By Victoria Adembesa – Leadership Coach

One of the things we focus on in our training and coaching at Dignitas are the CBC competencies. Specifically, communication and collaboration, self-efficacy and critical thinking.

When I met Mr. Nderitu of Karati primary school, he struggled with conducting targeted and orderly group discussions. In our first coaching session, I observed that during the lesson, he was very eager to implement group discussion as a way of enhancing communication and collaboration to engage his students. This however did not turn out as he had anticipated. There was quite some disorganization and the teacher felt these grade 5 students had not grasped the concepts that he wanted them to grasp.

After his class we had a moment to reflect on the lesson and thereafter Mr. Nderitu and I set some next steps for him to practice in his next lesson based on ideas we had come up with. These next steps included; that he will think through on how the students will regroup in the shortest time possible, setting group discussion norms together with the students and giving different responsibilities to group members so that all have a chance to participate.

In my next visit, Mr. Nderitu had shown tremendous improvement. He was teaching a science lesson on describing the differences between transparent, translucent and opaque. When the time for group discussion came around, the students grouped themselves in an orderly manner and within a short time. Mr. Nderitu proceeded to give step-by-step instructions on the activity at hand, requesting group leaders to note down findings. The students had been asked to bring different items from home and were classifying them according to the three categories. They were discussing amongst themselves and debating on which category to place the items they had, while Mr. Nderitu walked around to support the students.

Afterwards, when we had our coaching conversation, Mr. Nderitu was very happy about his progress, noting the differences between our previous session and this particular one. Through reflecting through his teaching practices, Mr. Nderitu saw other areas where he could improvement and refinement, making him more effective in the classroom.