Training of Trainers

Peace Corps Volunteers in Belize have been focused for the past several years on a project to increase the use of Belize's health and family life education (HFLE) curriculum. This is a new curriculum from the Ministry of Education that all primary and secondary schools throughout the country are required to teach weekly. Basically it is a sex ed curriculum but it incorporates a variety of lessons that also include self-esteem, building relationships, communication, and good touch/bad touch. Volunteers and the Ministry have found that teachers aren't using it though and often refuse to teach many of the subjects. Last year a group of volunteers completed a study to learn why teachers weren't teaching HFLE in their classrooms. The results weren't surprising but did give them a starting point to work towards implementing the curriculum more widely. Teachers said they were embarrassed and uncomfortable teaching these topics to students, they think its the parents job to teach their children, they state its against their religion, and they say they don't have enough time during the day to teach this along with all the required subjects.

A group of volunteers that have since finished their service put together a manual of activities and ideas on how to teach these topics. The curriculum provided from the Ministry is huge and overwelming without any specific ideas and lessons plans so the hope was this Peace Corps manual would enable teachers. Last year volunteers organized a training for a small group of teachers that went well. This year, the group met with the Ministry and together they agreed to train all of the upper primary school teachers across the country in using this manual and teaching the curriculum in their classrooms.

I became involved in the project soon after arriving and have enjoyed getting to know other volunteers, meet with folks from the Ministry, plan the trainings, and write lesson plans. Belize recently (I believe) became a recipient of PEPFAR funding (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and Peace Corps is able to apply for grants for projects. The group received funding to carry out these trainings since they contain a large HIV/AIDS component. The plan was to hold two separate two-day trainings in the north and south of the country for 5-10 teachers from each district that were identified as leaders and comfortable teaching these subjects. After these trainings, these teachers will turn around and train all of the other upper primary school teachers in their district during two days in August (hence the title training of trainers). Every August all teachers throughout the country must participate in two weeks of training. We felt very fortunate that the Ministry was allowing Peace Corps to use two of these days to educate teachers on using the manual created by Peace Corps Volunteers.

Last week was the first of the trainings. Monday and Tuesday we led the training in Belize City and then repeated the training in Dangriga on Thursday and Friday. Myself and five other volunteers facilitated the entire training and led discussions with the participants on how to teach HFLE. We had about 30 participants in each training which also included staff from district education centers and new Peace Corps Volunteers that will also work with this curriculum. Topics covered during the training included: self-esteem, dealing with feelings, sexuality, puberty, sexual anatomy, STIs, HIV/AIDS, and stigma and discrimination. We had an HIV+ individual as a guest speaker. He shared his personal story and how he never had anyone that believed in him, built up his self-esteem, or taught him about his sexuality. He also discussed issues of stigma and discrimination in this country. The teachers were then broken into small groups where they had to prepare their own lessons using the manual and present to the group.

Overall the trainings were a huge success. Reading through the evaluations we were amazed to see the biggest complaint was they wished the training was longer. This is after we were concerned teachers would refuse to attend during their one month vacation. We felt the teachers really opened up and were excited and willing to discuss many difficult topics. Some participants had a good deal of background knowledge while we found others really had a lot to learn in order to be able to share with other teachers and their students. Along with knowledge, we tried to provide teachers with resources they can use in the classrooms and information to answer questions their students may pose.

Pictures from the week are posted on my Picasa page.