Ullens Schools Outreach Program
As part of its outreach program, Ullens School has started working with community schools of its neighborhood towards their reform through teacher training and other support. The first batch of training on Professional Growth and Development is being conducted to teachers teaching different subjects in grades ECD to 8. The training started on August 7 and it will run until the end of December. There are 25 participating Principals and teachers from Namuna Machhindra Aawasiya School-Lagankhel ; Shree Moti Vinayak Lower Secondary School Dholahity; Shree Padma Prakash School Dhapakhel and Shee Krishna Higher Secondary School Dhapakhel. There were many schools interested in the program but the schools were selected on the basis of their commitment and interest to change and on their proximity to Ullens School. We intend to gradually reach out to other community schools as well.
The program consists of two 2-hour classroom based trainings plus two hours of supervised field work sessions per week. The SFW will consist of group conferences and individual conferences. During group conferences, participating teachers share about their learning and their experiences while applying them in their classrooms among themselves; and the fellow teachers and supervisor will come up with a suggestion or solution. Individual conferences consist of one- to- one session between a teacher and a supervisor focused on a specific problem encountered in classroom. There will also be class room observation and in- school support to the participating teachers by the Ullens teacher trainers once a month.
The trainers and the trainee teachers meet three times a week for two hours at 4:30 at Ullens School. The participants are divided into three conference groups and four subject groups. Conference group is a mixed group of teachers, where teachers of different schools teaching different subjects in different grades are mixed deliberately. Mondays are for subject wise training, Wednesdays are for group conferences and the Fridays are set aside for Philosophy/Pedagogy sessions. The subject session are very intense with lot of activities centered on the subjects the teachers have been teaching and are also very rich in content. All the teachers bring the issues they have encountered in the classrooms to the conference, where the trainer points towards a solution or the participants openly discuss the problem and collectively search for a solution. All the participants meet on Fridays for the philosophy/pedagogy session, where there is a discussion about theories and techniques of learning, classroom management, child psychology etc.