Practical Education Network

Updated Mar 29, 2019

Practical Education Network

PEN equips Ghanaian STEM teachers to learn, design, and share hands-on activities which complement the national curriculum and are created from low-cost and locally available materials.

http://www.practicaleducationnetwork.com/

Heather Beem

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Stage 4: Transition to Scale

PEN has built a robust teacher training program over the last three years. In that time, we have equipped 100 local-level trainers and built our brand locally. We are now moving our public and private partnerships forward to help scale the program.

Registered in United States.

Focus Areas:

Teacher Development and Training, Basic Education, Technology and 5 MoreSEE ALL

Implemented In:

Ghana

500,000

Lives Impacted to Date

Country Implemented In

3,000

Customers

Employee

$67,000

Funds Raised to Date

Verified Funding

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Problem

Fewer than 10% of junior high schools in Ghana contain any lab equipment, and similar resource constraints exist across Africa's 10 million schools. Fewer than 5% of the STEM teachers we surveyed had attended any relevant training in the last year.

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Solution

PEN empowers K-12 teachers in resource-constrained environments to engage students in practical education, by offering a series of workshops in which STEM trainers learn, design, and share hands-on activities using low-cost and locally-available materials. We partner with Ghana's Ministry of Education and the Ghana Association of Science Teachers.

Target Beneficiaries

We serve the thousands of teachers in Ghana who do not have training to address the resource constraints they face everyday in their classroom. From our survey results, 80% of teachers state the primary obstacle to doing practical science as being the lack of materials. After our workshops, 70% of teachers indicate a positive perception change in their ability to perform practicals in their classrooms.

Mission and Vision

Our vision is to see the normal mode of STEM teaching become practical, hands-on, and inquiry-based in West African classrooms.

Innovation Description

We have designed an MIT-style, constructivist learning experience around each of the activities in the Ghanaian standard syllabus, enabling teachers to form their own understanding while collaboratively designing low-cost hands-on activities to bring into their classrooms.

Competitive Advantage

We offer multiple tiers of training, bringing teachers from exposure to the new style of teaching to effective classroom application to designing new content. The Ghana Education Service endorses and advertises the program to all teachers in the corresponding school district. Repeat customers are migrated to higher levels of training. Strong relationships with the Ministry of Education enable us to infuse our hands-on STEM content and techniques into national standards.

Planned Goals and Milestones

Over the next year, we are looking to launch our 2-year, 6-stage PEN Teacher Roadmap, which is a holistic program designed to build fully confident, competent practical STEM teachers. It combines training, coaching, and community-building through a web app. We seek to formalize our relationship with various government entities to enable scaling of the intervention.

	Funding Goal	50,000
	Projected Cumulative Lives Impacted	2,000,000
	New Implemented Countries	Liberia, Sierra Leone
	Recruit	1 management, 2 full-time staff

The Team Behind the Innovation

Our founder completed her PhD in Mechanical Engineering at MIT, where she developed a passion for spreading hands-on education. While at MIT, she co-founded the D-Lab: Education course and mentored dozens of students in community-based engineering projects for rural communities. She has trained thousands of teachers and students in low-cost, hands-on STEM education. The PEN team is a mix of Ghanaians and Americans, all possessing both a STEM background and teaching experience.