Life Skills and Teaching Skills

My work this year focuses on handing over the Life Skills class to the local teachers. Whereas last year I taught 90% of the time to model the curriculum, this year the teachers are the leaders of the class. They choose the topics and lessons, and we split the teaching 50-50.

This week teachers taught the classes for the first time, and I observed them and participated in the class discussion. My reaction to their teaching was as mixed as their methods. On the plus side, the teachers did really well when they followed the curriculum. The curriculum is dynamic and participatory. Almost all of the lessons start with an activity where the students experience or do something, and the classes end with discussion questions to debrief the activities and extract how it relates to the topic. It is experiential learning, and it fits well with a Life Skills class.


The teachers’ lessons went wrong when they fell back on the two standards of Guatemalan teaching. First, teachers think that dynamic activities are good. I would add the qualifier that activities are only good IF they are in service of a learning objective. Something fun but pointless is a pernicious waste of time. Two teachers added fun games (called dinámicas here) at the beginning of the lesson. Each took 30 of the 70 minutes, and they achieved nothing. If anything, the students were so tired afterwards that the students were winding down in exhaustion at the same time that the teachers sped up to recoup the lost time. If the teachers had followed the quick and relevant opening activity in the book, the students would have the rush of something fun, and they would also have an experience upon which to base a thoughtful discussion.


The second downfall of the classes was the discussion section. Lecturing is the default setting here, and yet it universally alienates Guatemalan adults and children. Instead of asking the students the questions in the lesson plan, several teachers began moralizing about the topic of the day. I scanned the faces of the students, and not a single one of them was paying attention. Yikes.

During my teacher training courses at Harvard, I learned that “if you the teacher are talking, the students aren’t learning.” Meaning that students only construe understanding when they are thinking about, applying, or manipulating an idea. The discussion questions are supposed to guide the students through this process, and lecturing stymies this crucial reflection. Unfortunately, by middle school the students are so conditioned to listening and not speaking that when I ask their opinion they have none. Students do not participate in class because that is not what schooling is to them, and so teachers lecture even more to fill the silence. How do you break this vicious circle?

In my feedback to the teachers (all of whom have more experience teaching than I do), I complimented them on what they did well. I didn’t offer any constructive criticism because in this context I do not know how. We have a meeting in the Peace Corps office this week, and I’m going to ask other volunteers how they go about critiquing their teachers.

For the record, I do not invent the classes. The volunteers who preceded me chose their favorite classes from five different books and compiled them into the Youth Development Guatemala curriculum. Similarly, I am chairing a committee to write teacher training workshops that will be compiled and passed onto the volunteers who follow me.