Promoting Gender Equality in the Classroom
Welcome to Teachers of Tomorrow!
Teachers of tomorrow is a One Girl program all about providing formal training for unqualified, volunteer teachers in Sierra Leone. As you may have guessed, this program has a special focus on recruiting and training female teachers, but we also train male teachers too! We engage men to support strong male role models in schools, helping to foster positive male influence for other men and boys and encouraging boys to become champions for girls and women.
Girls face two pretty big challenges when it comes to receiving an education in Sierra Leone – access to quality education; and social and gender inequalities that stand between a girl and their future. Plus, in Sierra Leone, there’s a pretty big shortage of female teachers, therefore a significant shortage of essential female role models for girls. And we all need role models!
So that’s where Teachers of Tomorrow comes in. Essentially, the aim of the program is to improve the capacity of teachers to provide high quality education to their students in gender inclusive spaces, whilst also improving girls’ educational outcomes through increasing positive role models. So very cool, so very wonderful!
How do we do this?
Through working with the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education in Sierra Leone, we support teachers to complete their formal higher teacher certificates through scholarships to attend teacher's college, whilst also complementing this with mentorship and Teacher Learning Circles (TLCs). The TLCs are spaces for co-learning and creation where 15 teachers across 9 rural schools (totalling 135 teachers) run monthly sessions on gender-responsive and inclusive pedagogy – so that all students are given a fair go in the classroom!
After these teachers of tomorrow have completed their training, they have guaranteed employment at One Girl partner schools.
These are the objectives of Teachers of Tomorrow:
- Increased number of qualified teachers, providing high quality education to students throughout Sierra Leone
- Higher number of female teachers, and female role models for girls
- Increase girls' enrollment and retention in schools
- Reduce sexual and gender based violence in schools, particularly against girls and young women
