Tales from the Desh

On December 16^th, Senior English Language Fellow John Mark King visited a middle school and met with English teachers from more than seven area schools in the city founded as the summer home of the tsars and where national poet Alexander Pushkin once studied.

25 working elementary and middle school teachers came for the Fellow’s two workshops, “Managing Large Classes” and the Christmas-themed reading workshop, “Using Stories to Build a Community of Learners.”

Russian teachers in and around Pushkin often have groups of 25 or more students when smaller groups are temporarily combined into one. The teachers shared many of their own ideas when managing large groups of students who may not be their own and also enthusiastically explored the benefits of approaches which the Fellow suggested.

In addition, teachers in Pushkin admitted that there is a need for innovation in their approach to the teaching of reading in English. This second workshop encouraged teachers to allow students to construct meaning on their own as they read and discover texts as a community of learners.

Many teachers exclaimed that much of what they explored in these workshops could be modified and used in their own classes right away.

These workshops were part of a series of additional workshops the Fellow conducts regularly for the Academy of Pedagogical Mastery in St. Petersburg.

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