By Elizabeth Sholtys | Director of Programming
The AIC Education Outreach Program has been running for seven years as of July 2013! It is amazing to think back on all that has been accomplished in these seven years, yet there is still so much more to do in our communities.
We have recently made many changes to improve the quality of educational services provided at the Education Outreach Centre, the first being the hiring of American volunteer Mary Kay Hazel as the new Director of Education Development to work alongside the Education Outreach Program Director. As AIC grows, we feel it is important to maintain a focus on quality, and for the first time in its history, AIC now has a paid employee whose singular focus is to analyze and improve the quality of our largest and most impactful program. Mary Kay and Bunty (EOP Director) have formed a formidable team on the ground and have worked together to implement several new initiatives, including:
In addition to this, as of June, each teacher is also now required to spend an additional one to two hours of preparation time per day at the Education Centre. We have already seen improvement in our teachers’ daily lesson plans, new educational bulletin boards designs, and attention to administrative tasks, grading, student evaluation, and classroom preparation.
The Education Centre was closed to students for break during the month of May, but teachers and staff utilized the time to plan the upcoming year, arrange and catalogue books into a library of resources to be used alongside teaching, and participate in basic computer and internet training so that they will be able to more effectively use these tools to access teaching resources and enrichment materials for their classes. They will continue this training and exposure throughout the year. We have also begun mandatory spoken English classes twice a week for the Marathi-medium teachers, and their spoken English skills are rapidly improving.
Our new in-house counselor (a clinical psychologist) began working at the Education Centre at the start of the new school year. She has a separate office so that she can hold regular counseling sessions with children who need additional support. She has also commenced weekly sensitivity trainings and seminars with the teachers. We are happy to know that we can now better support the emotional and mental health needs of the children, and that we can do so in a financially sustainable way by investing in our staff.
There is so much more on the horizon that we are excited to share soon, and we can't wait to see the results of these initial changes and improvements starting to take effect!
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