What is a conversation club you ask? Well, a conversation is a group that gets foreign language learners speaking in their second language. While conversation clubs can take different forms, the ones I facilitated were a five day credited course (meaning: the country's Ministry of Education provided the teachers who successfully completed the course with a small raise) spread out over five weeks. The conversation club included fun activities to get participants talking in the morning and then mini workshops in the afternoon about teaching strategies.
The participants were teachers from our region. We separated them according to what grades they taught. I had four groups of primary teachers and four groups of secondary teachers. The groups were mixed speaking levels though. 
The mixed speaking levels allowed for the participants to lead the discussions and activities. My goal as facilitator was to provide the activities, encourage speaking, and answer any questions they had. It was wonderful to see the participants stepping up and leading the activities and discussions. However, with mixed speaking level groups there was the problem of the higher level speakers dominating the conversations. While that did happen sometimes, I tried to combat the problem by giving specific speaking roles to participants, requiring a certain amount of times to talk each day, and asking the quieter ones to lead (after they ensured me they understood what is needed to be done). I tried to never put the participants on the spot. I would write and say questions, instructions, etc. then allow time from participants to discuss their responses with their partners or write them down. I wanted to build the participants confidence and teach them strategies for doing the same in their classroom.
The afternoons were focused on teaching strategies. That included lesson planning backwards, classroom management, classroom procedures, activity development, and pronunciation. Again, as the facilitator I did not want to dominate this time. The mini workshops were a discussion based format to encourage sharing strategies and tips with their fellow teachers.
The conversation clubs, along with the Spelling Bee (Part 1, 2, 3) were my babies. I dedicated most of past 1 1/2 years to conversation club and Spelling Bee.
With these clubs, I was able to see HUGE improvements in some of my teachers. I had a handful of teachers who were too nervous to talk the first days and by the end of the course was volunteering to led activities or dominating the conversation (I had to ask one of these teachers to let some of the other participants talk). I enjoyed getting to know the 100ish teachers through this course. I have made some friends for life.
These courses brought together teachers to share ideas, tips, and practice English who normally don't have this opportunity. I would deem these 8 conversation clubs a success.
The Hubs and I are in the last few months of our service. I wanted to document my projects so I can show people what I did during my time in Peace Corps. As we wrap up our service, there will be a few more posts about what we have done, plan to do, and just general things about our host country and service.
