When the schools close for term breaks, we get the chance to bring our teachers and school directors together for training events. This month, we facilitated a training for our school directors on how to get parents more involved in their child's learning and the activities of their schools. Research shows us that parental involvement is a key marker to student success.
The highlight of the training was seeing our school directors create skits where they pretended to be the students, parents, and teachers. They modeled both good and bad practices for how to communicate to parents, and the audience was rolling with laughter. At the end of the day, our school directors walked away with a plan for how to engage the parents in the coming school term to help children learn even more.
Our Directors are role playing a visit between a disgruntled parent and the teacher
Along with the management training at our Impact One Library and Resource Center, there was also teacher training taking place within our partner schools. This year, one of our partner schools experienced a very high turnover of the teachers we had previously trained, and they recognized a need to provide a phonics course to their new teachers. Instead of calling us to facilitate this course, they called a former teacher to come back and share her skills.
During this three day session, Teacher Harriet (who was trained by us) taught her fellow Zambians how to use the phonics method to teach reading. Harriet confidently led the training, and was beaming with pride as we observed her showing off her skills. And we were beaming with pride to see this school strive for quality education with their own internal resources.
Teacher Harriet helping the new teachers understand the letter sounds and how to blend them in to words