FCL Updates: William Foster School in Liberia

A decade of civil war heightened the challenges in Liberia when schools closed and children went to war. Now schools are opening again and teachers are learning once more how to design educational systems that accommodate the generation left behind. Full-Circle Learning provides a way for students to learn with a new sense of purpose.

At the William Foster School, in Liberia, approximately 20 teachers were trained in Full-Circle Learning strategies for ten days in June 2010. They felt a new resolve to promote education reform in their community and to exercise transformative leadership as they begin to implement Full-Circle Learning in their region.

Trainer Tamiru Mikre Degefe reported:

The leadership training has helped the teachers to re-examine their mental models and adopt a new conceptual framework. After the first two days of the training, relationship has been improved very much. Instead of blaming one another they began to see inwardly and uprooted those mental models contrary to ideal of Full Circle Learning. They wrote their own journal. Some of them volunteered to share to the group. I will write you more about the process when we finish the training.

Today, we started lesson planning. Tomorrow we will start our group presentations. We learn the songs from the FCL CDs everyday. The group volunteered to contribute one traditional song based on one of the Habit-of-Heart themes. We will have a graduation ceremony at the end.

By the last day, the teachers were so excited, they had elected representatives to share the model with other interested schools. The following month, the Ambassadors class at Rancho Sespe, Fillmore, California created the first global challenge for students of the new school. Their habit-of-heart was cooperation. They created a hypothetical business plan for three fruit growers to maximize their resources by developing a co-op and business plan, to make funds stretch farther and to give money back to the community and save some for hard times. They sent their idea with a request for suggestions for improvement and a request for shared ideas from their Liberian counterparts experiencing their first habit-of-heart unit.