Teacher Training Spotlight: Advance in the Dominican Republic Successful Hosts its First Workshop

By Kate Pavelich

January 20, 2022

Geynmi Pichardo, FHI 360 teacher training consultant, presents at the Advance Dominican Republic’s first teacher training workshop.
Geynmi Pichardo, FHI 360 teacher training consultant, presents at the Advance Dominican Republic’s first teacher training workshop.

The Advance Program in the Dominican Republic held its first teacher training workshop in February 2021. The virtual workshop, titled “Didactic-methodological strategies workshop for higher technical training under the competency-based approach” was led by FHI 360 teacher training consultant, Geynmi Pichardo, as part of teacher professional development for the Program’s selected technical higher education partner institutions: the Community Higher Technical Institute (ITSC), from which 126 teachers and staff from administrative and faculty support services participated, and the Technological Institute of the Americas (ITLA), from which 98 teachers and administrative support staff participated.

At the start of the workshop, the teachers learned how the Advance Program supports their institutions in preparing young people who graduate to meet the demands of their employment sector as they seek a new or better job and enter the world of work.

During the workshop, participants had the opportunity to fill out self-evaluation surveys that included questions about knowledge and training of the competency-based approach, self-evaluations of their work, questions about having their students self-evaluate, and questions about their practice in using instructive feedback with their students as a method when teaching.

In developing the workshop, the consultant began by evaluating how much the participants knew about the competency approach. She found that only 16 percent knew “a lot,” 56 percent responded that they knew “enough,” and the other 28 percent categorized their knowledge on the subject as “little.” Ms. Pichardo then had the participants self-evaluate using the question, “Do I believe that my classes are taught from the competency approach?” The results yielded 129 participants who answered, “to a certain extent.” While selecting their answers to the question, participants also commented about their willingness and enthusiasm to implement the methods learned in the workshop in their classes.

At the conclusion of the workshop, participants commended the consultant’s presentation for being comprehensible and for its usefulness in covering a highly relevant topic of the competency-based approach for teaching. The teachers also showed great enthusiasm in attending future training workshops through the Advance Program in a variety of relevant topics, including socioemotional skills.

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