Teachers in class creating strategies for the new school year

We know that eleven thousand primary school age students are not in school and as many as sixty percent are not in secondary schools. The others will make it to the classrooms in the next few weeks when the school year opens. At one Belize City high school, classrooms opened since the beginning of this week but it was the teachers that were the students. They are taking part in a week of professional development training. News Five’s Delahnie Bain dropped in today and found the educators discussing new and creative strategies to make the classrooms more interesting.

Delahnie Bain, Reporting

It’s the summer holiday, but over four hundred teachers have been in class at the Edward P Yorke compound since the start of this week. But instead of being in front of the chalkboard, these educators are students in the annual Countrywide Personal Development training workshop.

Sherrie King, Facilitator, Ministry of Education

sherrie king

“It’s important for them because they are gaining a lot of ideas, a lot of sharing is being done. The facilitators are people who are going through what they are going through now and we share as we work together collaboratively for the betterment of our students and our country.”

The teachers, from preschool, primary and secondary schools, are grouped by their teaching levels and the focus of this year’s training is summed up in the acronym CAPS.

sharon mejia

Sharon Mejia, Teacher, Hattieville Government Primary School

“On Monday we looked at CAPS; just the Curriculum, the Assessment and Pyramids of Intervention. Then the Spirituality just came in as devotions that we did and things like that.”

Sherrie King

“Also beside CAPS being covered as part of the focus, we have balanced literacy, which we know without literacy, we cannot learn and it would be difficult to learn. Literacy takes many different forms and also we’re looking at classroom management and planning.”

Leolyn Steven, Sandhill Community Preschool

“As teachers, to be in the classroom we have to be very effective when teaching the children, to get them more occupied in whatever they’re doing. We do get tools on how to deal with them in the classroom, dealing with their behavior, the way they will participate and different things like that in the classroom.”

Katie Usher, Teacher, Anglican Cathedral College

katie usher

“We’re focusing on cooperative learning so we learn how best to work with the students. Like it’s not always the teachers who do all of the instruction. For example, you would have peer teachers so you’d group your students, one, two and three and then if you’re ones are the strongest then you would have them tutor students who maybe have a bit more problems grasping the material. We also learned differential instruction because everybody has different intellects, you have multiple intellects.”

The workshop aims to prepare educators for the new school year so that when September rolls around, the lessons learnt are expected to benefit both teachers and students.

Sharon Mejia

“When we learn from each other, the things that you are practicing in your school and the things that you are practicing that are not really working, then you can know okay I can try another strategy and that’s what we’re doing. We’re sharing the strategies that we have used and coming up with new strategies that can be implemented in our classrooms.”

Katie Usher

“It’s super because they’re kind of telling me you can expect this, you can expect that and these are the kind of things that you can look for. Most of the teachers here have been very helpful to me, being a new teacher so I’m really appreciating this workshop. It’s been helpful to me and I think it is to all the other teachers actually.”

Sherrie King

“Just the interaction by itself lets you realize that what you think might be a unique need or a unique thing happening at your school is not something that you alone share but you realize that others also share what you have or sometimes you think your problem is so big and you realize there’s always a bigger problem somewhere else.”

Sharon Mejia

“I think that teachers who don’t come to workshops and think that it’s boring and one thing over and over, I think that they are losing out and they don’t realize it.”

Representatives from the Canadian Rotary Club are also in the country assisting the Ministry of Education to facilitate the workshop.  Delahnie Bain for News Five.

High school ended today, pre and primary school end on Thursday