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Teacher Training

SE Europe Regional Teachers’ Associations Training
Sofia, Bulgaria, 7 to 11 October 2004

The training was attended by representatives from Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, Kosovo, North Cyprus, and Armenia and conducted according to the following programme:

8 October, Friday

Session One: Strategic Planning Skills
Session Two: The Role of the Professional Association

9 October, Saturday

Session Three: Financial Skills
Session Four: Teambuilding

10 October, Sunday

Session Five: Advocacy and Publicity
Session Six: Networking

The training in Sofija was facilitated by two presenters: Edward Richards, Language and Education Consultant, and Kent Williamson, Executive Director of NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English), USA. It consisted of lectures mentioned in the programme and workshops in which participants were able to reflect on and exchange opinions and practices in the fields of specific interest to their associations. The presenters provided an effective combination of European and American experiences and were very skillful in initiating responses from the participants. As stated at the end by the presenters/facilitators, the participants were exceptionally enthusiastic in all training activities and they also strengthened their ties in afterwork hours. All proposals that were made during the workshops were noted down on the spot by facilitators and sent to all participants by the Bulgarian organisers.

A video conference with colleagues from BC Belgrade and BC Romania was added to the programme, in which capacity building for TA’s in the form of a Knowledge and Learning Web Base project was presented by the Belgrade representative Siniša Simić and Self-starter Packs for New Teachers by the Romanian participants. The Sofia training participants contributed with their own proposals for future video conferences, which mainly concerned further development of video-conferencing skills, association management skills, improving relationships (including cooperation with other non-governmental organisations, money skills (fund raising, services to community), better recruiting of membership, etc.

Serbian participants, Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović and Nada Purtić found the training highly informative and useful for the future work of ELTA Serbia and Montenegro. Their participation was active and fruitful throughout the training and they tried to establish a personal contact with each individual participant.
Mirjana Ljiljak-Vukajlović made the following proposals for future ELTA S&M activities:

- discuss and make a proposal for the form of organisational structure of the Montenegrin association: consider possible eastablishment of ELTA Montenegro as a branch of ELTA S&M. This and other initialising help was requested by our colleagues from Montenegro – Anica Radan, Radojka Dapčević and Saveta Cukić-Laban

- take an active part in all future video-conferences and development of the regional KL Web Base

- take an active part in cooperation with NCTE, USA through the following:

• establish relationship with a US NCTE sister affiliate, which would result, among other things, in direct teacher/student exchanges
• exchange newsletters and articles
• ELTA S&M will get free access to six years of NCTE professional articles (another association who registered for this was North Cyprus)

- make contributions for "Umbrella Newsletter", to be moderated by Harold Saumels, Kosovo, which will include announcements for upcoming events, brief reports on events held and links to useful web sites

- discuss possible further training in grant application and raising

- organise joint events in the field of CALL with the North Cyprus Association

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