The Training Program exposes African national headmasters to a Christian academic or liberal arts teaching model at the pre-primary, primary, and secondary levels.
Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, rote recitation and memorization dominate classroom-teaching practices. This type of teaching-style does little to promote the critical thinking skills needed by students in today’s complex world. The underlying causes for adopting a recitation-memorization teaching technique are many, but one of the key reasons is insufficient teacher training. There is a need, therefore, to train teachers to instruct in a way that moves beyond the lower-order thinking skills of recall and comprehension to those that cultivate the higher-order thinking skills of application, analysis, and evaluation.
The Training Program exposes African national headmasters to a Christian academic or liberal arts teaching model at the pre-primary, primary, and secondary levels. The Rafiki School Training trains educators to cultivate wisdom and virtue within the hearts and minds of children through the means of godly, quality learning. During the five-day course, headmasters learn how to implement teaching techniques that promote critical thinking and how to develop lesson plans that integrate a biblical worldview. They receive training ideas to help their faculty move beyond recitation and memorization as well as how to implement Rafiki’s model within their own schools. Upon completion of the training, the headmasters receive copies of the Rafiki School Curriculum and the Rafiki Bible Study to use within their institutions.
A worldview is the lens through which we view the world. It is the mental grid or the frame of reference we use to make sense of our world. A biblical worldview is a set of beliefs formed in a person’s mind by what the Bible teaches about God, creation, humankind, moral order, and humanity’s purpose. When we have a biblical worldview, our spiritual and mental eyes look at the world around us as God looks at it.
Biblical worldview integration is taking academic content and connecting it to the bigger picture of a biblical worldview. The Rafiki School Training shows educators how to provide biblical answers to the questions that naturally arise as students study the arts, letters, sciences, and mathematics. By teaching biblical worldview integration, we are increasing the likelihood that the students will transfer this perspective to business, culture, and their profession and we are decreasing the likelihood that they will adopt a worldly perspective when they leave school.