Training & professional Development

SUMMER TRAINING FOR TEACHERS –2009

Ever since the doors of DAS opened in 1979, summer has been a busy time for teachers at DAS.   Every year, all teachers are in the school without students to participate in training workshops, committees, and other projects to raise the level of student learning.  2009 was a particularly busy year, however, since we had four weeks in July and another 2-3 weeks after Eid al Fitr.

In July, when our students were already out enjoying their vacations, DAS teachers spent the entire month with three internationally recognized consultants who worked with us on revamping our approach to unit design. Basing our approach on the book Understanding by Design, we worked together all day for four weeks to design units that are more interesting to our students and involve higher level thinking and other skills that will be needed for our students' future.  According to research,  it is expected to take 3-5 years for teachers to become  highly skilled in this learner-centered approach.  Since we are just at the beginning, we have a ways to go but we are working hard together and look forward to helping each other make regular progress.

That training did not just appear from nothing, of course.  We had been preparing for it for more than a year.   First we had to translate the book and find the right consultants. Then we had to train a core of teachers who could help translate and support the others as they began.   This required multiple visits of the consultants during the year, meetings after school, on Thursdays, and lots of reading and initial trials of the new ideas.

When we came back to work after Ramadan and the Eid, we discovered a whole new set of challenges as we faced the possibilities of school closures and freqent student absence.  Fortunately, we were able to get expert advice from our friends at the Aramco school about how they keep their students learning even when they are not in the classroom.  On their advice, we have contracted to install Moodle, an internet-based learning management system and got expert training on how to use it.  We used the extra time to get training from Dr. Ellen Alquist on how to revise and/or enrich our units with work that students could do at home if they had to stay home after completion of the fever and pains of the flu.  With some people taking training on the technology and others on ways to organize and enrich the content of their units, each group is now teaching the other how to prepare work for students at home.  We expect that this learning is going to be of great value to the level of our program generally as we become more accustomed to using it in the coming months and years.

We are eager now to welcome our students to the beginning of the new year and look forward to using our new skills and understandings to increase those of our students. In a school, we believe that everyone should be learning – students and adults as well.