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Childhood & Community Education

Basic Education and Teacher Training (Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn)

INMED’s Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn program in Brazil, developed in partnership with the GE Foundation, is a school excellence initiative that combines teacher training; development of instructional modules to increase students’ academic skills in reading, writing and mathematics; and improved school management, including ongoing performance assessment. Designated “master teachers” train their teacher colleagues in academic topics and best practices in instruction and classroom management. Nearly 17,000 children and 750 teachers in more than 50 schools are now involved in the program.

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The Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn program was originally developed in response to the fact that most public primary school teachers in the project areas of São Paulo and Francisco Morato, a community on the city’s outskirts, had little or no formal training, and that accountability for teacher and student performance was minimal—deficiencies that directly contributed to students’ poor literacy levels. Too many students were unable to read or write adequately when they reached 4th grade—and since many youth leave school after the fifth grade, the last year of compulsory education, they are unprepared to achieve long-term economic productivity and success in the workforce.

The goal of the Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn program is to improve the quality of basic education, and in turn, to improve student performance in Brazil, specifically by:

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    Improving teachers’ and master teachers’ instructional skills and academic knowledge in reading, writing and mathematics.
  • Developing, improving, standardizing and publishing curricula for reading, writing and mathematics.
  • Improving the management capacity of education departments, school principals, master teachers and teachers.
  • Engaging government partners and the general population, especially parents, in increasing literacy awareness and promoting sustainable change in the schools.
  • Developing a replicable model for academic training, assessment, monitoring and evaluation systems in municipal and state schools throughout Brazil.

Results to date have been dramatic, showing how the Ready to Teach, Ready to Learn program has the potential to transform elementary education in Brazil. At the baseline of the last annual evaluation in Francisco Morato, for instance, 30% of children could not read or write the letters of the alphabet—a year later, all but 3% have mastered this fundamental level of literacy. Also at baseline, only 7.5% of these children were able to associate the correct written words with spoken words—now 40% have mastered this level.

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