Ishara Foundation

Ishara Foundation has now successfully conducted TWO Teacher Training Workshops for its teachers, and prospective teachers.

A FIRST training workshop for Ishara Foundation teachers and interns was held from January 22nd to 31st. The workshop was led by Dr Mike Morgan (managing director of Ishara) and Sunil Sahasrabudhe (director of education and training programs), and was attended by Ishara's 3 Bombay-based teachers and 10 Bombay-based interns, 2 teachers from our study centre in Vadodara (Baroda), Gujarat, 1 teacher from our now-closed Orissa study centre, and 1 potential future intern.

The 8-day course, a total of 28 hours of training, covered a wide range of topics, such as learner-centred teaching, lesson planning, various methods for teaching reading and writing, discussions of classroom problem solving, critiques of sample classes, etc, and introduced the new concept of "RAVE": language teaching should be R(eal), A(ctive), V(isual) and E(njoyable).

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A SECOND teacher Training Workshop was held in early August 2008. This workshop focused on training new and potential interns and teachers.

This was an intensive 2-day course, with a total of 12 hours of training. In addition to Ishara's 3 Bombay-based teachers, 6 continuing interns and 6 new interns, 10 prospective interns and teachers participated in the programme.

In addition to a short review of some of the main ideas of the first workshop, this second workshop focused on PRACTICAL problems of teaching in the classsroom, and had all the participants working in groups to make short presentations, which were then critiqued by the teacher, Dr Mike Morgan, and the fellow participants. Each group was also asked to present a short summary of the details of HOW they planned their mini-"class".

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The THIRD Teacher Training is now set to take place on 23-25 January 2009. It will be a chance for all Ishara teachers and interns to share the past few months experiences, for the "newbies" to learn from the "old hands" ... and maybe the "old hands" to learn from the "newbies" as well. Included on the agenda are issues raised by the principals in the first ever feedback session for the BELC-in-schools (interns) programme, retruned out-posted teachers sharing their teaching experiences working at schools and institutes outside of Ishara, etc. As with the first two, we expect well over 20 participants for this three-day workshop.

Hopefully we will also be having some potential future Ishara teachers and interns join as well, not only from Mumbai, but also from our growing Vadodara (Gujarat) centre as well!