GOMPA, Nimba – More than 40 teachers in Bein-Garr Educational District of Nimba underwent phase two of a psychosocial ‘trainer of trainers’ workshop staged by the Ministry of Education in Ganta.

[Disclosure: The parent company of The Bush Chicken provides public relations services to the Ministry of Education; however, the news and public relations units are handled independently.]

The coordinator for parents, community engagement, and national dropout prevention at the Ministry of Education, Comfort Summerville, explained the overall significance of the training exercise.

“This is all about training teachers on how to handle situations in the classroom,” she said, “We are giving them the content on how to teach and handle [deal with] psychosocial issues in the classroom.”

Additionally, the teachers were also refreshed on their regular classroom activities including classroom management, lesson planning, and the teachers’ code of conduct.

“There are lots of new things we’re teaching them,” Summerville said. “New things are coming and instead of doing it like how we’ve been doing before, we are using the new approach – making many to be participatory and also incorporating our [district education officers] into the [training] process.”

The training is expected to cut across all the educational districts for not more than five days, and Summerville is anticipating that teachers who are trained will go back to their assigned areas and train others on what they have acquired so far.

Many Liberians are still recovering from the psychosocial effects posed by the protracted civil crisis and then exacerbated by the Ebola Virus Disease that claimed the lives of more than 4,000 people.

The acting county education officer for Nimba, Moses Dologbay, spoke at the training on the psychosocial effect left behind because of the Ebola outbreak. He believes that the student community bear the greatest burden of the outbreak’s effects.

He said the training would ensure that teachers and administrators would know how to deal with “our students who have trauma or mental disorders.”

Forty-seven teachers benefited from the training and are expected to be dispatched very soon in the county to share the knowledge to their colleagues.

“These people will be going in the county to train our teachers in all schools,” Dologbay said, adding that they would train other teachers “not only in public schools but also in private schools – because even those that are in private schools are citizens of Liberia.”

Dologbay amplified the importance of the training and stressed that “it is good that the Ministry of Education is able to provide the content of the training to participants so that the teachers will know the kind of children that they are dealing with; and in time of stress, to be able to know how to deal with them.”

Featured photo by Arrington Ballah