Personal Blogs

On any given day, one might wander the halls of any British or American school and experience the vibrancy of life: the noise, the physical motions of children, and even freedom. However, pass by a Ghanaian classroom and one is more likely see children facing forward, listening to the teacher, limited to what is immediately instructed. My goal in this experience has been to give teachers and pupils a taste of something else. I want Ghanaian children to take responsibility for their learning by becoming active learners rather than passive recipients of knowledge.

The first thing I taught them was how to form groups so that, instead of facing a teacher, in a teacher-centred approach, they were facing each other for group-based, somewhat self-directed learning. This has had an impact on those pupils who were lost. For example, when I had groups work on a writing activity, those who understood what I had instructed were able to pass this knowledge to those who didn’t quite understand what I was after. As a result, I had assessable work submitted by everyone, not just those who understood my instructions. One teacher had dismissed a subset of the children by saying they never did anything, but they all submitted work. This has much to do with group dynamics and the ability to gain clarification from each other. Further, because of the use of groups rather than long rows of desks, I could provide much more personal and immediate assistance to any student in the room, not limited to those on the ends which I could reach.

Active learning has taken off well in the classes I’m working with. In one activity, instead of me pointing out vocabulary terms I thought the children should know, it was up to the children to post the terms they did not know on the board. When a word appeared, we all stopped and discussed it. However, I did not simply give the definition. With one group, for example, there was a list of about 20 words and for 15 or 16 of these, meaning could be inferred from the text. In looking at the word ‘grasped’, we were able to identify it as a verb and then to look at it in context. The sentence read, ‘A hand grasped her and pulled her back’. The children soon realised that grasped means ‘grabbed’ or ‘took hold’ and were able to imitate the action, showing their understanding. Inferences couldn’t be made for every term, but the children developed skills in identifying what they did not know and then finding ways to infer meaning from the text when meaning was clearly shown. This is considerably more active than having a teacher post words and their definitions on the board and the children created their own vocabulary lists which were highly relevant to their immediate needs for reading the book, Journey to Jo’burg.

The head teacher of the school has popped round occasionally and seems to enjoy the more relaxed and free environment the children and I have created for English lessons. Lowering affective filter relaxes learners so that they are capable of taking in more information than they would in a more stressful environment. The idea is that people learn much more when they are not suffering from anxiety which can be brought on by numerous factors including overly harsh or strict teachers.

In upcoming lessons, I am hoping to use Journey to Jo’burg for a descriptive linguistic approach to developing sentence structure skills. In this instance, children will be responsible for identifying simple sentences, building up to compound, and then to complex. This is to be done over days, not minutes, but will give children the clue that they already know what the sentences are, but now they can understand why they are the sentences they are. Wish me luck!