Teachers Training

I have just finished two weeks of helping out with our teachers training with three amazing ladies from Canada. I served as their translator, chofer and liaison person at the four different schools where we held the trainings.

Margaret and Sue have been coming for eight years in doing trainings for our teachers here in the Dominican Republic. They had a new member to their team this year, Mary who was such a delight to get to know as well as her talents in music. This year the theme for the two day training---the brain's favorite way to learn is through play.

We started our two weeks in Constanza who hosted both Constanza and Palo Blanco Schools for training. Our next stop was in Caraballo for our school there. Then off to Santo Domingo who hosted both schools in Santo Domingo, our Monte Plata school and invited a few teachers from a public school in Santo Domingo as well. We finished our time then in Jarabacoa at our ANIJA school.

Even though I am not a school teacher but I learned a lot through translating for these women in their different workshops. I also, loved to see our teachers listening, participating, and hopefully understanding the concepts to use in their classrooms. The mornings were mostly theory and the afternoons were how they applied the theory to a lesson which Mary did a science class on density and a social studies class on cultures and customs from different countries.

My favorite part of the two day training was the last day when the teachers had to do a presentation on a country that they knew a lot about regarding food, clothing, housing, climate, recreational things, and/or fun facts of the country. They were instructed to use their eight different smarts in how they would present it to the class. They were also given only 20 minutes to decide how they would work, by themselves, in pairs or groups, find the information and how they would present it. The majority of course choose the Dominican Republic but we also had Haiti, Puerto Rico, Columbia, the USA, Peru, Italy, Switzerland, and Brazil. The part I loved were if they made a song or danced one of the Dominican dances. We also had some interviews, a small skit and some who just presented the material. Let's just say you had to be there as part of the atmosphere as our teachers presented and the fun they had in doing it as well as listening to their colleagues' presentations.