Scholarship Recipient

Getting to live and work on the beautiful island with the cutest kids was one of the most rewarding experiences I've ever had. Being able to make and create lessons and materials following a national set of guidelines from a curriculum was an invaluable lesson on teamwork, creativity, and collaboration. Teaching twelve classes twice a week was a lot, and definitely an important exercise in independent facilitation of teaching; however, it was really nice to only teach for half days. The rest of our days we spent at the beach, exploring the island, or working on materials for the next days/weeks. Going into the program I was worried about having to come up with lesson ideas out of nowhere without an idea of where to start, but the program and the national curriculum provide the guidelines and support to do so while giving leeway for creativity and innovation. The training for the program is hands-on, not theory based. This helped me ensure that I could actually go in and teach the classrooms rather than just knowing the theories on how to teach. The set-up of the program also helped me learn from my own, but also my other intern-colleagues successes and mistakes.