Eight American volunteers paid their own way to Margibi County this week, not for a vacation, but to sit in classrooms at the Kakata Rural Teacher Training Institute and talk shop with Liberian educators about everything from cognitive development to artificial intelligence. When the symposium closes Friday morning, it will mark eight years, and more than 900 teachers touched by a partnership that has never once charged a participant a dollar to attend.
By Rodney D. Sieh, rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com
Monrovia – For five days this week, the Kakata Rural Teacher Training Institute traded its usual rhythm for something closer to a working conference — chairs pulled into circles, notebooks filled, and teachers who normally stand at the front of a classroom sitting instead as students themselves. The Train-the-Trainer Continuing Education Symposium, running August 3 through 7, drew educators from across Liberia, not just the host institute. Guest faculty came in from the Zorzor Rural Teacher Training Institute and the Webbo Rural Teacher Training Institute, alongside administrators representing other private schools, turning what could have been a single-campus workshop into something with a genuinely national footprint.
The symposium came together through a partnership that has, by now, become something of a known quantity in Liberian teacher training circles: Africa Community Exchange, Inc., under founder Dr. Sophie Mends-Cole Williams; the Delta Iota Zeta chapter of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated, under Chapter President Dr. Jobila Sy; and KRTTI itself, under Director Madame Sorna F. Sherif. Three institutions, three sets of resources and relationships, pointed at the same goal — better-prepared teachers walking back into Liberian classrooms once the week was over.
Eight Volunteers Who Paid Their Own Way
What gives this year’s symposium its texture is who showed up to teach it. Eight volunteer facilitators traveled from the United States specifically for the week, covering their own travel expenses to bring expertise in education, instructional design, curriculum development and teacher professional growth directly into Kakata’s classrooms. It is not a small commitment — flights, time away from their own jobs and families, a week spent standing in front of rooms full of strangers hoping to leave them with something useful. ACE added a more tangible gift to the visit as well, donating five laptops to KRTTI to widen faculty access to online research, a modest but practical upgrade for an institute working to keep pace with a fast-changing field.
From Human Development to AI in the Classroom
The week’s training topics read like a survey of everything a modern teacher is now expected to know: Human Development; Learning Styles and Cognitive Processes; Universal Design for Learning; Culturally Responsive Teaching; Assessment, Feedback, and Teacher Evaluation; Online Teaching Resources with an emphasis on Artificial Intelligence; and, closing out the week, Career Exploration. That AI session stands out as a sign of how quickly the ground has shifted under Liberian classrooms as much as any other. A conversation that might once have felt distant or theoretical for rural teacher training institutes is now a working part of the curriculum, taught alongside the fundamentals of human development and inclusive teaching design rather than treated as an afterthought.
The symposium closes Friday with that final Career Exploration session, followed by a 10 a.m. closing program — a deliberately forward-looking note to end on, sending participants back to their own classrooms thinking not just about how they teach, but about the paths they might help their own students discover.
Eight Years, Nine Hundred Teachers
This week’s gathering did not appear out of nowhere. It is the latest installment of a teacher continuing education initiative the partnership launched in 2018, and the numbers behind it have quietly added up over eight years: more than 900 teachers trained across Montserrado and Margibi Counties, plus leadership workshops extended to principals representing 27 schools. Multiply that out and it is not a stretch to say a meaningful share of the teachers standing in front of Liberian students today have, at some point, passed through one of these sessions.
What has made that reach possible, organizers say, is a decision baked into the program from the start: every workshop, every session, every year, offered at no cost to the teachers who attend. In a sector where professional development often competes with a teacher’s own limited income and time, removing the price tag entirely has been less a courtesy than a design principle — one aimed at making sure the educators who most need continuing training are never the ones priced out of it.
Built Around What Liberian Educators Actually Need
The other design principal organizers point to is relevance. Training content, they say, has been intentionally built around needs identified by Liberian educators themselves, and aligned with the Ministry of Education’s own curriculum and priorities — an effort to make sure a week spent in workshops translates into something usable on a Monday morning back in a real classroom, rather than a set of ideas imported wholesale and left to gather dust. ACE’s involvement in Liberian primary education now stretches back 19 years, with teacher development and continuing education as its consistent throughline.
As the symposium wound down this week, the collaborating organizations thanked KRTTI for hosting and every participating institution for showing up and staying engaged through five full days of workshops. They described their vision in shared terms: equipping Liberian educators with the knowledge, skills and innovative teaching practices needed to prepare students for success in a world that keeps changing shape and treating teachers themselves as lifelong learners rather than a workforce that finishes training once and stops. With Friday’s closing program approaching, organizers say the partnership has no intention of this being the last chapter — only the latest one.
