Keep Pakistan Learning

Dear Partner, 

We hope you are well. The past few months have arguably been some of our most special at Teach For Pakistan. As of August this year, Teach For Pakistan launched its Karachi program, and placed Fellows in schools in the city to begin their leadership journeys. In addition to this, we welcomed back our second-year Fellows to begin their second and last year of teaching in schools, and worked to prepare them to further strengthen the progress and impact they have been making with their students and school communities over the past year. Teach For Pakistan currently has more than 150 Fellows across 50+ schools in both Islamabad and Karachi!

Developing Fellows’ leadership: 

In the past quarter, we have provided Fellows extensive support to ensure they continue to excel in their classrooms and enable their students’ growth: 

Back to School: As second-year Fellows returned to school after summer break, they came together to share their learnings from break, and orient themselves towards their last year in schools, particularly in view of strengthening their self-leadership. 

Classroom Leadership: Teach For Pakistan classrooms are special for many reasons, one of them being that they are student-centric. For this training, Fellows first learned how to create student-centered learning spaces in their classrooms. Alongside this, they also reflected deeply on what drives them to do their work, aimed to identify what sustains their energies so they continue to fight against education inequity in the long-term.

Enabling Student Success: First-year Fellows were offered additional support to support their work with students. Across Islamabad and Karachi, Fellows gained insight on translating student outcomes into specific competencies, while also identifying strategies on how to make their vision and goals come to life for their students. Lastly, Fellows learned the importance of data-driven classrooms and participated in a small series of workshops to strengthen subject-specific pedagogy, accommodated to unique contexts across both Islamabad and Karachi. 

Teach For Pakistan at the Pakistan Learning Festival

In November, Teach For Pakistan was  invited to participate at the Pakistan Learning Festival, an annual 3-day festival to provide children a platform to promote reading, creativity, imagination, and a comprehensive experience to engage with knowledge beyond textbooks and examinations. The 3-day festival had a footfall of approximately hundreds of thousands of students from across public schools in the federal capital, and with it brought excitement and anticipation at what the three days would hold. 

Teach For Pakistan joined in on the festivities as both organizers and attendees. A group of 14 Fellows and 25 students were part of the organizing committee, who came together to ensure their participation set them apart from the crowd - and that it did! Teach For Pakistan set up a booth at the festival for three days, visited by almost all those attending the festival. Here, we prepared an interactive board where anyone, particularly students, could share the kind of future they want to create for the country.  

For the first activity, students were delighted to prepare ‘Are you smarter than a 5th grader’ where they came ready to stump attendees with questions on various subjects. Unsurprisingly, everyone that attended the students’ booth were excited to take part in the activity and had a wonderful time engaging in something both intellectual and light-hearted. 

Another very special feature of Teach For Pakistan’s engagement at the festival was a visioning exercise titled ‘Aao mil kar khwab dekhein’ (Come, let’s dream together). For this, the Teach For Pakistan team worked closely with a set of students from the festival, pushing them to think about what dreams they have for themselves in the future. Students used this as a starting point to think about how they would achieve these dreams. This activity allowed students to dream not of an impossible reality, but an alternate one that is possible to achieve if they believe in it. 

Teach For Pakistan’s presence at the festival was marked by hope and unwavering faith that one day all the children of Pakistan will be able to avail the opportunities they need to make their dreams a reality.

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