Learning Champions!

Every summer, our teachers take a break from their classrooms to travel back to Ho Chi Minh City, where they join together with colleagues for a time of reflection, planning, and training. Sessions are comprised of sharing ideas, comparing experiences, receiving encouragement, identifying areas for improvement, and learning new skills. These sessions are equally meaningful and essential. And that is important. After all, it is the patience, commitment, perseverance, and effort of these excellent teachers - our learning champions! - that help to create impactful moments for our students.

In recent years, Kidspire has significantly increased the resources we invest in training and development for our teaching team. In large part, this increased investment has been made possible by the support of our key funding partners, including EMpower, the Chao Foundation, and the UPS Foundation. These funders all support ongoing skills development for our teachers and have made grant funds available for professional training and development.

The need for increased training has coincided with improvements in the ways we monitor and evaluate our program outcomes. As our understanding of our students' needs has increased, so too has our collective awareness of the areas where our teachers need to develop new skills. And many of our teachers have taken the initiative to request additional training. It has been common for our teachers to request training in practical tools of classroom management, designing and creating engaging lessons, or best practices in supporting students who have experienced traumatic events in their young lives.

In a recent training, teachers explored the intersection of S.T.E.M. alongside Social Emotional Learning (SEL) - a timely training as Kidspire begins implementation of a new 10-week initiative, reaching more than 1000 youth, that will focus on using S.T.E.M. as a delivery mechanism to start conversations with participants about interpersonal relationships, common conflicts, and techniques for de-escalating these conflicts. As Kidspire teachers deepen their understanding of social-emotional learning and how to better support our students in identifying and regulating their emotions, we believe it will improve learning outcomes for other essential classroom activities.

Take a look at those smiles. Our learning champions are ready for a new school year and ready for a new year of milestones, memories, and meaningful impact!