British Council Workshop Completion Report

Name of organisation	IQRA FUND
Workshop	Final Session on Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Region/Dates/ Participants	Region Baltistan June 4, 2016 Number of participants = 28
Date of submission	June 15, 2016
Trainer Name	Ameera Jiveria

Aim(s) of the workshop

The overall aim of this session was to review and share lessons learned from school projects with each other.

Expected outcomes

·         Present experiences while implementing school projects ·         Share challenges they faced since first training session ·         Adapt strategies to overcome these challenges ·         Impact that they achieved in the individual setting

Feedback from Participants (please use the text from feedback forms and attach the same with this report)
The mission of Iqra Fund is to provide access to quality education for girls in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Similarly, Iqra Fund aims to achieve the quality education through professional development teachers and head teachers.  To enhance the capacities of teachers on core skills and head teachers on school leaders Iqra Fund awarded a project from British Council. It was partnership project between Iqra Fund and British Council. In the core skills training, teachers were given two days training on Critical Thinking and Problem Solving (CTPS) skills. At the end of the training, teachers were assigned a project work to implement in their classrooms and write a comprehensive report on their findings.

In the final session, teachers’ presented their project works with the whole group. It was found an excellent finding from project works of teachers. They presented their tasks with evidences and shared their findings, achievements, challenges and recommendations. Some of the key findings are as follow:

The training course was very useful to develop teaching and learning skills for teachers. Majority of the teachers were not oriented with the term critical thinking and problem solving. This training helped them to learn new methods and strategies of teachings and learning processes. They also found that these methods are very effective for students’ learning. They observed that students were very active and receive some creative answers while teaching through these methods and strategies. They also reported that students built confidence and developed language skills while teaching through these methods. They found that a sense of cooperative learning environment in their classrooms.

However, they found some challenges that they were not properly guided by the trainer during their field work. They faced confusions about how to start their task and how to write the report. The school ambassador has guided them twice during their field work. His guidance helped them to focus on their task and write the report in a systematic way.

They requested that next time the field support should be given properly and followed up regularly. Teachers also requested that kindly continue such training course on other core skills and duration of the training course should be extended from two days to one week.

Overall the training course was outstanding and it was full of learning. They really enjoyed their learning from this training course. Trainer was very helpful and supportive during training course and all the arrangements made for this training was fabulous.