The “wee-fee” (wifi) is back on today for now, so I’ll try to give a little summary of our past two mornings spent leading teacher development.

The teachers came! (Over 30 of them!) This was important, obviously. We were hopeful that they would, and encouraged when all returned, with even more participants Tuesday. We held the training in the Christianville cafeteria. This is not a school cafeteria, but the cafeteria used to serve visiting teams and employees. The kitchen is run by the culinary arts school. (Have I mentioned how much I love the food?) The most important thing you should know is that it is air conditioned part of the day, and we quite appreciated that. <– understatement

 

 

Our goals were the following:

1. Provide a teacher-requested development opportunity/training for teachers at Christianville schools (four campuses). Teachers had not had any opportunities for training in the past five years.

2. Engage teachers in active learning so that we could show them how to engage their students in active learning.

Traditional Haitian schools use the call and response, repetition model of instruction. Students sit on benches in rows and the teacher stands in the front to deliver a lecture on the content. We wanted to shake things up right away so we broke the loooong cafeteria tables into small groups of six and the room.

We divided our training into two days, 8-12, with about three modeled learning structures each day. Everything takes at least twice as long when you leave time for translation (provided professionally by Bilson and Stanley), questions- there were a lot!, and “Haiti time” (not quite like American time, if you read my earlier post.) Happily, the timing and structures worked out very well and the content was well received.

3. Provide teachers with a complete set of materials to create/use the same modeled structures in their own classrooms. Thanks to the generous donations of family and friends, we were able to do this!

We are looking into getting some of the papers translated into French or Creole, as we were only able to translate the primary handout ahead of time.(Thank you, Bilson!)

4. Encourage teachers in their dedication and thank them for their continued efforts in difficult circumstances and environments. The three of us have a renewed gratitude for the almost obscene abundance of supplies, support, and information available to us in the States.

Outcomes:

Here are just a few wins from our two days-

-connections made between us (relationships built) as we discovered our shared, universal frustrations and joys! of our profession

-the “Stasyon Bis”: For teacher friends, this is the”parking lot” for questions. Since Haiti doesn’t really have parking lots… It was suggested we use the term ‘bus station’ instead. The teachers LOVED this idea. They asked a ton of questions (and received prizes for asking questions!) Correlation? Probably.

-finding out several of the teachers there actually taught Stanley, one of our amazing translators. Love this picture of their reunion at a teacher training, where former student helped teach his former teacher!

-Madame Stephanie (regarded with the utmost respect as a special education teacher/aspiring neuro scientist-!)  explained the areas of the brain, and introduced the idea of waking up multiple areas of the brain to maximize (authentic) learning.

-the gradual build of enthusiasm during the activities as understanding grew

 

-The teachers made a bulletin board tree with their handprints, each one with a written prayer for their students this year. It was exceptionally touching to read them and present the finished product with the certificates of completion.

Overall, we each found the experience rewarding and well worth the planning and effort. They’ve already given good feedback and started talking about next year’s training!

I’m just so humbled to experience this with two incredible teachers from home that I respect so much.

Thank you for following along!