The Future Leaders Program

The Future Leaders Program (FLP) is a multi-dimensional teacher-training program that provides school-based training, mentoring, and independent professional development to pre-service and in-service teachers.

Mission

The program seeks to develop a new generation of highly capable educators by immersing pre-service teachers full-time in schools, while equipping in-service teachers with the necessary skills and resources to improve their own teaching practice, mentoring ability and instructional leadership.

Aims

• Increase the number of entrants into the teaching profession
• Improve the retention of in-service teachers
• Build relationships between student teachers and schools that can ultimately fast-track student teachers into positions within the school where they received training, thus addressing both issues of teacher shortage and teacher attrition.
• Provide student teachers with the necessary tools and resources needed to make their teaching practice self-reflective and contextually relevant.

Model

The FLP utilizes the teaching capacity already existing in schools to develop new teachers. The program employs in-service teachers as mentors of student-teachers, providing student teachers (“Future Leaders”) with direct, experiential training in the classroom while also providing mentor teachers with a classroom teaching assistant that offers additional classroom support. The mentor-student teacher relationship also gives mentors the opportunity to better understand their own practice and develop the necessary skills to become effective instructional leaders.

In addition to student-teachers and mentor-teachers, the program also employs Site-Managers who coordinate the operational and logistical aspects of the program while also providing another layer of personal support to student-teachers. Like Mentor Teachers, Site-Managers are existing school staff members who receive training and support from the FLP in exchange for their work with student teachers.

The FLP directly supports all of these relationships by providing training and professional development opportunities to both student-teachers and mentors to enable their ongoing personal and professional progress. By activating teacher capacity at all these levels, the program works to develop a school’s long-term potential to improve their instructional delivery and leadership potential.