Training Teachers

If you asked me what my favorite part of service is and what I enjoy doing the most, the answer I would give you is teacher trainings. First of all, it gives me an opportunity to talk, a lot, to a captive audience. I get three hours to spew my opinion. There are few things that I enjoy more.

On one hand, with teacher trainings I do not get the opportunity to work hand-in-hand with a teaching and really coach them and watch them grow. However, I can reach so many more teachers than I can reach through co-planning. I don’t have the time to cover 20 different teachers on a weekly basis. Teacher trainings let me cover that gap, and best of all, I don’t have to deal with any annoying kids!

Best of all for the teacher trainings, the preparation that I put into each session allows me to deeply study and understand entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurship curriculum. I think that these sessions have given me an edge over my peers who do not offer teacher trainings, because I have uncovered so many important connections between themes in the curriculum, and I can use those insights to the advantage of my teaching counterparts and students. In addition, I have identified weaknesses in the curriculum and the teacher’s handbook, and I can pass those on to all of the teachers in León.

The Volunteer before me did a great job laying the groundwork for teacher trainings, and I have continued right we she left off. By the end of my service I will have given more than 20 teacher trainings, mostly focused on the entrepreneurship curriculum. On a typical day there are around 15 participants, but I have had up to 38. The sessions have also made me a very confident public speaker. If you can get through three hours in Spanish, anything less than that in your native language, no matter the audience, is a cake walk.

So far 2016 is off to an incredible start. I offered two trainings in February. We invited assistant principals to the first one, which is very important so that they see the importance of the class and give the teachers the support that they need. I was nervous about the second training, which was just this past Wednesday, because I was focusing on idea generation, creativity, and innovation. I didn’t do a great job with those themes last year, and I see a great need to develop those themes, so I really wanted to deliver an excellent training on the subjects. I think that I did a great job. The training lasted for about three hours. I would have liked to keep going, but anything more than three hours and the teachers get very antsy (which is ironic, because they expect their students to patiently learn for four hours and thirty minutes every day, no matter how hot the classrooms get). If I were to do another training on idea generation, creativity, and innovation I would make it into a morning and afternoon workshop with a lunch break built in so that I could capture the teachers’ attentions for longer.

I’m lucky that my boss observed one of my teacher trainings last year and was very impressed. Since then they have asked me to speak with Volunteers about teacher trainings on three occasions, most recently at our Entrepreneurial Education Volunteer conference in January, and coming up for the new group of trainees that arrive in just a few weeks. After the Volunteer conference another Volunteer came up to me and told me that I should think about becoming a motivational speaker. This recognition, as well as the momentum I feel for my teacher trainings this year, has me inspired to write about the themes I have conveyed to the teachers here in León to my wider reader audience. Many aspects of my trainings are certainly applicable in the United States and all around the world, not just in Nicaragua:

The Importance of Teaching Entrepreneurship

Idea Generation, Creativity, and Innovation