Collaborative Schools Network

Things go wrong in our schools… every day. That’s not a problem in itself. It’s normal in every school. It only becomes a problem if you don’t notice it, or you don’t act on it. One of the jobs of school leaders is the have very sensitive antenna (and good data) to spot the problems … Continue reading When things go wrong…

So if teacher training is a waste of time, what’s the alternative? Something like this. (password: janauddhar) Here’s a video of three science lessons developed with our science teacher, Namrata and Laxmi, Asha and Sunita, our class 1 – 3 teachers. These lessons are drawn directly from the government textbook, but we’ve brought them to … Continue reading So if teacher training is waste of time, what’s the alternative?

It is commonly assumed that teacher training leads to better teaching. It doesn’t. At least it doesn’t with government teachers in Nepal. This is because; the quality of training is often very low, a one day (or even one week) training session is not nearly enough to change the habits of a teacher’s lifetime and … Continue reading Why teacher training is a waste of time

1.  You need to balance the fierce urgency of daily demands – a sick student, an absent teacher, a broken water pipe – with the longer term planning need to get an organisation off the ground – staff recruitment, fund-raising, building relations with the government. I use a simple rule to help me prioritise: only … Continue reading 8 things we’ve learned about leadership

We’ve been managing Jana Uddhar for about 17 months, and yet we’ve only just introduced formal lesson planning to our teachers. In most teacher training programmes, this is one of the first thing trainees will learn. Why has it taken so long? Because we’ve been very wary of introducing something which simply becomes a paper … Continue reading Lesson Planning – at last!

We did it again. Roughly 95% of our students’ parents attended our parents’ meeting today. That kind of attendance rate is unheard of in most schools in the West, let alone in a government school in Nepal. How do we do it? inform the students about the meeting repeatedly during assemblies running up to the … Continue reading How do we get 95% attendance at our parents’ meetings?