The Teaching Mission at VOH...

The students line up for end-of-year treats!

I'd like to first talk about the work I did at VOH, and then spend my other posts sharing some stories that touched my heart throughout the week. So bear with me as this one is pretty detailed about our work as teachers...

A good portion of our trip was devoted to teaching demonstration classes and putting on a Staff Development for the teachers at Hope Academy. This was my second year to work with the teachers.

DEMONSTRATION CLASSES:

In the mornings, each of our group would teach a "demonstration class," and the teachers at Hope Academy would sit in and observe our teaching methods. I taught two of the three mornings, focusing on the JHS 1 class (7th grade) and the JHS 2 class (8th grade). At Hope Academy, there is no reading class, so I taught reading comprehension skills through a social studies lesson using Weekly Reader magazines.

The first article that I taught to the JHS 1 classes was about contaminated water around the world -- something that is a huge problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Honestly, I completely BOMBED the first lesson! My timing was totally off, and I didn't focus on the important stuff. It's just so difficult to just step into another classroom (especially in another culture) and be a wonderful teacher right from the beginning! So, after the 45 minutes was up and I had gotten nowhere, I promised that class that I would re-do that lesson another day (and they held me to it, lemmetellya! I ended up teaching three classes one day...).

Two teachers were observing me that day, so they got to see me fail...which was good. Sometimes, I feel that we come across as the self-proclaimed "experts" when we do these demonstration classes and staff development. We've even been told that "kids in America don't have the problems and behavior issues that kids in Ghana have." I think it was good to see a lesson just completely bomb to see that it's okay every once in awhile. I talked with those two teachers afterwards about it, and I had a chance to redeem myself in the next class.

The second class I taught that first day went MUCH better. I introduced the lesson with the word of the day, made up a motion to say with the definition (to become the attention-getter for the class period), did a K-W-L chart with the class, passed out whiteboards for each pair of students, had the students read the article in pairs, completed the K-W-L chart, and closed out the lesson. Whew!

The next time I taught the demonstration classes, I went to the JHS 2 classes (after re-doing the lesson in that first JHS 1 class). I toted 18 white boards, a bag of 50 dry erase markers, eraser cloths, and Weekly Reader articles about plate tectonics up to the third floor classrooms of the school.

SIX teachers came to observe me that day! This was great considering we came at the end of their school year, when they have to grade the final exams which count for 70% of the overall grade. Some of our demonstration classes seemed to be babysitting classes, as the teachers would take that opportunity to leave and accomplish other things...which kind of defeated the whole point. But by the end of our time there, things were better. It has just been a very difficult year for the teachers (which is another story for another time).

The teachers actually walked around to see how the students were writing questions from each level, just like they had in Staff Development the day before! (More on that later in the post.)

So, "plate tectonics" was our word of the day, and the students had NO IDEA what that meant. They also hadn't learned about the Earth's core, mantle, and crust (and this was 8th grade). Kind of shocking, but I think by the end of the day, the students got it. Whenever I would shout out, "PLATE TECTONICS!", the students would chant, "the enormous moving pieces of the Earth's shell!" while they moved their hands like they are shuffling dominoes. By the end of class, the definition had been erased from the board, and the students had it memorized! Yay!

The article was about how two tectonic plates underneath eastern Africa were shifting so much that one day, Africa might be split into two pieces! They were so excited to read about it because it was about their continent -- something they care deeply about.

We did a cause/effect Thinking Map called a "multi-flow map" that the students (and especially the teachers) LOVED. I gave the first example of cause/effect from the article, and the students searched for other examples that we later shared with the class.

Next year, I hope we can do some more with Thinking Maps in our Staff Development there.

STAFF DEVELOPMENT:

We had three full afternoons of Staff Development and one Celebration Day. Our Staff Development this year focused on:

1. Learning Styles and Multiple Intelligences
2. Shy/Timid/Difficult Students and Love & Logic Discipline
3. Scaffolded Questioning for the older group (grades 6-8) and Problem Solving for the younger group (grades 1-4)
A group of teachers works together, including Madam Chelsea, who has taught at Hope Academy this year, too! She's from Portland, OR, and went to Oklahoma Christian.

Learning Styles & Multiple Intelligences

I headed this one up with two of the other teachers. We began with our word of the day (just like in my demonstration classes), which was "Learning Styles." Every time I'd yell that out as an attention-getter, everyone would stop and chant, "Preferred ways by which people learn," as they touched their eyes, ears, and then wiggled from head to toe. They LOVED this! My goal was to introduce this method of vocabulary to them as a way that incorporates ALL the learning styles. We tied the Multiple Intelligence training to discussing with students what they already like to do, in hopes that more relationships would be formed between student and teacher, and so students could begin to think about future careers.

One group of TEACHERS drew this on their white board during their 5 minutes of "free drawing time."

Shy/Timid/Difficult Students and Love & Logic

If we had to do this all over again, we'd nix the Love & Logic stuff. It's just so out of culture for this school. By failing here, though, we're learning about what is needed and what is not needed at these staff developments. We feel that the shy/timid/difficult student discussion was helpful, though. I wasn't in this training, so all of this is from what Debbie and Tammy (two of our other teachers) reported back.

Scaffolded Questioning

Megan did a wonderful job with this training! We gave the teachers a laminated, bright yellow page with Bloom's question stems and had each group write a question for each level to center around a learning goal. The teachers were already familiar with this terminology, so it was a good refresher, and a new twist to what they already know. Megan was accoladed at the Celebration Day for her work here, so I know it was beneficial.

Problem Solving

Kami and Amy did a great job with this one, but I think they needed more time with it. Again, I wasn't at this training, so I don't have a whole lot to report on it.

Amy teaches the 1-4 Grade Teachers about Problem Solving.

CELEBRATION DAY

So, it was a tough week, but it was also similar to our own Staff Developments in the States. The teachers needed time to grade exams, it was the end of the year, the students were already technically DONE with school, and it was hard to focus. But I think we grew a lot together through the experience.

Celebration Day was great because we all went around and shared the highlights from the week:

• watching the teachers work in cooperative groups together
• seeing the teachers wiggle as they chanted the "Learning Styles" definition (which we did all together at Celebration Day!)
• realizing that students are capable of constructing more than we sometimes give them credit for, if only we may give them the tools to do so
• remembering our past trainings and building on them
• seeing how much energy Tawana has (she single-handedly led the pre-school teachers in a separate training which was amazing!!)
Tawana has captivated these little ones!

I know this has been a long post. It was good for my processing to write it all down, though. The next posts will be shorter (I hope) and more to-the-point. If you have read this entire thing, you are to be commended!

CLAP-CLAP-WHOOSH!!!