During the week starting from Feb.6th to Feb.10th, JESIE ran a week-long professional development workshop, focussing on an essential and eclectic range of seminars and activities, to prepare our teachers in readiness for their return to the classroom.

In the week, teachers listened to lectures and demos, held open discussions and gave feedbacks to each other. All teachers were divided into two groups based on the grades they teach: primary level, and middle school and high school level.

During the five-day training, different teachers gave useful tutorials to two different groups, including Lesson Planning & Preparation, Best ways to start a lesson, Methods of Teaching Sentences, Learning Through Playing, Adapting teaching material for both younger and older age groups etc.. Teacher Kathleen gave a lecture on 'Bloom's Taxonomy' in the fourth day of training, in which the teachers can view teaching job from a psychological perspective by learning the progressive cognitive theory.

Also, we had a specially invited Chinese Teacher Sophie Wei to give us a seminar on 'Chinese Workplace Culture', giving insight into the life of a Chinese native teacher. Teacher Sophie answered the very many questions asked by JESIE's teachers and gave useful tips for foreign teachers working in Chinese schools. We are also very fortunate at JESIE to have among the staff, a fluent native speaker of Lithuanian. Teacher Val gave a demo language lesson entirely in Lithuanian, so that the teachers may have first-hand experience of full immersion in a second language teaching environment. These were sessions that clearly made a great impression among the teachers.

Demo classes were also given every day during the training by our teachers on teaching sentence structures and using games to support or reinforce a language point. After each demo, other teachers gave useful comments and suggestions.

For the discussion part, the new version of Code of Conduct were introduced during the training and all teachers gave their ideas and thoughts about it. The morning of the last day of JESIE's training week was reserved for open discussions, where teachers gave feedbacks and insights on social media, promotional activities and recruiting process.

We hope the training week has been a valuable learning experience, as we wish the JESIE teachers on their way to deal with the challenges of the new term!