BY HAZEL P. VILLA
ILOILO CITY – A major webinar series focusing on assisting teachers with improving their motivation ended on a high note with 45 completers finishing the 6-series event organized by West Visayas State University (WVSU).
Project FORTH WVSU Cluster Virtual Training Series 1 on “Motivation: A Driving Force of an Extraordinary Teacher”, held every Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m., started on Nov. 20, 2021 and ended on Jan. 22, 2022.
As part of the Project FORTH (Formation of Teachers in Challenged Areas), an international engagement of WVSU with the University of Groningen in the Netherlands as lead institution and co-funded by the Erasmus+Programme of the European Union, the event was held via Zoom with various participants coming not only from West Visayas but also from other parts of the country as well as Vietnam and Thailand.
Topics covered in the six Saturdays were the following: Motivation: A Driving Force of an Extraordinary Teacher; Self-assessment/Self-affirmation in the Context of Being a Teacher; Recognizing and Addressing the Factors that Affect Intrinsic Motivation; Creating Strategies to Sustain Motivation; Designing my Professional and Motivational Development Plan; and Creating Communication Mechanisms and Strategies to Motivate Others.
Project FORTH (Formation of Teachers in Challenged Areas) seeks to empower teachers who are working in locations and contexts that are out of the ordinary. A major achievement of the project is the approval of the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) in 2020 for the offering of the degree Master of Teaching in Challenged Areas (MAEd TCA) in selected universities – WVSU College of Education Graduate School being one of them.
Dr. Emma Melgarejo, academic coordinator of Project FORTH, said in her closing remarks that teachers are the message and that children in challenged areas have a bright future because the teachers stayed the course, adding, “Lives will be better because you are there for them.”/PN
