Teacher Training

Here in Uganda a lot of teachers do not have formal training that they go through to become a teacher, and they don't really know about effective teaching methods, so a lot of them rely on "chalk and talk" which is basically writing notes on the board and having the kids copying it down. This isn't necessarily the best way for kids to learn. So last weekend we taught about 50 teachers of a Secondary and Primary Schools in the Manafa district on classroom management, teaching strategies, and assessment! I felt the pressure writing the curriculum because my course was on Classroom Management and I took that class last semester. It was harder than I though remembering the most important parts without my textbook! But I hope (with the help of the internet) Holly and I got the basics.

So the time management isn't a strong point of a lot of Africans..... The teacher training workshop was supposed to be an all day thing from like 8am to 5pm. We figured that nobody would show up until 9:30 because African time is usually an hour behind. We were way off and nobody showed up until 11am! This totally threw off our schedule but we managed to plan accordingly! Holly and I ended up only teaching 2 classes before lunch, instead of 4. Then we were monitoring the other classes after lunch. But after the morning sessions, we suddenly had a "guest speaker" that nobody really knew about and we ended up listening to this man speak about who knows what for a good 90 minutes. (Half of  it being in Lugisu so we didn't understand it..)

That's me leaning over to Holly saying "What is going on??" and all of the other teachers and parents.. sleeping.

Just waiting for teachers to come!

Getting our lessons ready

Us with some of the teachers at the end of the day!

Overall it was a great day and the teachers were really receptive, interested, and participatory in class. It was awesome. We hope they can implement some of the things we taught them in the workshops. And after lunch, we also had a parent meeting where they were taught about ways to be involved in their childrens education and the importance of it. What a great day!