Creating Master Teachers

In April 2010, after attending the annual Micro Finance Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, I began committing my time, energy and personal resources to understanding the issues around low literacy in under resourced countries. My volunteer work with teachers in Ethiopian classrooms, along with my extensive experience as a teacher educator, informed the subsequent design of my professional development program, Read Think Write: A Teachers’ Guide to Creating Thoughtful Early Grade Readers and Writers©. Creating Master Teachers(CMT) piloted the Read Think Write program in Maasailand, Kenya. We gathered evidence to demonstrate that by combining effective, multidimensional professional development practices with high-impact pedagogy, teachers and students functioning in conditions of extreme scarcity, will substantively improve their awareness, interaction and proficiency when reading and writing. Our goal is to address the literacy crisis and its impact on unfulfilled human potential in a thoroughly systemic way. Replacing flawed workshop and cascade model teacher training, we are seeking to partner with teacher preparation colleges in under resourced countries that are looking to either upgrade or initiate courses in the teaching of higher-literacy learning and work reciprocally with local schools.