Workshop teachers Unisport

One of the things that we have started at Unisport is to make a schedule when, which lesson is being taught, and how we can have a logical build up in the lesson sequence without it going to be to0 complex or difficult, for all the different volunteers.

In Unisport its often a surprise how many teachers show up on a day, and that means that sometimes you have a lesson planned for a certain group, but you get another group, or a bigger/smaller group than normally.

To make agreements and discuss about how we'd best structure the lessons and the school program we provided a workshop for the teachers. In the past we already tried once to do a workshop but then no one showed up. But this time we had a different strategy. We first teach the children until the break, and after the break the older boys get instructions to do games with all the children together, and the teachers gather for the workshop. This to make sure that the teachers come to school, and to see and try if the older boys are capable of leading the whole group in a game.

In the workshop we did the following things:

- setting rules for Unisport

(what do you personally think is important, what does the group think, we all have to obey these rules to set a line for the pupils)

- time schedule

(what do we do in a morning, how many subjects every day, what about other things such as singing, dancing and games)

- casus

(we give them problems and they have to think for themselves about what they thinks is a proper solution, and then we discuss about that in group)

- questions and other remarks

When we were preparing the workshop we were a little bit worried about the input the teachers were going to give. But that wasn't a problem at all.

They were very cooperative, discussing about things, telling openly about their personal opinion about things. It was very useful and interesting. We let them do the talking and only interfered if the discussions got too long or we really had to move on to a conclusion or the next topic because of time. Together we made a set of rules for the school, a time schedule for the week, and we came to some very good solutions for common difficulties with the pupils. For example the way of punishing children, we do not hit children at Unisport. But what is a good and also effective way of punishing them? We decided that the children who misbehave have to clean up the tent at the end of the morning. Another example, if a child keeps disturbing the lesson in a way that it effects the teacher, than we contact the parents, and parents can attend the lessons for a morning and take actions for controlling their own child.

For all the teachers we will provide the rules and other agreements on paper, so they can check or read back about what we decided together.

In the question round the teachers opinion was that it was very useful to have a workshop/meeting every once in a while, to make sure there is the possibility to talk about issues. Next workshop will be with a little bit help from us (European students) but they have to do the workshop, so that after that they will be able to arrange their own meetings in a structured way.

 the teachers just before the workshop started