Strategy
Mission
The mission of World Partners in Education (WPE) is to improve the quality of and expand access to education in under-served areas that empowers people and communities for the future while respecting the local culture and history. To achieve this mission we will partner with educational organizations to pursue locally supported goals, monitor long-term outcomes, and connect communities with needed resources.
Strategy
After years working in schools in Ghana, we have noticed a trend across schools: students in the primary grades are not showing growth in literacy. This has a trickle-down effect on all subjects, since it is hard to learn social studies, science, and even math if reading is difficult. It also undermines the quality of education students receive throughout their educational careers. Without a strong foundation, students never have the opportunity to catch up. To address the gaps, we are developing a new literacy intervention. This strategy is teacher-focused and research-based.
Our strategy is teacher-focused, rather than student-focused, because we want to continue to impact students for years. A single teacher can have a tremendous impact on his or her entire classroom year after year. If the average class size is 20 students and we have 10 teachers in our teacher training program, we can impact 200 students the first year of the intervention. Those teachers will then continue to use the strategies and techniques year after year, dramatically increasing our impact from an initial investment in 10 teachers.
We focus on research-based techniques in our teacher training. We are not re-inventing the wheel. Instead, we re-package proven techniques in an easily learned format so we can have maximum impact. We measure our success with pre and post assessments of teachers and their students so that we have the data to show our impact. We also use these data to continually improve our intervention. Our assessments are designed to measure individual program goals so that we can figure out where we are doing well and where we can continue to improve.