Let's improve Education in Government Schools..

This project is being organised by a group of nine members in the main Mirpur City, most of whom are primary teachers in government schools. After working in schools for a considerable amount of time and attending Active Citizen Workshops, the group was inspired to take up the task of improving educational standards among the teachers in primary schools.

The rationale behind this project is to develop their teaching methods and meet increasing needs of the pupils. This is achieved through the mentoring and counselling of primary teachers (in order to gain better understanding and easy to do since they are less in numbers).

The job of counselling is undertaken by group members who are teachers themselves, and have access to wider information pool and material through the Active Citizens platform and/or other partners. This is vital to facilitate the improvement of quality education in terms of structuring the syllabus and critical thinking among the students.

Since the Teachers Association, is one of the largest associations in the division, lack of proper teaching methods and knowledge transfer is very minimal; therefore the group supervises knowledge transference from teachers to students, helps improve and polish the teacher’s interpersonal skills and lastly helps the community through producing evolved teachers that can pass it on to others.

The project at present is only two months old, and is currently targeting only two government schools in the region out of a large number. In the beginning these trainings start with only ten teachers, which will benefit three hundred teachers through cascading of materials and resources to their peers.

The group has collected ‘Feedback Forms’ filled by teachers and students as a form of measuring the success of the project. Teachers are being tested in terms of their teaching experiences before and after the training sessions, whereas students were asked to share the differences between pre and post counselling.

The main costs incurred are the transportation and stationary items, with some additional expenses for multimedia equipment; and so far the expenses have been met through the group’s personal capacity.

The group has adopted several methods in terms of the project’s sustainability; one of them is to include the sharing of new ideas and issues during teaching experience in their regular meeting sessions.