Teach teachers.
The classroom multiplies what you leave.

00 Pre-work before arrival

Arriving prepared is an act of respect. The host teachers will notice. These eight tasks are the minimum preparation for a visiting educator entering Bombali's classrooms.

01 What to unlearn

Training in progressive Western education contexts creates assumptions that are counterproductive in Bombali's classrooms. These four will undermine you if you carry them in unchallenged.

02 The classroom reality

Understanding what you are walking into prevents the shock that costs visiting educators their first week. The gap between Makeni town schools and rural chiefdom schools is large.

The Community Teacher situation

In many rural Bombali chiefdoms, the person standing at the front of a 70-student classroom is a Community Teacher: unpaid or minimally paid, untrained, and relying on "chalk and talk" — rote repetition — because they have no other strategy for managing the room. They are often only 2–3 years older than their oldest students.

The system does not fail because these teachers are uncommitted. It fails because they have no tools. Your job is to give them tools, not to replace them. A visiting educator who makes the Community Teacher feel inadequate has made the classroom worse, not better.

03 Systematic phonics: the highest-leverage skill

Literacy is the master key. A child who can read can access every other subject independently. A child who cannot read is dependent on the teacher for every piece of information, for life. In Bombali's context — where few books are available and teacher turnover is high — phonemic decoding is the survival skill.

Why phonics and not whole-word reading

A child who learns phonemic decoding can decode any word, in any book, forever. A child who memorizes word shapes can only read words they have already seen. In a setting where the average child may encounter fewer than 20 books in their entire school life, the ability to decode new words is categorically more valuable than a memorized vocabulary.

Jolly Phonics in Sierra Leone

The Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education (MBSSE) has adopted the Jolly Phonics approach as part of its national literacy shift. Jolly Phonics teaches 42 letter sounds (not letter names) in a specific sequence, using actions and songs to cement each sound. If host teachers already know it, reinforce and assess their consistency. If not, teach it from the beginning.

04 Classroom management at scale (70+ students)

A 70-student classroom is not a 30-student classroom with more children. It is a different pedagogical context. The strategies that work in a 25-student UK primary classroom do not scale directly. These three structures do.

Peer Learning structure

Identify the strongest readers in each row. They become "reading partners" for the two students on either side. The teacher works with the weakest group — 5 to 8 students — for focused instruction while reading partners manage the rest of the class. This is the structure that makes 70-student literacy teaching physically possible. Without it, the teacher has no time with the students who most need help.

Think-Pair-Share

Ask a question. Students think alone for 30 seconds. Then they turn to a partner and share their answer for 30 seconds. Three pairs report to the class. This structure produces roughly 10 times more student responses per lesson than traditional teacher-led question-and-answer. In a 70-student class, it converts passive listeners into active participants without requiring the teacher to manage 70 individual voices.

The "Show Me" board

Each student has a small personal whiteboard — or a piece of smooth cardboard with chalk, or a slate, or any flat writable surface. The teacher asks a question. Every student writes or draws the answer and holds it up simultaneously. The teacher sees 70 answers in approximately 5 seconds instead of waiting for one student to answer at a time.

This is the single fastest formative check available without technology. Make 40 boards from cardboard and chalkboard paint before Day 10. They cost almost nothing and transform the feedback loop in a large classroom.

05 The gender gap: keeping girls in school

Girls and boys enter primary school in Bombali at roughly equal rates. By secondary school, the gap has opened significantly. Understanding why — and addressing it during a 3-week program — is possible.

The menstrual hygiene barrier

Girls in rural Bombali miss 2 to 4 school days per month due to lack of sanitary materials. Over a school year, this is 24 to 48 missed days — significantly more than the male peer sitting next to them. Over five years of secondary school, that gap compounds into months of lost instruction. This is the single strongest predictor of secondary school non-completion for girls in rural Bombali. It is also the most directly addressable.

The Dignity Kit workshop

Teaching girls to make reusable pads from locally available fabric takes 2 to 3 hours. Materials: cotton fabric, needle, thread, a simple pattern. A single workshop equips 20 to 30 girls for a full school year. The pattern and the skills remain in the school after you leave — provided you teach the process to at least one female teacher who can run the workshop again independently.

Leave the pattern, fabric samples, needles, and thread with the female teacher who assists on Day 12. She is your leave-behind.

The school latrine connection

Girls without a private, lockable toilet at school face additional barriers to attendance during menstruation. This connects directly to the construction curriculum — a private latrine for girls, built by a visiting construction team, removes a parallel barrier. If you are one of multiple visiting teams across domains, coordinate.

06 Formative assessment without technology

Formative assessment — checking whether students have understood what you just taught, in real time — is the feedback loop that separates effective teaching from performance. In well-resourced settings, teachers take this for granted. In most Bombali classrooms, it simply does not exist. These three tools introduce it without requiring power, devices, or printed materials.

Exit tickets

Three minutes at the end of a lesson. Two questions that directly test the day's specific learning objective. Written on a half-sheet of paper (or scrap paper, or a section of the blackboard students copy onto a shared piece of cardboard). The teacher reads the stack before the next day's lesson and groups students by response pattern. This is the feedback loop. It exists in the best schools in the world. It does not exist yet in most Bombali classrooms. It costs paper and three minutes.

The thumbs check

During the lesson, the teacher asks: "Thumbs up if you understand, thumbs sideways if you are not sure, thumbs down if you are lost." Every student responds simultaneously and visibly. No one has to admit publicly that they do not understand — but the teacher sees the room in 10 seconds. Non-threatening. Requires no materials. Works in a 70-student class exactly as well as in a 25-student class.

Stamp as reward

A rubber stamp with a star or the word "GREAT" is a powerful and durable positive reinforcement tool. It is rare in Bombali. It is highly effective. It costs approximately $3. Bring a set and leave them behind. The teacher who reaches for the stamp every day is doing formative assessment without calling it that — the act of looking for who deserves the stamp is the act of noticing student performance.

07 The Teacher Toolkit (under $100)

Everything below fits in a carry-on bag. All of it stays behind when you leave.

08 Radical Inclusion: disability and pregnancy

The MBSSE (Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education) Radical Inclusion policy establishes that pregnant girls have the right to remain in school, and that students with physical disabilities have the right to attend. These rights exist in policy. They do not yet exist consistently in practice.

What community teachers need

Community teachers in rural Bombali often lack tools or confidence to manage a classroom that includes a pregnant student or a student with a mobility impairment. In the absence of guidance, they default to exclusion — not out of malice but because they have no model for inclusion and no one has ever shown them one.

Visiting educators can model inclusive practice directly. Sit the pregnant student close to the exit. Ensure the student with a physical disability has a seat with adequate space. Ask them the same questions you ask everyone else. Hold them to the same learning standards. The message to the classroom — and to the host teacher watching — is: these students are not an obstacle. They are the accountability test of good teaching.

09 The 21-day schedule

This schedule is a guide. Host teachers set the pace. If a session needs to be repeated, repeat it. The most important principle: every skill you demonstrate, a host teacher must then do themselves before you move on.

10 What success looks like

Success is not a good lesson on Day 4. It is a host teacher running the phonics sequence alone on Day 90, with no external prompting, having trained a colleague.

11 Who to contact in Bombali