Hello Everyone! This is the final report for the Training Session held in Cerca-la-Source

​MIIS TEAM EFL HAITI
 
presents
 
Our first Training Session of April 2017 in the town of Cerca-la-Source
 
Trainers: Dieuseul Saint-Ange, Wilgens Jean & Junior Louimé
Date: April 10-14
Number of hours: 30
Number of trainees: 15-1=14*


The roster:
1- Adlande PIERRE
2- André DORVIL
3- Apheneque JOACHIN
4- Dameson JUSTIME
5- Dewilguens SAINTELLIN
6- Dieuferne ESTINVIL
7- Evelor BELLAMY
8- Gregory APOLLON
9- Guigo MATHURIN
10- Harold THERMIDOR
11- Jeandy AUGUSTIN
12- Lanio DORVIL
13- Mislet DORVIL
14- Wood-Berry ORTHELA
15- Roodler LACROIX*
 
The report is below

1- Introduction
We did a general introduction to begin the first day of the training. It rained a lot in the night prior to the first day of training. We had to make some last minute changes in order to start everything.

2- The use of Ice Breakers.

• After having a snack together, we start each morning session with an Ice Breaker.
• At around 12:00 PM we give a break of one hour and have lunch together. We start the afternoon session with an Ice Breaker as well.
• The use of the Ice Breaker is to ensure that everyone is warmed up and is in the mood to start the session.

 
3- The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)
The concept of CLT was used all throughout the training to ensure that teachers fully understand that students need to use whatever they learn in the lessons like in real world conversations. We had group activities where they have to conduct activities that feature exchanges or interactions between students and groups of students. Most of those activities are simulations because we really need them to pretend they are in the reality instead of just doing an exercise.

4- The use of SWBATs and Lesson Planning
In order to talk about SWBATs, we first talked about Lesson Planning. This includes the following points:

• Having a curriculum for everything you will need to cover throughout the school year.
• Having several units. A unit contains several lessons in it and that can be covered in weeks. All those lessons within the unit have some sort of connections between them that would make us use them in one unit.
• Having lessons for each day of class or sessions. Each lesson may contain several SWBATs. SWBAT stands for Student Will Be Able To. These are basically your goals or objectives for the lesson. For instance, at the end of a lesson you may expect that your “Students Will Be Able To” “use perfectly the passive voice”.
• Set at which level your lesson is applicable. Depending on your student levels some lessons may be too hard or too easy for them. Therefore, in your lesson planning, you should take this into account to ensure that they assimilate better the concepts you’re teaching them in each lesson.

 

• The four learning goals:
• Performative: students are expected to take an action; they have to actually do something.
• Affective: you want to access their feeling about the activities you’re making them do. You want to make sure that they are having fun as they are learning, they are enjoying the session.
• Cognitive: you want them to really understand the concept you’re teaching them in the lesson.
• Metacognitive: you want to develop a passion in them to keep working on how they can better learn, how they can uncover their own learning style which will make them learn even outside of the classroom as well.

 
5- The use of rubrics
All of our teachers in the training have a lot of experience in making assessments for their students. However most of them do not really use a rubric. We explained to them how a rubric can make their job easier, more trustworthy and students will know better how to prepare for their assessment because they know ahead of time what the teacher expect from them. That way it makes it clear that you will do the evaluation more accurately.

6- Graduation
We had a nice ceremony of graduation led by one of the teachers, who is also a pastor. The title of the sermon was “Mas Vale Saber Que Haver”. He was explaining to the audience the importance of learning and acquisition of new knowledge. We handed the certificates to each participant at the end of the mass and head back to the school to have our last meal together before we ended everything in prayers. Our trainees understood that the concepts they learned in the training is applicable to any language teaching class and also some of them are applicable in non-language teaching class as well. We were happy to have at least two strong Spanish teachers in the training who will use those concepts in their Spanish classes too.
 
 
 
*NB: One of our trainees had a problem that caused him to show up in class only the 4th day. Therefore, we weren’t able to provide a certificate to him but promised to let him participate in the next available training so he can fully participate and earn his certificate.

May the gallery below give you a better sense of how fun and enjoyable our Train-the-Trainer Session was with the amazing team of Cerca-la-Source!

We hope you've enjoyed this post and we're waiting for your comments, suggestions as well as your support in order to help up empower our teachers in Haiiti.

Thank you

Dieuseul Saint-Ange