Outreach team member Khyati Datt writes about our recent workshops with Teach For India in Bangalore and Delhi.
StoryWeaver has collaborated with many organisations in order to take stories to more and more children. One such organisation that works with children directly is Teach For India and we conducted a StoryWeaver workshop with the Teach for India fellows in Delhi and Bangalore. We invited fellows from the organisation to spend a few hours with us and brainstorm around ways that stories could be integrated with everyday teaching in the classrooms.
With the fellows coming straight from school, the workshops were shorter than our usual workshops but the fellows were actively engaging with us despite the long tiring day that they’d just had.
The session in Delhi began with a quick round of introductions where the fellows told us their role in the organisation. It was great to see that the participants worked in different verticals of the organisation - there were Program Managers, First year fellows, Content Advisors and TFI alums in the audience. After a brief introduction of Pratham Books and StoryWeaver, we dived into the demo of StoryWeaver and the functions available on the platform.
We discussed with them the various ways that different organisations were using the content on the platform to give the participants ideas on how to combine learning with fun! We also saw videos of teachers and organisations using StoryWeaver with their students and shared our thoughts on whether stories could help make classes more joyful. The fellows then went on to their first task of the session - looking for interesting stories and plugging them in in a lesson plan. While some fellows decided to use the story for Reading Comprehension, others chose to use a STEM book to introduce the children to the concept.
After hearing the thoughts of the participants on what they’d seen so far, we asked them to do the most interesting task of the workshop - creating stories! The fellows saw this as an opportunity to create the kind of stories that they thought would work in their classrooms and added a fun element to their lessons. We received some great stories from the audience, with flying animals and dream schools!
We ended the session with a question - actionable ways through which stories could be used with children. While some fellows were excited to share their takeaways from the session with other fellows, the alums wanted to understand how stories could be used in their context.
We conducted the same workshop with the Teach For India Bangalore fellows. All the participants were in their first year of fellowship and were happy to share their experience in the classrooms and discuss with us ideas on how they could use stories to make children learn in a joyful manner!
Both the workshops gave us an opportunity to interact with people who were working with children directly and we thank Teach For India Delhi and Teach For India Bangalore for arranging the same.
If you are interested in hosting a similar workshop for your organisation, drop us an email on [email protected].