School Life    Additional Programs

We, at ABAT, encourage students yearly to participate in various scholarship programs in Lebanon and abroad. One of 10^th graders, Fahed Abou Shaer, won a scholarship provided by Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) program to study for an academic year in the USA. “YES” program is a program that is administrated by AMIDEAST/ Lebanon, where students move to USA, attend grade 11 in an American high school, and engage in activities to learn about the US society and values. Through this program, our students also get the opportunity to present Lebanon and its culture to Americans and the host families.

At ABAT, our students participate in the Model United Nations program (MUN) yearly. MUN is an academic activity where our students learn about diplomacy, international relations and the United Nations. Through this program, our students demonstrate high level of collaboration, togetherness, teamwork, and positive engagement with people and politics as well as present a smart way of tackling issues.

ABAT induction program is a comprehensive and multiyear process designed to train and retain new teachers. Its goal is to provide a systematic structure to support mentees. This stand-alone program, established since 2017 at our school, is followed by continued mentoring throughout their first year. It assists the new stakeholders at the school with information about the system and processes that guide them to adapt to the culture of a new workplace, as well as school norms.

This systematic induction program is part of the teacher’s professional development, designed to reduce anxiety, increase engagement, increase knowledge, improve his/her teaching skills and thus boost new teacher retention rates.

The induction program goes beyond understanding students, classes, and curriculum; it is a set of instructional workshops to help new teachers adapt easily to the school environment, and it is supplemented with a guiding toolkit.

After conducting the Makassed Induction program, which is the introductory stage about Makassed educational system, conducted by ERDC on the first orientation day, the mentees are welcomed to Makassed ABAT School. They are then introduced to school’s rules, regulations, policies, procedures, and advanced learning strategies such as differentiated instruction and blended learning strategies, noting that these sessions are delivered by experienced teachers. In addition, procedures and routines are immediately established, modeled, and practiced to set the stage for a well-dynamic classroom.

In the third stage of the program, mentees will attend mentoring sessions in the aim of assisting them to overcome expected challenges during their academic year. Furthermore, new teachers continue to receive ongoing support and guidance throughout the year.

 In general, professional development is a training  program for staff in order to implement specialized teaching strategies that can be used in many different subject areas, or advanced professional learning that intend to help educators improve their professional knowledge, competences, skills, practices and effectiveness. 

 Based on the Makassed Professional Training Policy, teachers participate yearly in a minimum of 20 training hours. ABAT supports teachers’ professional development by providing them with different opportunities to improve their teaching and instructional strategies based on needs and data collection. 

 The ABAT Annual Professional Development Plan for each academic year aims at empowering every teacher and staff member to develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to create learning settings that eventually lead to improving our learners’ academic achievement. It also aims to enhancing the pedagogical practices through teachers’ professional development. The plan engages each educator in a way that helps in providing distinguished teaching and active strategies in education and equipping our learners with the 21^st century skills.

Types of professional development:

1. Internal Workshops
2. External Workshops
3. Conferences or seminars
4. Engagement reviews
5. Induction sessions
6. Individual or collaborative research on a topic of professional interest
7. Peer observation and coaching, as part of a formal school arrangement