Chollimagori Primary School in Phyongchon District, Pyongyang is famous for developing its pupils excellently.
Every year lots of its graduates are admitted to schools of higher grade like Pyongyang Secondary School No. 1, and members of its music circle never fail to take one of the top three places at national schoolchildren’s individual art contests. Not long ago members of its Taekwon-Do circle won the relevant event at a junior sports meeting which attracted the whole country.
Object-based teaching is encouraged.
Kim Jong Ok, headmistress of the school, says, “We give priority to the effort to improve educational conditions and environment, contents and methods. At the same time we encourage the teachers to enhance their qualifications and train the pupils into persons of varied attainments.” She tells the following story.
The headmistress held on to the idea of “Keep your feet firmly planted on this land and look out over the world” as required by the development of the times, and set it the first goal to make all classrooms multi-functional.
It was not an easy job, but with the determination to dedicate themselves to the future of the country all its teachers did their best to equip the classrooms with modern educational instruments, establish an intranet and computerize the management of educational and administrative affairs by pooling their own wisdom and efforts. They also studied lots of data on global trends in education in an effort to turn the classrooms into utilitarian and scientific ones. Their devoted efforts bore fruit. Each of the classrooms turned into a multifunctional one equipped with modern educational instruments such as a computer, a television camera and a visual aids projector connected with the intranet. Besides, they established their own homepage “Our School” and improved its efficiency.
Meanwhile, the school made sure that multimedia materials for different subjects designed to suit the pupils’ psychology and electronic teaching plans for perfect distance education were prepared and used actively. This has boosted the quality of 45-minute lessons. And the pupils have remarkably improved their ability by referring to homepage data at any moment, acquiring a wealth of diversified knowledge.
Inspection of any class at work can be done through the intranet, and the management of the school affairs is under way by dint of the homepage.
It is said that there is a fine teacher behind an able man. This partly means how a teacher should educate students.
On the basis of the achievements, the headmistress made efforts to lead the teachers to invent new teaching methods to suit the characteristics of the school. In the course of this there were invented and introduced new teaching methods of developing the ability to judge and apply logically and programs to improve mental faculties. A teacher gave lessons consistent with questions and answers so as to help pupils develop the ability to think most correctly and in depth, and another teacher made effective use of pupils’ psychology to suit their ages, personalities and tastes in order to enable them to enhance their ability of concentration.
And the school often organized discussions on teaching methods and teaching materials, meetings for sharing experience and inspections of classes at work. This made it possible for the teachers to further improve their qualifications while learning from one another and competing among themselves. Thus the teachers invented and employed other new teaching methods of making it possible for the pupils to understand ten or a hundred through one and easily leading them to find the answers to any complex problems most correctly and fastest. As a result, obvious progress was made in the development of the pupils’ thinking and practical ability day after day.
The school is still putting more efforts in inventing more utilitarian and better teaching methods.
As fertile soil produces good fruit, so does the school produce able children to become the future pillars of the country thanks to its teachers’ sincere efforts.
Article: Pak Un Jong
