Traveling Teacher Roadshow…Reborn!

Right now I'm enjoying a wonderful week with my parents and Grandpa in Prague.  I just arrived this Saturday and am looking forward to a great week catching up with Mom, Dad, and Grandpa in Prague and Vienna.  It will be tough adjusting to these beautiful old European cities, eating wonderful food and taking hot showers, but I think I'll manage.

"Well," you may be saying to yourself "you probably would manage a whole lot better if you didn't spend your time writing a post for me to read".  Well, my royal 'you,' you bring up a good point.   But you can rest assured that this post was typed the thursday before I left, in the presence of absolutely no family.

Most of you know of the work I've been doing regarding teacher training in this country; throughout this past year I, and another volunteer, Kelly, have been traveling around Azerbaijan delivering trainings to English teachers across the country.  This project, developed by two AZ7s (props to Jenny and Shira) and funded by Rotary Club of Baku, was a great way to teach many teachers new methods.

However, when looking to the future of a project like this, a few problems became evident.  First of all, it was a huge commitment of time on Kelly's and my part.  There were times where our total travel time for a single one hour training would be 24 hours.  And that training had 6 teachers.  Certainly it was fun to visit PCVs and see the country, but just as certainly-it was inefficient.  Secondly, this method of training was completely unsustainable.  The fact is every training required an overnight stay somewhere, something that is completely out of the question for an Azeri counterpart to do.  If we ever wanted this project to survive beyond Peace Corps Volunteers we had to ensure that an Azerbaijani woman (English teachers are generally women) could reasonably participate in it.

So, we came up with a new project.  We're still traveling in this project, but we're traveling across the country to train motivated English teachers to hold a training of their own.  We've divided the country into 5 regions and will be holding a training in each one.  These will be longer, more involved trainings; in addition to interactive teaching methods, we'll discuss presentation skills, lesson planning for a training, and steps to take when setting up a training.  Our project goal is to create a country wide network of Azerbaijani and American English teachers who are prepared to deliver trainings in their own and nearby communities on Interactive Teaching Methods.

And we have a lot of support for this.  Three AZ9 PCVs are will support Kelly and I, acting as point people for this project.  They'll follow up with workshop participants and encourage them as they experiment with this new skill.  AzETA, the Azerbaijani English Teacher's Association is helping us advertise to its already existing network in the regions and has provided permission for use of their, not a small contribution in a country obsessed with certificates.

And, perhaps best of all, the US Embassy is funding this project in whole.  All workshops are paid for, all travel for failitators and participants to the workshops is paid for, and all travel teachers may do to hold their own training is paid for.  Sustainability means we have to minimize both time and money commitments so we're excited to fully fund teacher's participation in this.  We've even received funding to hold a handoff meeting between the AZ9s and Kelly and I where we can discuss the future for this project before Kelly and I finish our service.

Our first training is Saturday, March 31st and these past two weeks have been spent writing a new workshop from scratch, creating all sorts of handouts, and talking up the event in Mingechevir and surrounding communities.  Kelly and I have been working on this project for a while, and its exciting to see it become real as a fully written, and funded, training.

I'm really excited for where this project can go.  In every aspect of this project we are working towards sustainability, the main metric of success is the number of teachers who present the information they learn and bring it to their communities.  We want to get Azerbaijani teachers to become responsible for other Azerbaijani teacher's development.  I'm excited and optimistic to share our success with you.