Workshop Planning

July 18
We met with three supervisors from three different school districts at the Municipal Education Office to plan our teacher workshops today. School ends on July 29th, so our timing is unfortunate with final exams and report cards. Our target group are the UTTDBE (Untrained Teachers in Diploma in Basic Education) teachers. These teachers teach in the villages during the year and attend classes during their breaks.

We started with the logistics first and the difficulties were surprising. First of all we had to address the long distances and time the teachers would have to travel, how we could provide food (there are no catering services), and how we would let the teachers know (there is no electricity, email or fax in the rural areas). We decided to hold the two day conference in two different locations, to make the travelling a little easier for the teachers. One location has electricity, while the other doesn't. Our plan had been to use our laptop and an LCD projector that we are trying to purchase and have sent from Accra. Fortunately one of the supervisors had some chart paper and we bought a black marker.

Programme was next on the Agenda, and we shared our plan to focus on planning: long range, weekly forecast and lesson notes. The Ghana Education Service has an excellent handbook on lesson notes preparation and teaching learning materials. They also have a teaching syllabus for every subject. Teachers however do not have their own copies, in fact in the rural schools they are lucky if they even have a copy of each document. Photocopying is very expensive and not an option for us.

However, Calgary Catholic teachers are a resourceful lot, so we are now busy preparing our two Conferences for July 25-26 and July 27-28.