THE Rotary Club of Westbury were recently treated to a guest speaker, Hilary Wright, who is an expert in teaching, at their fortnightly meeting at The View.
The club reports, “Hilary, who has worked in three continents, spoke about her trips to India working with the Helga Todd Foundation. She is an expert in teaching as well as a published author in the subject.
“We found out that the Helga Todd Foundation is committed to making a difference to society in partnership with established educational bodies and other educational charities in their target countries.
“Since its establishment in 2008, the Foundation’s trustees have embraced a number of initiatives and have explored different avenues in order to find out the best way of achieving the Foundation’s aims through practical experience. Their initial focus has been on developing links and projects in India and working with English medium schools to support the education and training of women teachers.
“To date the Foundation has trained young women candidates from rural areas with the minimum qualifications of 16+ matriculation to become early years and primary class teachers, provided short and part-time courses to help practising teachers develop their pedagogical skills so that they can teach and communicate more effectively with the children in their classrooms, and conducted skills enhancement workshops and programmes to help practising teachers to improve their pedagogical skills. Workshops are generally school based and planned to run at weekends, in vacation and other off-peak times.
“The Foundation has also sought to embed, sustain and build on ITT and CPD programmes through mentor development and training and other school-based developments, and provided opportunities for individual practising teachers from the UK and India to learn from each other, contribute at an individual level and to develop understanding of each other’s culture and education systems.
“It was a highly informed and informative talk on the subject and a vote of thanks was extended to Hilary.”
