Diane writes a report about her experience at the sessions she developed in Tacuarembo.

1. Workshops in
Tacuarembo
Highlights
Diane Whaley
22/06/2012

2. HIGHLIGHTS
Tacuarembo’ Workshops
Name: Diane Whaley
Email: caniac25@gmail.com
State of Residence: New York
Country: Uruguay
Host Institution: The University of Montevideo
Date: June 23, 2012
Title: Tacuarembo’ Workshops
Project Highlights:
From as far away as Paso de los Toros (approximately 150
kilometers), 53 secondary school English teachers from the
Tacuarembo’ province in north-central Uruguay gathered for a day-
long professional development workshop with English Language
Fellow Diane Whaley (ELF, Montevideo) on June 22, 2012. Diane
covered three major topics: using models and rubrics in planning for
oral presentations, mining PBS and NPR websites as resources for
teaching English, and understanding the US public education system.
During the first session, Diane focused on discussing the practical
applications of rubrics and had the participants break into small
groups to create their own rubrics. In the second session, she
demonstrated how to find and use educational materials for students
of all ages and proficiency levels on two important US websites of
which the participants were completely unaware. And for the final
session, she presented a lecture focusing on the funding sources of
the US public education system, contemporary issues facing policy
makers, and special types of schools including magnet schools and
charter schools. Diane also distributed copies of Forum magazine and
made sure that all of the participants had contact information so that

3. they could request copies of her presentation and continue the dialog
they had begun. Several requests for her materials were received
within hours of the workshops’ conclusion, one of which came from a
teacher who had travelled from Paso de los Toros. This teacher
explained that he was requesting the material so that he could
distribute it and discuss it with the nine other English teachers in the
Paso de los Toros secondary schools who had not been able to make
the long trip to Tacuarembo’.