Teaching Assistant

Schools in Ecuador are often understaffed and lack educational materials. As such, the children’s education suffers and students find it difficult to progress due to the poor quality of education provided. Teaching assistant volunteers make a great contribution to the daily classes as an extra adult in the classroom and are on hand to provide extra support to students that need it the most.

As a teaching assistant, you can have a significant impact on both the students and teachers by helping in the following ways: 

• English teaching: Some schools might not have an English teacher and others have teachers that are not fluent or even comfortable at teaching English. As a volunteer fluent in English, you can provide a great deal of help with English classes, enabling students to progress much more than they would with their designated teacher. You will be required to use initiative to make English a bit more fun for the students through games, songs and activities, that will help their English language skills develop without it being boring.

• Volunteers will assist in the other subjects as well to their best ability. Despite not being fluent in Spanish, many universal skills can be taught such as Math, Music, Art and Sport. In other subjects where it’s hard to help the students directly, volunteers will assist the local teacher to keep an eye on the students and keep order in the class.

• School in Ecuador is mainly in the morning and ends by 2 p.m latest.. There are often afternoon activities either at the school or in the community where the volunteer lives that they are able to participate in as well but this is of course optional. 

• Volunteering as a teaching assistant not only provides vital support to students and teachers, it can also be very rewarding to volunteers, and provide unique experiences of becoming part of rural Ecuadorian community.