Tshepisa Primary School recently hosted two English teachers on a British Council’s schools link programme.
The two teachers from the United Kingdom (UK) came in February to facilitate core skills workshops.
Oakwood Avenue Community Primary School teachers Rachel Howard and Joanna Frank said the programme is run both in South Africa and the UK, so that teachers can share skills and encourage good practice.
“The skills shared with the learners had a theme of gender equality through citizenship where learners were given activities and facilitators helped learners to eradicate negative gender stereotypes,” said the school principal, Mr Martin Kekana.
“To the learners the programme also created awareness about the importance of being part of the broader global community.”
The principal said the programme helped to cast off the myth that children in other countries are better off and South African learners get inferior education.
He said the teachers seemed really impressed by the learners’ behaviour and dedicated attendance.
“These are some of the issues they struggle with in their own country. Here they marvelled at the interaction they had with the learners, despite the high number of learners we have in our classes,” said Mr Kekana.
“In the programme we look at the similarities and differences between the two schools and pay attention to the children’s understanding of their roles within the family and the society at large,” said Ms Frank.
“We try and get the children to work in a team. They work together as a team to complete tasks and one learner is assigned to be an observer, where he or she observes whether the learners are working well together,” said Ms Frank.
She said the observing learner will thereafter report back to the class whether the team mates were co-operative, and also look at each group’s positive qualities.
That means the observer looks into the leadership skills of the groups’ leaders, and takes note of whether the leaders were able to make complex ideas clear to their respective groups.
This encouraged them to share ideas and working materials.
“We had a good response and the learners were very engaged. They worked very well together. We had this particular lesson where learners requested that we repeat an activity we did the previous day,” said Ms Frank.
She said that the learners appreciated being able to work together and were excited at the opportunity to try something new.
“All the children participated but there was this one child who was reserved and pulled away from the crowd. We gave a camera to the child to take pictures of all the groups and that taught the children that when working together everyone can have a role to play even if they are not hands on,” said Ms Frank.
“The main objective of the project was to teach learners creativity skills and collaboration. It was a success – children completed tasks in the record time of an hour. Their teachers said prior to these classes learners would take longer to complete given tasks.”
She said that was a result of children being involved and she was impressed that the children in turn brought materials from home.
Learner Tshepo Sebajane (11) said the ladies came to the school to teach them about the world and their culture.
“The experience was nice because they made us feel confident about art. I learned that I shouldn’t know about my culture only.”
“We took a lot from the lessons we ran here in South Africa and we are taking those lessons back to our school to share with our children. It’s been amazing,” said the other teacher, Ms Rachel Howard.
“We were also driven for a tour around the township and a squatter camp: the South African cuisine is very nice.
“We saw women selling on the street and we had their ‘millie corn’. We also got to touch and stroke a lion at a game park – very scary, but we were very excited.”
The school has been part of the programme for seven years and the teachers are looking forward to coming back.
