One of the many great things about working with Liberian teachers is their enthusiasm for professional development and teacher training! Our once a year workshops are just not enough to satisfy their excitement for learning new classroom techniques. Fortunately we have found that networking with another US-based teacher training group can help our friends in Liberia get at least two workshops per year. Liberia NOW is a Texas-based group whose training team regularly travels to Liberia in June to deliver quality professional development workshops. LOEP and Liberia NOW have partnered in developing training programs in the past year. This month our friends at New Life School (pictured above) are attending Liberia NOW workshops on Critical Thinking Skills, Professional Ethics, Developing an Administration Team, and Guided Reading.
New Life School was established by a local church in answer to their community's need. We have featured pictures of New Life on this blog in the past. The small stick-built building is a heavily-used facility with more than 500 children using it all day for school and adult literacy students attending class in the evenings.
More than 80% of Liberia's schools were destroyed during the war and re-building is an enormous challenge. More than half of children in Liberia do not attend school because there are simply not enough schools for them. Community schools and mission schools such as New Life stand in that gap, trying to meet the needs of their community's school age children. Reports from Liberia are that teachers and administrators from New Life are getting the most out of their professional development workshops this month!
