Training Rural Teachers

Skilled teachers are the cornerstone of effective education. In Guatemala, public schools are underfunded to the point of neglect, and teachers enter the profession with almost no specific training in how to teach children to read. These young educators begin their  careers with minimal classroom management skills, little knowledge of curriculum development and little support for improving their skills. The results are poor student performance and high dropout rates, especially among girls and indigenous Guatemalans. By training hundreds of teachers, we are improving education at its core.

Quality Ongoing Training

In both group and one-on-one settings, we provide dynamic, interactive training for over 350 teachers in 39 rural schools throughout Guatemala’s Central Highlands. Each teacher in our program receives six intensive training sessions per year—more than three times what they receive from any other source. And these sessions are far more effective than the occasional trainings offered by other sources. We also provide ongoing training to more than 180 young indigenous men and women from remote villages, students who grew up in extreme poverty and are now studying to become teachers when they return to their communities.

Practical Effective Training for Teachers

Our training sessions are conducted by Guatemalan literacy staff who live in the areas where they work, and know them intimately. In group and classrooms-based sessions, we focus on giving teachers specific instructional techniques that engage children in books. We work closely with all teachers in our program to help them create and implement effective reading and writing activities that improve comprehension, retention and critical thinking skills for their students. This training and support increases the teachers’ confidence, makes their teaching more enjoyable and helps them become more successful educators. For most of the teachers in our program, these approaches are not only new, they are revolutionary.

Backing Training with Resources

As part of our training program, we provide each teacher with storybooks, textbooks, an extensive Child Aid teaching manual and instructional materials for use in the classroom. For nearly all of the teachers, these are the first such resources they have had. Through Our Books to Villages program, we supply teachers in the most isolated schools with monthly rotating stores of books provided by our partner libraries.