Leading by Example

The RELO teacher-training program has enabled mentor-teachers like Divya Gupta to take simple strategies and tailor them as per her students’ needs in the classroom. (Photograph courtesy Divya Gupta)

Divya Gupta is a teacher who works with the schools of the Directorate of Education in New Delhi. As an English mentor teacher, she introduces other government school English teachers to innovative ways of teaching the language and helps them upskill to improve student outcomes.  

Gupta had the unique opportunity of attending a Professional Development of Teacher Trainers (PDTT) program organized by the U.S. Embassy New Delhi’s Regional English Language Office (RELO) in 2018. The program, an eight-week online course delivered by the Arizona State University, aims to support teacher-trainers in nurturing teachers’ skills, knowledge and teaching methods. The program offers them a way to understand what makes a teacher training workshop successful, create a course outline based on goals and objectives relevant to the participant’s teaching needs and apply evaluative concepts to measure outcomes. 

A large number of students in Delhi government schools come from underserved backgrounds—some of them first-generation school-goers, with very little exposure to the English language, explains Gupta. Mentors like her help classroom teachers work around their limitations to ensure students in the public education system have the necessary English language skills to get a leg up in the professional world and widen their horizon of opportunities.  

The RELO training 

Mentor teachers, like Gupta, have a critical role to play in Delhi government schools. Besides capacity building of teachers at mentee schools, they also facilitate workshops, troubleshoot classroom challenges, observe and offer recommendations on best pedagogical techniques, and ensure that government interventions are carried out effectively.  

Gupta’s participation in RELO’s PDTT program equipped her with the working knowledge to become a successful pedagogical mentor. Besides learning new language teaching techniques and activities, Gupta developed key skills like time management, improving engagement and participation of mentee teachers in workshops, and developing strategic thinking skills for effective interventions. She also learned how to curate and plan content for workshops she would facilitate as a mentor. 

For Gupta, the program was more than upskilling. It gave her confidence and motivation as a teacher. “It was an incredible experience because I was a new mentor then,” she says. “While doing assignments in the program, I was apprehensive because I had never done such workshop-related activities before. But the program gave me the much-needed confidence,” she says.    

The impact 

Gupta says this training has been super helpful in facilitating workshops, offering observations to class teachers, and changing the way she looks at foreign language pedagogy. As a mentor teacher, Gupta uses the learning from her training and contextualizes them as per the needs of the three west Delhi schools that fall under her care. She says she usually gets good engagement and feedback from classroom teachers on language training strategies, their results and challenges. Her RELO training helps Gupta address these challenges by using the resources provided during the program and offer creative solutions to classroom challenges. 

For example, during a workshop on improving reading skills among children, she suggested that class teachers encourage their students to read labels and gather information from everyday material like wafer packets and candy wrappers. For teachers, the challenge was to collect such material for large classrooms in multiple grades. “They were worried about how it would be possible to collect so many labels and wrappers for every child to read,” explains Gupta. “So, I asked them to use children as a resource, and encourage them to bring packets and wrappers from home, or of things they consume. This became a fun activity for the children because they started to feel involved in the process and began engaging with each other more, sharing what they had learnt.”  

Till date, says Gupta, she refers to the “Monster Book of Language Teaching Activities” that RELO gave the program participants. “The ‘Monster Book’ is a boon for us,” she says. “It has so many activities which I still refer to from time to time. These activities and the training have empowered us teachers with such brilliant ideas.” 

Gupta’s success as a RELO-trained mentor teacher has also opened other professional avenues for her. She is now part of the team associated with English curriculum development for the Delhi Board of Secondary Education—the Delhi Government’s own certifying board. She is also helping a Fulbright Teaching Excellence and Achievement Program participant in her research on using folk music to teach a foreign language. 

 

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