Practical Education Network in collaboration with the Government of Liberia and with funding from the European Union and the Swedish government through the UNIDO’s Youth Rising project held a three-day Training of Trainers (ToT) workshop to equip participants in an ongoing training programme to cascade the training to other public basic school teachers in Montserrado County.
The workshop which took place at the Booker Washington Institute TVET Training Centre in Katata, Margibi County, Liberia equipped 33 beneficiary teachers with skills needed to train their peers to employ hands-on pedagogies in their classrooms to teach science and mathematics.
Catherine Naserian, Technical Advisor at UNIDO said “through the past six months or so our interactions with the PEN teacher training program have proven that science and maths taught in a more practical way can be as attractive as any other subject.
Our hope is that these efforts will arouse curiosity in maths and science for early-grade learners so that bridging of STEM to Technical Vocational Education and Training (TVET) becomes more seamless,” she added.
She reiterated UNIDO’s commitment to STEM education and appreciate the support of key partners which include the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Youth and Sports as well as the European Union and the Government of Sweden for the funding.
Prince Varney, a participant of the training said the skills he acquired will make his work easy and allow his learners to do most of the work by themselves as the hands-on approach enables the learners to retain the knowledge gained.
“The just-ended ToT training was indeed excellent. It has helped us improve our skills and methods of teaching and even training. These new skills of training other teachers were great and will actually help us to train our peers,” said Alphonso Toee.
Joseph Quaye Amoo, Programme Manager at Practical Education Network said the participants feel highly enthusiastic about becoming “apostles” of hands-on STEM, and both partners (the Ministry of Education and UNIDO) expressed positive remarks about the training.
The ToT training forms part of the final phase of a series of in-person and online workshops under the PEN Teacher Roadmap, which improves teachers’ lesson delivery by infusing MIT-style “learning-by-doing” to enable hands-on science and math regardless of resource constraints.