Sirjana has been in the teaching profession since 2008. Currently, she teaches at Shree Laxmi Secondary School, Pokhara. She is an English teacher for grade nine to eleven.
Out of 24, Sirjana was one of the teachers from Community Schools of Pokhara to attend a three-day training on Core Skills including an in-depth training on Creativity and Imagination conducted by the British Council under its Connecting Classrooms through Global Learning Programme.
“I found the three-day training on Introduction to Core Skills and Advance Course in Creativity and Imagination very helpful and informative. The most important thing I learned from the training was how Imagination leads to creativity and why it is necessary to embed it in the teaching and learning process.
As a teacher, I have always struggled to promote creative thinking amongst students. Whenever I try to encourage my students to think out of bounds, I find them confused and unable to express their imagination. I do not blame them for this. It could be my teaching style too. So, when I knew about the British Council’s training on core skills and creativity and imagination, I was really interested to participate.
This training on core skills has benefitted me in many ways. With this training, not just I have realised my weaknesses and areas of improvement, but also learned new and effective strategies to plan class sessions and promote students’ engagement in creative thinking for problem solving processes.
The best part of this training was the use of local training videos with Nepali teachers in a Nepali classroom. I could easily relate to those videos as the context and setting was exactly like my classroom. Through these videos it was easy for me to understand how creativity, imagination, critical thinking and problem solving can be embedded in the academic course and used in teaching.
As part of the training, now we teachers must work on the action plans that will focus on strategies to improve students’ engagement and encourage creativity and critical thinking in the teaching and learning approaches. I am sure this will be an additional advantage for all of us to research, brainstorm and learn about new strategies of creative teaching.”
