them and question them. And in doing so, we have to question ourselves. Learning is not only about what a teacher teaches in the classroom, it is not a product of cause and effect. Teaching is not only about managing what you can/can’t control but it is also about distributing responsibilities. And lastly, proficiency is not the ultimate goal, understanding is.