My Classroom: Bangladesh

A profile of Asif Ahmed, who teaches English at a government primary school in a remote village on Bangladesh's border with India, where most parents are farmers and many children miss school to work.

It follows his path from an English literature degree to teaching and training other teachers, and the approach that runs through it: a warm relationship with pupils, stories and songs every day, and games in place of the memorisation his pupils were used to. As a college lecturer his students twice had the highest pass rates in the district; his biggest lesson from teacher training was that English classes can be taught in English.

1. Build the relationship first - stories, folktales and songs every day, and activities outside class such as sport, art and music.
2. Replace memorisation with play: word games, guessing games and chain stories get pupils speaking without a script.
3. Use short, lively activities with weak classes - a jazz chant, a running dictation, a picture chain drill.
4. Teach in English. His training showed him that an English class can be run in English, and he has taught that way since.

Almost everything in it will be familiar to a teacher in a rural Sri Lankan school: children who work before and after school, a mandated syllabus, parents who cannot help with English, and a strong habit of learning by heart.

It is not a method to copy step by step. It is a reminder, from a classroom very like ours, of what a single committed teacher can do - and a good text for a staff meeting or a teacher-training session.