I have been working with Be Better, an organisation that trains teachers to teach social and financial skills. Our teaching methods are quite different from regular Chinese teaching, and so it takes a very intense training and follow up for the teachers to start implementing it in their schools.
All the activities we did are meant to do in your classroom. That was fun! We played games, discussed, brainstormed, made paper towers and solved puzzles. And if you think it was easy peasy, no it wasn't. Kids must be geniuses to do all this. And so are teachers.
One little example: we all sat in groups, and got few sheets of newspaper, some cellotape, and a scissors. The assignment was to make a tower, as high as possible, yet as creative as possible. And we couldn't talk. So my group had a lot of fun all the time, but we usually under performed at all the assignments. We lacked guys I think. We rolled the newspapers, taped them, made a lame construction at the bottom end, tried to stick them together to stand up... Our tower was a disgrace, it kept coming down. In the mean time we sneaked at our neighbours who were born winners, their tower was beautiful and had already reached the ceiling. I decided to give it one last shot, and used a bit of cellotape to stick ours to the sprinkler system. All of a sudden it looked fabulous! My team mates couldn't stop laughing, and tried to hide the fact that our tower was no longer standing on the floor.
Afterwards there was time to discuss implementation. How do you do this in your class room? When? How does it work when you have 50 students? How do you sell it to the parents who are mostly just concerned about their kids getting high grades?
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