Action for Education – my proudest Peace Corps moment

From My pics

Amanda and I were the main planners.

I’ll be leaving my community and finishing Peace Corps in about one month (!!!), but this weekend some of my favorite fellow Peace Corps volunteers and I hosted a three-day conference for educators in one last hurrah of ambitious projects before this whole show is over.

The idea came from talking with friends from my education group who are about to finish up service. We’ve seen what a terrible education Dominican kids get but also have felt inadequate for the task of training teachers to use better practices in the classroom because none of us are teachers ourselves. We thought we could get volunteers to do teacher training if they had a resource like a manual of sessions to give the teachers with all the proven practices and if we introduced them and their community members the topics via a conference. Peace Corps DR does tons of youth conferences with activities and educational talks about all sorts of things — the environment, sexual health, entrepreneurship, and in the education sector our youth conference has been focused on computer skills for youth — but really we could have a bigger impact by doing conferences for leaders, who affect the entire community. And nowhere is this type of orientation needed more than with Dominican educators, who have some very backward ideas about what education is. The DR is far from the poorest country in Latin America, but it is second to last in the quality of its educational system. And I have really come to be a passionate believer in education as the key to improving quality of life and empowering the people in all countries, not just in the developing world.

For me, this weekend was taking a step into the unknown. Throughout my service, I have avoided complex projects that require a lot of teamwork since I feel that they are more likely to fail. I have avoided taking leadership positions in Peace Corps, especially ones that require planning, because it’s not my forte. I’ve been content with the low-hanging fruit, as I call it, of doing fool-proof youth groups and other small, short, manageable projects. But this idea was so compelling that I ended up in a leadership position and, gracias a dios, in collaboration with some of the best PC volunteers I know. So I ended up managing a US $2,500 grant, including withdrawing $25,000 pesos cash from the bank and carrying it around in my money belt for the first and probably last time. But it was worth it. This weekend inspired Dominican and volunteer participants alike and was my proudest moment in Peace Corps. I realized as soon as we got started with the event that I had never felt so much like we were addressing, finally, THE ISSUE that I came here for.

The conference brought together 13 Dominican principals and teachers. We wanted to start small since it was our first time doing the conference. We used a lot of dinamicas – fun group activities that get people participating and the blood flowing – and other group management techniques like – clap once if you hear me, clap twice if you hear me until you have everyone’s attention – music and a festive atmosphere to model the principles of education we were promoting. We gave charlas (educational talks or sessions) on the importance of education (Did you know that education is tied to maternal mortality, higher incomes, lower rates of teen pregnancy, and healthier families?); teaching with the brain in mind to create the richest learning environment possible for students; how to manage student behavior through a system of rewards and consequences; and how to lesson plan for maximum critical thinking practice. We also talked about what the role of parents is in the education of their children and how schools can teach parents about their responsibilities for the benefit of the students and the school.

I wasn’t sure how the educators would respond to a lot of new ideas about education from a bunch of young, inexperienced Americans. But thanks to the help of a former Teach For America corps member and a Fulbright teaching grantee, we had the authority to convince the participants that some of our ideas could work and truly were worth the effort. Overall, the educators had a great time leaving the commitments and worries of their everyday lives behind and having a weekend to network with new people and think more freely than in the constraints of life in this difficult country.

We have a lot of ideas on how to make the next conference even better and hope that the next one is even bigger. Our dream is for this to become an at least annual conference, ideally right before the start of the new school year. We hope education volunteers can use it as a springboard to do trainings with the entire faculty of a school, so that the administrators can put new policies and expectations of the teachers and make some lasting adjustments for the benefit of their students. We’ve seen this model work in other Peace Corps programs, but I think it would be hard to argue that any one of those is more important than a good education, the fundamental human right.

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We were so excited as we set up for the conference that all our planning was finally coming together!

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The Dominican teachers and principals did a vocabulary activity that showed the difference between the traditional way of teaching, which would be writing definitions on a board, and the way taking the brain into account, which had participants have to pair up the word and the definition.

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Leslie, a Fulbright English teaching grantee, lent her expertise as a teacher in the US and in the DR to the charla on teaching with the brain in mind.

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The principal of the school where I work in El Limon paired up with Jean to create a matching set of word and definition.

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Natalie, a former Teach for America corps member who is now a youth Peace Corps Volunteer, talked about how teachers can use proactive classroom management to allow less opportunities for students to misbehave, for example, by creating “procedures” for various points in the class, such as entering and leaving.

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Natalie also taught the participants about using Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchy of critical thinking skills, to plan lessons that encourage critical thinking in students.

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My dear friend Katie helped demonstrate the importance of writing an effective action plan for their schools by pretending to be an alien who followed participants’ instructions to make a sandwich. No fue facil. It wasn’t easy.

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Our creative seating arrangement. Breaking all the rules!

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We did feedback with the participants to see what they liked and didn’t like about the conference. Gaby, the principal at the school where Amanda works, wrote that she liked everything and didn’t like leaving. Thanks, Gaby.

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One of the participants wrote us this touching note. It says: Peace Corps girls (we were all ladies), congratulations on such a wonderful job. We wish you success in your lives. May God protect you always, you are very brave! You are leaders who inspire the rest to work. Signed, Andrea from Constanza.

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At the end we had cake and gave the participants certificates of recognition, two extremely important ways to acknowledge an event in Dominican culture. My profes and I kinda blew it with our picture.