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Our Project Sites |
| Mandalay, Burma. We are currently working
with a charitable school in Mandalay, Burma that offers
free education and vocational training to over 7,000
children in its community.
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Past Projects |
Teacher Training:
Since its founding in 2006, OPA has hosted two Teacher Training Workshops in the winter of 2007 and 2008. By hosting these workshops, OPA hopes to accomplish the following goals:
- Promote cooperation and peer-support amongst teachers
- Address common classroom instruction problems and present methodology to resolve these problems
- Introduce creative and active techniques to incorporate vocabulary, group work, discussion and games into the classroom
- Offer one-on-one consultations and classroom observations to personally address problems in the classroom
- Encourage the use of English amongst the teachers and build confidence in speaking English
The 2007 OPA Teacher Training Workshop
Length: 30 hours
Participants: 36 teachers of different subjects and grades
Topics Covered: Why Teach English, Motivating Students, Student Assessment, Using Visuals as a Teaching Tool, Teaching Grammar, Vocabulary, Writing, Speaking, Reading, Listening and Prompting Conversation.
Summary:
OPA volunteers incorporated anecdotes form common classroom experiences to demonstrate strategies regarding controlling classrooms, disciplining students and incorporating more group activities and teaching methods into the curriculum. Simultaneously, OPA volunteers recognized that teaching environments in the U.S. are radically different from Burma; they customized the workshops to meet the teachers’ needs by observing their classes and working with the teachers to tackle the problems listed above. The workshops exposed the teachers to teaching ideas and techniques that they could employ directly in their classrooms to create a better learning environment for the students. Though we trained only 36 teachers, each teacher teaches anywhere from fifty to two hundred students, so indirectly the workshops impact a community of at least 1,800 children, as well as the teachers’ cohort of 150 people.
The 2008 OPA Teacher Training Workshop
Length: 20 hours
Participants: 30 teachers of all subjects and grades, excluding accelerated learning teachers
Topics Covered: Why We Teach, Classroom Management, Maintaining a Positive Classroom Environment, Giving Constructive Criticism, Indentifying and Accommodating Different Learning Styles, Teaching Mixed Level Classes, Assessment, Teaching Vocabulary, Utilizing Groups in the Classroom, Encouraging Discussion in the Classroom and Enacting Change in the Classroom.
Summary:
OPA volunteers led a workshop with a similar structure to that of the previous year. However, several differences made this workshop a new and fruitful one. First, this workshop was open only to teachers of “normal class,” meaning teachers who do not teach accelerated classes. Making this distinction allowed OPA volunteers to focus on the specific problems that teachers face: large class sizes, lower English levels and a wide range of levels within the classroom. Second, while OPA volunteers again observed classes and offered one-on-one consultations to deal with specific problems that teachers faced, in the second workshop, OPA volunteers also helped teachers implement the methods reviewed in the workshops. Third, this workshop incorporated much more small and large group discussion, helping to close the language barrier. By giving teachers time to discuss methodology and classroom scenarios first in Burmese and then in English, OPA workshops built a foundation for peer support, both in teaching and learning English. Since teachers teach classes anywhere from 50 to 150 students, the impact of the 2008 OPA workshop offered to 30 teachers reaches at least 1,500 students, not to mention the teachers’ coworkers.
English Education
The 2008 English Conversation Class
Length: 10 hours
Participants: 32 faculty members, monks and teachers
Topics Covered: Introducing Yourself, Interviewing Others, What is Your Dream?, Talking about Your School, Talking about your Job, Talking about Burmese Culture, Independent and Dependent Clauses, Conditional Sentence Structures, Homophones, Pronunciation
Summary:
This was the first chance that OPA volunteers had to teach English Conversation. Every day, for one hour OPA volunteers taught English Conversation to a class of various speaking levels. Because participants worked at the school, they were unable to take regularly scheduled English classes. OPA’s English conversation classes focused on increasing fluency and accuracy. Each day, participants wrote in their journal responding to a specific topic. Then, at the beginning of each class, participants discussed their journal entries freely. Following this discussion, OPA volunteers presented a lesson addressing basic conversation patterns, pronunciation and grammar. Then, participants had a chance to learn and use proper English. In this way, the 32 participants increased both fluency and accuracy.
Raising Awareness and Funds
In the past two years, OPA volunteers raised almost $3,500 through active fundraising at the following venues. This money directly supports former and current students at our project site, as well as the school itself by providing it with supplies:
- Gwangju International Center, Gwangju, South Korea
- Red Fiesta, Gwangju, South Korea
- Forest Hills High School, New York, USA
- Fulbright Korea Teaching Fellows
- Cambridge University
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Current/On-Going Projects |
| We are preparing another workshop,
to be held in winter 2008-09 at our project site to
offer individual teacher consultation to address the
specific problems that each teacher has in his or her
classroom. We are currently planning the exact curriculum
for the future workshop and identifying the tools, resources,
and skills we will need to conduct it. We are trying
to incorporate:
- More teacher and trainer interaction through assigning
an experienced trainer to each teacher and having
the trainer guide the teacher with her classroom problems,
- More demonstrations of content based activities,
not only pertinent to English language, but also mathematics,
science, and history
- Increased trainer role in the teacher’s classroom
so the trainer can demonstrate how a specific teaching
method could be executed, and the teacher can begin
to apply the methods in his/her daily routine (since
initiation and habit creation is the hardest part).
We continue to financially support education and living
expenses of rescued children from high-risk areas, and
higher education of three very talented high-school
graduates from Mandalay. |
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