My Life as a PTS Mini-Series, Part Five (Ginnie)

CBT Week Two

In week two, the trainees met with the principal at the local school in which they will work during the remainder of training. This time around, I really wanted to provide trainees with a real-world training experience and get them into a school and working directly with a classroom. Between trainings, we revised learning objectives in each project and this is one I added in place of some other activities that did not provide as much value to the training process. While I anticipated some of the challenges that may come up, I could only hope this would provide a valuable learning experience – and in the end that is what trainees said about their time with their partner teachers.

Each group eagerly anticipated their first meeting with the principal, and, not surprising to me, but a bit eye-opening to the trainees, each principal was late for the meeting. This is not a slight on the principal, it’s just the reality that these folks are super busy and in the midst of running a school it is not easy to get right to a meeting after lunch! During these meetings, the trainees learned more about the role of a principal, the structure of the schools, the classes where they would observe and volunteer for the next four weeks, and the topic of their teacher training workshop to be held toward the end of CBT. Following this, the trainees had their first observation of their partner teacher’s classroom. They also had some more sessions on education and various skills and knowledge areas they need for their work, including a day with currently-serving PCVs. The PCVs came to Dangriga and shared their experiences in specific skill areas that relate to our project plan – differentiated instruction (by the fantastic Anthony himself), ESL, early childhood education, and reading strategies. All PCVs fins themselves working in one or more of these areas in order to fulfill the mission of the education teacher training program in Belize.

Trainees continued to work on their language skills as well as developed stronger relationships with their host families as they spent more time in their communities. At the end of the week, trainees headed out across the country to stay with currently-serving PCVs for a weekend to learn more about the PCV experience and to witness a PCV in action in their projects!