Poor teacher quality is one of the main factors causing the students to suffer and to make matters worse the percentage of trained teachers reached an all-time high of 58.408 % in 2009 and a record low of 47.579 % in 2015 as reported by the World Bank. Teachers are underappreciated, under-prepared, underpaid and COVID-19 has intensified this problem. They are struggling to pivot to online classes.
Shamima who is a perfect representation of the lives we inspired used to believe that memorization based learning and corporal punishment is the only way to manage students. Unfortunately, this mindset is still prevalent among majority of the teachers especially those in the rural areas. The challenge of transform her into a 21st century teacher, guide and facilitator was like a success indicator for our training modules. After mentoring her for a year she has now become a friend to her students. Collaborative learning, problem solving and novelty are some of the features of Shamima’s classroom. We have developed over 9412 such teachers. The transformation of one teacher can touch the lives of many students like Sharif, initially a nervous 8 year old, who struggled to read and write is now a confident, curious and proactive learner under the guidance of Shamima. Our trained teachers have developed over 250,000 such future leaders and changemakers.
We host workshops both online and offline; workshops are advertised via social media. Previously, we have personally gone to schools and spoken to the teachers to get participants.
We completely pivoted from offline to online workshops during the pandemic and have provided online training to over 700 teachers from governmental and non-governmental institutions. Our online community has grown to over 1100 users. Our social media engagement has increased by 80% throughout the pandemic, and the social media community has doubled. We have also received media attention for our teacher development programs; at least one article per month in local newspapers has been published.
Visit our platform - www.alokitoteachers.com and our Facebook page.
