Learning Beyond the Classroom Initiative
The goal of this program is to nurture and empower girls, using a holistic approach, to become independent leading young women in the society and in turn impact the community through the above initiatives.
Program- Programs created with our goal in mind. A program that is student oriented and focused. This will give the students a dynamic opportunity to be groomed into independent, responsible members of the community through character education, career guidance, skill development/ acquisition, academic success, life coaching and leadership development.
As a result the girls will develop:
- Positive self-image and confidence
- Increase effective communication skills
- Higher order thinking that leads to excellence and foster a sense of empowerment
We value each and every girl as a valuable, respectable part of the community that needs to be nurtured and mentored.
“Strive not to be a success but rather to be a value”- Albert Einstein.
Each month is designated to a virtue that the girls’ activities and learning are centered upon. To facilitate learning and understanding, expectations are set for the girls to meet that demonstrate their learning. The girls are involved in these activities through a think, pair and share model collaboratively. To show understanding the girls are expected to define, demonstrate and apply the topic to a real life situation making it relevant.
Each student is paired with a mentor that best meet their career goal
Each student is encouraged and supported through skill acquisition during the holiday
Celebrating Student Success
This is an important aspect of our program. The girls are the center focus and so they must be recognized and their success must be celebrated. At the end of the session, OGAV holds a “theme Gala” to celebrate graduating students, honor girls that have distinguished themselves throughout the year as nominated by their peers, and give scholarships, awards to deserving girls to help and support them both in secondary schools and post secondary destination.
Career Guidance
Assisting and supporting girls through various services and activities to help choose a career. Students are able to identify their career options by defining their abilities, skills and interests using the self-assessment tools and receive suggestions on occupations matching their profile. Students are encouraged to make a plan, set a goal and take action to manage it. Career guidance helps create an atmosphere of optimism and help empower the girls make an informed career decision.
Skill development
Introduce girls to the nine essential skills so they can recognize the skills that they already have, and make connections for the skills they will need in future. Understand that skills are transferable from one activity to another.
Essentials skills: Reading, Writing, Document use, Numeracy. Oral communication, Working with others, Thinking, Computer Use, and continuous learning.
It is important for the girls to develop these skills because they enhance their ability to deal with change, heightens their self-esteem, confidence and provide stepping stones for personal growth
Academic success
We know that success in school takes more than academic skills. We ( OGAV) are committed to supporting and enhancing the girls learning and to providing the skills they need to become lifelong learners. It takes a combination of skills —academic skills and social skills (ethics) -organization, time management, prioritization, concentration and motivation to achieve academic success. Most children say they want to do well in school, yet many still fail to complete the level of work necessary to succeed academically.
Academic Success is then designed to provide a holistic view of a girl’s ability to succeed in school through four critical factors that most directly influence student success:
Academic Skills: behaviors, beliefs and skills that directly facilitate academic success
Commitment: commitment to, drive toward and perceived importance of academic success
Self-Management: ability to anticipate and respond to pressure and stress related to school life
Social Support: availability of resources to support academic success
Students are introduced to assessment questionnaires – Learning styles and Multiple Intelligence to help them identify how best they learn: visual, auditory, and tactile/kinesthetic and their intelligence empowering the girls to take charge of their learning. Girls will undertake a self assessment of class/ study skills to help them reflect on how to improve their study and learning abilities using their learning styles.
Through collaborative partnerships, we offer services and resources that empower the girls to take responsibility for their own learning and achieve success.
Character Education
Character education is the teaching of children in a manner that would purportedly help them develop variously as moral, civil, good, mannered, well behaved, non-bullying, healthy, critical, successful, traditional, compliant and socially acceptable beings.
Development is a deliberate effort to encourage positive personal attributes, civility and solid ethical and moral actions. Character Development focuses on each individual’s personal management at home, at school and within the community.
A common approach of these programs is to provide a list of principles, pillars, values or virtues, which are learned or around which themed activities are planned.
Life Coaching
Life Coaching is the art of empowering the girls to live a more fulfilling and effective life.
Life coaching takes a more holistic approach. It deals with a whole life situation starting from the present and sets goals for a totally successful future.
