Friday 20 February 2009

Training, the bad and the good.

I used to think that the problems I had with training were quite interesting as they would make a good blog entry. Now I’m getting bored. On Tuesday, the 8:00 (local time) car was not in sight – we finally left at 08:25 after the driver was tracked down. Arriving at the school where we had training organised by one of the Vice Deans there were no teachers – one lot were “too busy” and the other lot claimed they had not been told.

Sometimes you get very close to giving up. This came on top of my counterpart, who I had arranged to accompany me from the college to the local school at 3:00 (local) ringing me from the school at 4:00 (wrong place and wrong time.) We doubled checked tomorrow’s training (as much good as that will do).

The latest problem with the CPD course at the local school is that they want certificates but also are getting the facilitators to falsify attendance at the training. I tried to explain that if we just give out certificates to teachers whether they attend / participate / do the work or not then all the certificates are, are pieces of paper.

On Wednesday, over the day we did successfully manage to train the two shifts of teachers (it’s a big school and half the students and teachers come in the morning, and half in the afternoon). They seemed much keener than teachers in other schools, so there is hope for this seventh school we have trained. During the time between training sessions, I had lunch at someone’s friend’s house. They pay 100ETB per month rent (£5.) The walls (which are mud-based) are covered in newspapers and old product packets cut open and stuck there.

Thursday was also successful. We again performed training to a two-shift school – the largest in our cluster with 50 teachers and around 3000 students. It all went well and they do seem interested.

We have one more training session next week to two smaller schools together and then the task I started about one year ago (when I first knew about the CPD course) will be fully in action in all ten schools of the cluster. Our next task is to monitor the progress in all the schools.

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