Summer English Seminars

Every year, the Panamanian Ministry of Education hosts training seminars as a developmental opportunity for its employees, a chance to learn some new methods. A few volunteers and I worked on sessions for the English teachers and professors.

The theme was Integrating Technology in the Classroom, or something along those lines. We did our best to incorporate that into our seminars. As you can see, we used a projector, a PowerPoint presentation, and video clips during our workshop. It sounds like I'm reaching, I know...However, there are many deeper problems besides teachers not using technology enough in the classroom, such as antiquated methods, lack of resources, lack of motivation, etc. We felt it was better to address methodologies and techniques more realistic with expectations placed on them from without, something a bit more finite.

We presented on two topics, both methods we volunteers learned during our training. We hope they encourage teachers to plan lessons, thereby greatly improving their chance to succeed in transferring their (occasionally) stellar knowledge of English. I would like to believe that our topics/methods are fun and engaging ways to teach language.

Our first topic was TPRS, or Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. It's something my high school Spanish teacher occasionally did with us. Here you see the teachers really getting into their lesson during the workshop portion.

Sometimes they behaved well, and other times, who knows? A cultural difference, perhaps. It leads me to believe that age has very little to do with behavior in a classroom setting. If allowed, people will act a certain way no matter what age. I thought that since these were teachers, professionals usually on the other end of the classroom, they would understand our desire for an attentive, engaged audience. Yet sometimes people would answer phone calls during sessions, talk, and be generally disruptive. I was a bit offended, but thankfully it didn't take away too much from the sessions.

Here you see a group performing "Are You My Mother," the famous children's story by P.D. Eastman in the style of Reader's Theatre, another one of our topics. We hope it can get kids excited about reading, which is not much a part of the culture out here in the interior.

As work-related business can often be here, things were occasionally lacklustre, disorganized, and frustrating, but the teachers seemed to have gotten a lot out of the seminars. I just hope they take these new methods and try and implement them into their classrooms for the benefit of their students. I can only hope to have some sort of impact. We'll see.