Pretty much every Nepali school textbook I have seen and read about, I have decided, actually hinders children's learning, forget promote -- and contribute to -- them! In this blog post, I show how a fifth grade textbook completely misses the mark.
The solution? Do away with the local and national level examinations in grades 8 and 10 and eliminate textbooks.
Children want to impress and please adults they look up to, whether the adults are family members, teachers, or members of their local community. As a teacher, if you have high expectations of your students, by and large, they will do everything they can to meet those expectations, partly to impress and please you.
This is a very feel-good story of a former student of mine who, as a HL IB Chemistry student, rose up to meet my expectations, succeeded AND went on to do a PhD in Chemistry at Oxford in the UK.
At under-funded and resource-strapped public schools in Nepal, teaching science in a way that brings the subject alive for students can be a major challenge. What the teachers at such schools do have is themselves and their students. There's no reason they shouldn't be using their own students (by having them model structures for example) in an effort to get across difficult and challenging science concepts and ideas!
I have a Science Teacher Education program. Depending on the needs of the school, I can either hold interactive workshops on how to impart higher level thinking skills or hold interactive workshops on teaching the content of the prescribed textbook a little differently, a little more effectively using local resources, the teachers themselves, as well as the students.