New York, NY, March 14, 2018 — Today, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) announced a major initiative that will provide training and support to teachers of Syrian refugee children in Lebanon. The project seeks to improve teachers’ ability to collect and use data on their students to make real time changes in their pedagogical and classroom management practices. This will result in quality education and better learning outcomes for children.
March 15th marks the seventh anniversary of the Syrian conflict, which has displaced over 12 million Syrians. Lebanon has become host to over 1.5 million Syrian refugees, over half of which are children and adolescents under the age of 18. There is a severe need for education services, as nearly half of all Syrian children in Lebanon lack access to education. The IRC provides education services in Lebanon to Syrian children through its Healing Classrooms approach, which supports teachers to create safe, nurturing environments and apply social-emotional learning principles in order to help crisis-affected children cope with the consequences of conflict, learn and thrive.
With generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the IRC is implementing a project called Teacher-Focused Quality Improvement to advance its teacher professional development model to identify and rapidly test new classroom behaviors and practices that will contribute to better student attendance, increased social cohesion among students, and increased teacher abilities to apply differentiated learning techniques. Together we will pilot the project with a total of 30 teachers who are currently part of the Healing Classrooms initiative, and ultimately share learnings with a greater number of teachers.