Day One of the Dominica Teaching Project.

So day one of the program here in Dominica is over. We arrived at the Convent School and prepared for the opening Ceremonies. The minister of Education arrived and spoke about the value of the program. His Chief Educational Officer spoke and challenged the teachers to teach in innovative ways and to meet the learning needs of all the students.

Then I did my opening speech, responding to the ministers challenge. I introduced the team. We received a warm welcome. The Dominica Association of Teachers President Mrs. Nicholas gave a very passionate speech and offered her own challenges to the Minister of Education.

Then it was off to teach our opening class. In the Administration group we had 40 students in a room designed for 30. We had to remove the desks, so there was enough room for the participants.

First we did Headbands, a game where you are given a card face down and then you place it on your forehead. The goal is to sort by order and suit with out speaking. The goal is to show that asa a team you can do things that individuals can not do on their own.

Then we found a person in the group that we did not know and learned enough about them to introduce them to the rest of the group.

Then it was time to get to work. We used an Learning Style Inventory to establish the learning styles of the participants. We graphed this on a pie chart to give a visual representation of their learning style. We then sorted into "like groups" and did a little practice activity to use the predominant learning styles to teach three things about a school. It was wonderful, we had news casts, blackboard full of graphs, a song, posters, role playing, discussions, and the naturalistic group (new intelligence from Gardner) that used recycled materials to beautify the room. All we had time to do after that was debrief. I tried to convince the logical group (the graphs) to sing the song ....... yea it didn't work. Then there was some discussion about why do this when they still have to write high stakes tests. I assured them that they would get better results if the students learned the material with activities designed to suit their learning style than if learning style was ignored. Then it was time to issue the exit tickets and have them describe what they hoped to learn over the course of the two weeks.

Then it was time to meet with my co-tutor and plan for tomorrow.