Teacher Training Internship

Welcome to the Volunteer Uganda Limited Resource Teacher Training (LRTT) Internship page. Having run an extremely successful Summer Internship in 2011, we are currently recruiting for 2012. Twenty participants and ambassadors from Teach First will spend four weeks with us in Bwindi, teaching and running LRTT workshops in one of the most exciting and challenging environments in the world. Watch the video and find out more about the Internship here, then go to "Apply Now" to apply for next summer.

Applications

Having been overwhelmed with interest at the Leaders in All Fields fair, we are very excited at the prospect of putting together our team of twenty for this summer. Recruitment has begun, with Group Leaders signed up and ready to go. All we need now is you.

We operate on the same principle as Teach First recruitment - if you meet our requirements then you're in, with the twenty spaces filling up as soon as we make offers to successful applicants. We expect the applications process to be competitive and are keen to finalise our team as soon as possible. As soon as you have applied, you can expect to hear from us in the next few days to arrange a telephone interview, after which successful applicants will be offered a place.

Project Details

The 2012 summer internship will last four weeks, from Monday 30th July until Sunday 26th August.

Week One

Participants arrive in Kampala, Uganda's capital, where we have the opportunity to go white-water rafting and bungee jumping in nearby Jinja. Once our team of twenty have all arrived, we drive down together to Bwindi in south-western Uganda. Here we stay at the stunning VU lodge, overlooking the Impenetrable Forest Natural Park (home of the last mountain gorillas). To end the week, we spend two days getting to know the local region - observing lessons, visiting VU volunteers teaching in local primary schools and taking part in life-saving HIV / AIDS awareness workshops and testing. At the weekend, we head for the beautiful Lake Binyoni, the deepest lake in Africa, where we will spend the weekend camping, canoeing and having fun with the other volunteers.

Week Two

Here the project really gets up and running, with participants spending the week teaching in Great Lakes High School, a local secondary school. This is where all our teaching footage is from in the 2011 project video! At Great Lakes, we teach a curriculum of our own design, promoting thinking skills and testing out our own teaching strategies in a Ugandan context. As well as being an amazing experience in itself, this week is crucial preparation for the LRTT (Limited Resource Teacher Training) workshops that lie ahead. After a week at the High School, we spend the weekend finalising our plans for the workshops in Weeks 3 and 4.

Week Three and Week Four

Prepared, practiced and ready to go, in Weeks 3 and 4 we run LRTT workshops for local Ugandan teachers. These workshops are funded by VU, with teachers receiving free training of a kind otherwise completely unavailable to them in Bwindi. For most interns, this is the highlight of the project: putting our hard-earned skills to the test and helping make a lasting, long-term impact in a hugely underprivileged community. With our team of twenty, it is probable that we will be providing training for over 100 local teachers - with class sizes of up to 50, we could be impacting on the lessons and lives of more than 5000 local children.

LRTT Previously

In August 2011, six awesome Teach First Participants joined 32 other volunteers living at the VU lodge and transforming education in a region of South-Western Uganda. Along with an unforgettable summer of immersion, exploration, white-water rafting and big game safari, they were able to make a massive and tangible impact in a very short space of time.

Spending a week in a local, VU-founded secondary school, the TFs taught innovative schemes of work and gained experience of teaching in an entirely new context; over two weeks working with local teachers, they went on to pioneer a new LRTT (Limited Resource Teacher Training) course which equipped local teachers with a toolkit of approaches to improve the education of the students they teach. Over time, and driven by year-on-year input from TFs in further collaboration with VU, it is hoped that this training will help Ugandan teachers and volunteers to revolutionise education in the Kanungu region. Following the initiative’s ground-breaking success this summer, in 2012 Volunteer Uganda and Teach First will be running the programme again on a much larger scale.

Programme Component 1:

Teaching in Ugandan Secondary schools

The team of TFs taught four classes using schemes of work they had created for the purpose, centred upon problem solving and “thinking skills”. The Maths and Science schemes focused on creating sustainable micro-business models for job creation and enterprise. The English and Humanities schemes firstly built group-work and presentation skills through designing advertising campaigns for children’s drinks; having done this, students developed their new skills by writing “I have a dream” speeches for their community, with an emphasis on empowering young people to be the driving force in creating a brighter future for the region.

Programme Component 2:

Pioneering the LRTT Courses

Between living alongside the other volunteers at the VU lodge, seeing a range of VU's educational and wider projects, and having now themselves experienced teaching in the area first-hand, the TF team had effectively gauged the poverty and developmental context of the region, and the implications for education in the local area.

It was now time for the TF team to carry out their main purpose in Uganda: workshops with local teachers, built upon the new LRTT model. Planning collaboratively, the team came up with an innovative course centred upon key areas of development needed to transform the currently didactic, lecture-style methods of Ugandan teaching: these included starters and plenaries, AFL and questioning, engagement and group work, reward strategies and use of praise, and higher-order thinking. This drew heavily upon the TFs’ own experiences within UK schools, on the training they had themselves received as new teachers and upon the localized approaches that they had trialed in their own teaching during the first fortnight.

The four-day course was run twice and drew 40 enthusiastic, energetic teachers from schools around the district. It was heavily over-subscribed, with many more teachers wishing they could have been involved in the workshops and received the LRTT training. The reception and atmosphere were incredible: the TFs were able to deliver a type of training very rarely (if ever) available to teachers in the area, and were enthusiastically and warmly received as a result! As well as feeling certain of the benefits to their own teaching and careers, several of the local teachers went back to their own schools armed with LRTT resources, intent on delivering it to their colleagues.