Every day we make choices to do or not do many things. These choices may range from profound to trivial and each one has an effect that makes our lives more fulfilling or less fulfilling, more balanced or less balanced, that makes our process of living more effective or less effective. Life coaching helps you learn how to make choices that create an effective, balanced and fulfilling life.
The facilitator helps each girl to identify what she wants in life and suggests strategies and tactics that will take her from ‘where she is now’ to ‘where she wants to be’. This process assists the girl’s personal growth. They are no longer alone but have an ally who will work with them to establish better goals, sustain momentum, overcome setbacks and to steer towards success.
The facilitator and the girls work together to establish goals inspired by the girls dreams, and design a plan to reach them. The girls commit to the plan and are responsible for taking action. The facilitator commits to supporting the girls in overcoming any obstacle that may arise during their journey.
The facilitator/organization creates a safe and loving atmosphere full of acceptance, empathy, and appreciation for the girls. In addition, the role of the facilitator will be one of supporting the girls to take action, overcome the obstacles, learn from them, keep moving forward, cheering them, and celebrate with them their achievements. The facilitator also educates the girls by sharing with her new tools, skills and a way of being effective that will assist her to live a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
In every case, the outcome is that each girl is more focused on their objectives and achieves these faster than if they worked alone.
All of these will generate rewarding insights. They will develop their self-awareness, change any limiting beliefs and create new, productive behavior. All of this will have a happy and fulfilling impact on their life.
OGAV help the girls connect their head and their heart in a way that transforms their passion for their dreams into action for their life.
Leadership development
Leadership is “organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal”
At the most basic level, a leader is someone who leads other. While leadership is learned, the skills and knowledge possessed by the leader can be influenced by his or her attributes or traits, such as beliefs, values, ethics, and character. Knowledge and skills contribute directly to the process of leadership, while the other attributes give the leader certain characteristics that make him or her unique.
The girls will learn how to earnest their beliefs, values, ethics and character in developing leadership skills that they can use to their advantage to become a leader. Also, the knowledge and skills the girls acquired , provides the opportunity to demonstrate using leadership skills to accomplish community projects.
Each section of the initiative has a time duration that aligns with the girls schooling period as explained below:
Co-curricular school-based program (Girls Club) 3years (SS1-SS3)
The Girl’s club is a socio-academic club that is student centered and focused. It is a dynamic opportunity designed to support the development of character building that leads to academic success, a positive self-image and the making of respectable young women of society in order to foster a sense of empowerment in them. Our girls need to be taught what authentic character is before they can identify unacceptable behavior.
Each month is designated to a virtue that the girls’ activities and learning are centered upon. To facilitate learning and understanding, expectations are set for the girls to meet that demonstrate their learning. The girls are involved in these activities through a think, pair and share model collaboratively. To show understanding the girls are expected to define, demonstrate and apply the topic to a real life situation making it relevant.
Each student is paired with a mentor that best meet their career goal
Each student is encouraged and supported through skill acquisition during the holiday
Summer Leadership Camp initiative (4 weeks)
We work to make summer valuable by providing a safe place – camp for girls to learn through structured opportunities for enriching experiences. Providing a safe environment for the girls and laud them away from roaming the streets and exposing themselves to danger and unsafe activities. Improving learning that leads to academic success helping them become lifelong learners as an adult and foster better social life for disadvantage girls. Providing opportunity to bridge the gap for our least advantaged children, and to what their better off peers have, and also provide them with healthy food.
In the past four years, we have successfully held a yearly Summer Leadership Camp for 1000 Girls in public secondary schools within Lagos Mainland – Agege community
We are in collaboration with the Education District who is making available a large school site to run the camp giving room for more expansion
Entrepreneur /Vocational Training (Post-Secondary Destination) 12 Months
The purpose of the project is to develop an education program that provides grants to high school graduating students to support a business/trade of interest that meets their post-secondary destination/decision. The project enables students to gain business expertise and leadership skills required to launch, manage, and grow their own enterprise while aiming to build confidence, resilience, and creativity to succeed in today’s global society. This will give them economic power to avert poverty and contribute positively to the society.
Scholarship Overview
We provide full scholarships to University for secondary school girls in support with Eng. Yaro from Casaka Foundation.