This course is designed to help you to become a teacher in a Rural Training Centre or Vocational School. In the past you will all have been to schools where they treated you as children. The teacher was in charge and told you what to do. You learnt what you were told to learn.
 
Now,however, you have left school.  You may have already been to an RTC or Vocational School, worked somewhere, been a member of your village community, or even taught in an RTC.  In this course, therefore, you will all be treated as adults. This means that your own ideas and experiences are as important as those of your tutors. Your tutors are here to help you to learn how to teach, not to tell you how to teach.

Many of the activities, therefore, will ask you to discuss topics in groups, so that you can share your ideas and experiences with your tutors and fellow students.
 
This course is called LEARN BY DOING.  This is because you are going to teach in RTCs, which aim to teach practical skills useful to students when they leave the Centre. A practical skill is always learnt better by doing it, rather than by learning about it.

In the same way, this course will be based on learning by doing. You will not be told to learn certain things, but given the opportunity to think and find out for yourself. The course, therefore, is based on ACTIVITIES, which you will be expected to do, to help you to think about a topic before you discuss it with your tutor.

Many of these activities involve observing lessons or teaching at St. Dominic’s RTC.  Many involve discussion in groups.  Some activities should be done in writing, but not all.  Your tutors will tell you which ones to do or record in writing.
 
Another reason for this approach is that teaching is a personal matter. There are no right or wrong ways of teaching. Two teachers may teach in quite different ways, but achieve the same results. We can give you advice on ways of teaching that other people have found successful, but you must make up your own mind which methods you use.  For this reason, you will not be given a ‘Text Book’ with all the answers in.  You will be given information and ideas, but in the form of Summary Sheets after you have discussed a topic and given your ideas.  You will be given a file so you may gradually collect these Summary sheets into this.
 
Both this book and the Summary sheets will be given to you at the end of the course so there is no need to copy anything from this book or the Summary sheets.  The important thing is to do the activities in this book, not to copy or learn the information.
 
It is important that this course suits you and teaches you what you hope to learn. Before you start, therefore, we would like to know what you expect from the course and the College. We can then modify the course, if necessary, according to what you feel you need to do and learn, in order to become a good teacher.