ok hi my name is danielle guzman i am a teacher at less shy elementary my name is kyron barber and i am also a teacher at russia elementary school and we just finished our cultural competency training here the restaurant through the heart of africa and we just wanted to share some of our thoughts yes and so the focus was on east africa and i think one of the big takeaways that i got from the training today was just the importance of communication with the family to show them not only that you know a little bit about their language by welcoming them in that language but it does show that you'll go out of your way to show your support for the students so like home visits and then inviting them into the classroom i found it really helpful to have this time for us to get snow different members of the community on the east african community and for us to really as educators learn more about the culture and where our students are coming from and how to interact with their families so we can better serve them and really do our best to teach them when they're in our classrooms yeah yeah i think one thing that i definitely learned from this training was that the home world and culture can be a lot different for students when they come to school so being aware of that and noticing you know things that they  might not know yet as far as just academic and academic setting goes and so really supporting students in that way that's one thing i can think of i think one thing that schools need to do better because it becomes a problem is communicating to families what's going on at the school events that are happening what the students are learning how they're doing and at this training i found a very helpful for us to sort of stop and think what are we as a school doing to reach out to families and how can we do that better and more often to make sure that families are aware and that we as you know teachers and staff at the school are really serving the whole family including the students the best that we can write and i think definitely oftentimes students who speak their native language with their parent and the teacher doesn't necessarily know their native language we can put the kids in charge of things that are really for the family and the teacher to be communicating so as daniel mentioned just figuring out systems like having phone calls home that will be in the native language to form that communication as well as any translation materials so students are put in that role this isn't my first training that we actually did another one out last shy but this is the first one where we really had a long time to you know be part of the culture have the coffee the food sit down ask a lot of questions there was much more time devoted to it for us to talk as a school staff about the problems we want to make better at our school and then hear from the actual members of the community issues that they that they see within their their students and their families well i think the really big thing for me is building relationships and i and it and it's hard to do that unless you have face to face contact and one thing to me and i have done is go to families houses and as i mentioned earlier i think home visits are important so definitely doing that with some families i don't know some of our next steps for the school we we definitely have we have some family nights coming up so we have a family night for families a speak other languages and we're going to have a dinner and i think there it'll be a good chance for us to get some information and see what is it that families want to know about the school how can we do a better job and asking them those things and then definitely planning more events and more professional development for  staff similar to the one we had today just to continue our learning so it's not just a one time and then we know everything we have to keep building our learning so we can really be in true collaboration with the community that we serve no no