Teacher Training is going great!

Education Progress Initiatives (EPI) is heading into their 6th month working with our teachers at Kisimani School, and the program is going so well.  

Samwel Yonah, the program director had this wonderful feedback to share:

"We had great cooperation from the head teacher, everyone was very supportive and receptive from day one, both at the school and from the government.  Buy-in from the city was very receptive and open, especially to scale the training to other schools and use the same teachers from Kisimani to train future teachers at neighboring schools."

Wow!  To have government officials asking 'what are you doing that is working so well?' and express a desire to scale the program to other schools is a huge win.  From the beginning, one of the visions the community at Kisimani had was to be a model school and show what was possible when we invest in education, resources and teacher training.  Change needs to come from within, and because EPI is doing such a phenomenal job leading our teachers, they are setting an example to follow.  

Samwel went on to say: " We have an idea to organize a workshop at the end of the year and start to scale to other schools.  We want other teachers to see 'wow, Kisimani is one of the best schools' and how can we learn from them and duplicate their success, not just academically but in other ways as well."

Kisimani was ranked #1 in the district in 2018,n and every year since has had a 100% graduation rate, which is very impressive.  The next step is modeling modern and progressive classroom management strategies that can give healthy alternatives to teachers who have been trained with outdated and sometimes harmful behavior modification strategies such as corporal punishment.  

We have always had a zero tolerance policy for corporal punishment at Kisimani School, but the honest feedback that some of our newer teacher gave was that that was how they were taught and trained, and without an alternative they were struggling to teach classrooms of 50 or more students with positive reinforcement.

Take a look at what one of our teachers had to say after a particularly inspiring training session with EPI:

THANK YOU AND CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF OUR TEACHERS AND MENTORS FROM EPI!