Last spring, an official from MACILE contacted the Technology and Engineering Education (TEE) Program at _______ regarding an opportunity to conduct in-service teacher training in the Dominican Republic (DR). Despite their inability to speak Spanish, two faculty members accepted this opportunity and went to the DR and spent three days training the teachers and teaching several classes of students technology and engineering content. 

From information provided by the MACILE administrator, the TEE faculty members anticipated several challenges to delivering the teacher training in-service. The first challenge stemmed from the fact that neither faculty member could speak Spanish. A translator was provided which partially helped solve this challenge. Additionally, the faculty members decided to teach a unit on electricity and electronics, hoping that the math and schematic symbols involved in the teaching could be easily understood by the teachers and students without need of additional translation. These solutions, along with the fact that many of the teachers and students had a familiarity with English enabled the TEE faculty members to provide the teacher in-service without too much difficulty. 

The second challenge was related to the lower level of content knowledge and skills of the Dominican teachers involved in the in-service. When first developing the model for in- service, the TEE faculty considered conducting a morning session with only the teachers and then observe these teachers while they presented the same information to their students during an afternoon session. Before beginning the teacher in-service, the TEE faculty had an opportunity to observe the teachers and students in a classroom setting and determined that given the teacher’s limited knowledge of science and technical content and because of the common use of rote memorization as a method of instruction, this model for teacher in-service would not be effective. While very eager and able to participate in the in-service, the teachers needed to not only learn the content, but more importantly needed to have a variety of instruction methods modeled for them to see how this content might be effectively taught. Because of this, the Dominican teachers were taught content and participated in the technology and engineering activities along with their students during the morning session, and then these teachers team taught with the TEE faculty during the afternoon session. This allowed the TEE faculty members to model for the teachers instructional strategies appropriate for teaching the specific content and then for the Dominican teachers to apply what they learned in a mentored environment. 

The final challenge was the lack of hand-on materials available in the DR classrooms needed to adequately teach technology and engineering content. To overcome this problem, the TEE faculty looked for inexpensive methods for teaching the specific content to be covered in the in-service. The lesson plans they chose to use came from a series of curriculum projects developed by the Boston Museum of Science called: Engineering is Elementary. The specific topic they taught was titled, An Alarming Idea: Designing Alarm Circuits. Using inexpensive materials such as batteries and Christmas tree lights cut into individual sections the TEE faculty were able to teach the teachers (and students) about simple electronic circuits, the engineering design process, and several other basic principles of engineering. On the final day of the in- service, each of the groups of teachers and students were able to successfully design an alarm system as a solution to the problem given to them as part of the Engineering is Elementary curriculum. 

Because the instruction was so well received, the directors of MACILE requested that these teacher educators return on consequent years and provide additional in-service teacher training focused on technology and engineering related domains. During the summer of 2010, TEE faculty will return with university students, who are pre-service technology and engineering teachers, and teach additional topics related to electronics, robotics and rocketry. Consequently this request blends well with faculty research projects, and the mission of the TEE program: to educate learners about the principles, processes, impacts, and domains of technology and engineering.