The Summer Academy History
The Summer School was founded by the Academy’s two alumnae – Keti Khukhunashvili and Ana Getiashvili. They led the effort to establish and develop this new way of learning in Georgia from the School’s first session in 2008 until its restructuring in 2014.
The first Summer School session started in July, 2008. In this inaugural session, 60 paying students and 30 scholarship students (non-paying) from the ages of 10 to 16 took English and Mathematics classes over a 4-week period. The scholarship students, some of whom had had some previous English training, were recruited from Tbilisi-area orphanages. The English teachers were specially-trained English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers from the United States and the Mathematics teachers were from local Georgian schools who received teacher training in Georgia. English teachers from the Pankisi Valley in northern Georgia and Spasovka in southern Georgia served as classroom aides for these classes as part of their teacher-training program.
The teacher-trainer and mentoring program gave new and less experienced Math and English teachers from underdeveloped regions in Georgia the opportunity to participate in the development and implementation of lesson plans featuring communicative language instruction, interactive task-based classroom activities for learning mathematics, and an introduction to project-based learning. The goal was to give these visiting teachers exposure to new teaching methods and encourage them to implement communicative and interactive approaches in the instruction of Math and EFL for elementary and middle-school aged students in their regions. The philosophy behind the summer school program was to provide state-of-art English instruction for Georgian students and to give them extra training in math, both of which will assist in their future employment and educational prospects.
The July, 2009 Summer School continued this program, but this time with USAID/World Learning support. The targeted group for this part of the program (which also included a for-pay cohort) was the IDP settlement at Tserovani, which sent 25 students from the ages of 10 to 16 and 10 teachers to the GZAAT Summer Program. The program was a great success; at the end of the program the IDP group met with Vice President Joe Biden and other officials of the US and Georgian governments, where they were able to demonstrate their new proficiency in English.
