Professional Development comes to Luz y Verdad

By Katie

A few weeks ago Escuela Luz y Verdad was blessed with an opportunity for professional development. I went to school that day thinking we were just going to have a regular teachers' meeting, so I was astonished to see Professor María Rodriguez of Calvin College show up to do a training for the teachers at Luz y Verdad and the teachers of a nearby town.

I had Prof. María Rodriguez´s sister as a professor in the Spanish department at Calvin, and her other sister Blanca works here in Honduras for Worldwide Christian Schools. Accompanying María and Blanca was Elaine Helmus, who is a former missionary with CRWM and was integral in starting the school about 20 years ago. It was truly an honor to have them come to visit our little school.

Professor María gave an excellent workshop on teaching strategies for improving reading skills and examples for providing more hands-on, high-interest learning activities in the classroom. It was exciting to see Professor María talk about these things for several reasons. First, the examples she gave were very much in-line with the style of teaching that I try to promote by example in our school. This style is contrary to the more popular mode of copying off the board or doing book work. But María, who was born and raised in Honduras, was able to be very convincing to the teachers that we need to shift our methods to reflect changing times where group work skills and creativity are necessary for success in life. She explained that, although this was not how they were taught, it is a necessary shift that needs to be made by today´s educators. Also, parents might be skeptical if they see that students play games all day long, so the teachers need to educate the parents on the new learning techniques too. Professor María said in a few short minutes what I´m hoping the teachers glean from me in the two years that I´ll be with them.

The results of the workshop were immediate. The next day the English teacher, Marcos, developed an activity that combined an activity that Professor María had shown with one I had done with another group the week before. It was encouraging for Marcos to see that not only did the students learn the new vocabulary better, but they behaved much better too. Now he is incorporating pre-planned activities such as this into his classes more often. Another teacher, Cendy, had her kids create posters for something they were learning, and those posters are now hanging in her classroom. You can see in this picture that teacher Jarmin also hangs student work in her classroom and has the students interact with it.

Bit by bit change is coming to Luz y Verdad. With the support of trainings from highly-qualified professionals like Professor María Rodriguez, these changes can become permanent pieces of our identity as a school, so that we can better reflect our calling to be a Christian school dedicated to real learning for ALL of the students.