Ramona Wells, national teacher of the year first runner-up used her summer to share best practices with educators and to further her training.

Since the beginning of summer, the educator at C.H. Reeves Junior School has presented at plenary sessions at the 19th Conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers (CCEM) hosted by The Bahamas, where she spoke on the importance of technology policy as it relates to information and communications technology in the Bahamian classroom. The role was reversed for Wells as soon as CCEM ended, as she found herself returning to the classroom to complete the final phase of her school discipline management certification at Chicago State University (CSU).

The certification covered an intense study on various discipline strategies that are being used to manage student behavior on school campuses across the world. The focus was on ensuring that school administrators set the rules and guidelines from the beginning of the school term. Most of the literature alluded to that fact that students need consistency, and that if they discover that all authority figures are on the same page, then all avenues to “play the system” are diminished.

“This one-year certification was an eye opener,” said Wells. “Problems that you believe are unique to your country are really not, and students throughout the world exhibit many of the same behavioral problems,” she said.

“There are no differences to how students react to certain situations. If they’re in a depression situation, or live in a community where they have to run the household… the father isn’t there or their mother is working two jobs… children kind of have that weight on their shoulders, and so the first thing they ask educators to do is build relationships which is something we basically know. We know that in order to get to know our students we have to build a relationship with them, you just can’t come at them hard and be tough with them. You have to build that relationship with them.”

In doing so, Wells said it is also important that schools set the rules from the beginning and that everyone from administration to teachers be on the same page in enforcing the set rules.

“It shouldn’t be where some teachers are lax, so we have to be consistent with the children across the board, and leave no room for them to escape the rules of the school. No one would baby them or allow them to get a free pass.”

At C.H. Reeves, Wells who is the business studies coordinator said her principal, Greta Brown is looking forward to a more cohesive movement of students and teachers on their campus with the new school term.

“We have to be on one page,” said Wells. “We’ve always worked as a cohesive staff, but you have some loopholes where kids know they can get away with this one a bit more than the next one. But this year moving forward, our principal is excited that we can move forward together as one team.”

At the conclusion of the CSU course, Wells received the highest total score and the best research report award of more than 55 participants. She was the only international educator in the group. Wells also received an invitation from two Florida schools to assist their administrative teams in assessing their plan of action for minimizing discipline issues in their classrooms.

Last summer Wells participated in a summer course at Morgan State University where she delved into technology integration and Web 2.0 for the classroom. This year she spent more than a month in Chicago wrapping up a year-long course, for her, she says it’s all about staying current to ensure her children have the best.

The educator, who has been in the classroom for 11 years, says she has a passion to see students educated in an environment that is conducive to learning. And she is excited to implement the strategies she has learnt.

“Upgrading is very important to me, because as an educator, we should never stop learning. Every year there’s something new. Every term there’s something new, and we’re dealing with students who are in a global world. They’re not just sitting in The Bahamas and not interacting internationally. I find a lot of our students have contacts and friends on social media who are all over the world, people they meet on a daily basis, and we have children who are operating in this global village, so we have to kind of do the same thing. We have to make ourselves better as educators to educate our children.”

Wells’ vision for her future is one that has her working in an administrative capacity.

“I’m hoping to move into the administration part of it because I see where I could be better used and facilitate more sessions and more workshops, and more training for our educators. I aspire to continue to share with my colleagues all of the nuggets I receive, because I firmly believe that education and learning never stop.”