The teacher glances back and forth from her black tablet to the students in front of her as she runs through an English lesson.
"Very good," she announces as reads the directions from the tablet. "Give them a super-cheer," she continues and the students shout in unison "Super!"
The e-reader not only delivers the lesson script to the teachers, but it also acts as an electronic time sheet, grade book and supervisor. The tablet tracks what time the teacher arrives, what time she leaves, and how long she spends on every lesson.
The administrative side of the entire school can be run off a smartphone, says David Mwangi, the manager of a Bridge school in Nairobi. He can admit new students, submit test scores and send payroll time sheets back to Bridge's central office in Nairobi all from his cheap Chinese smartphone.
Tuition collection is also automated. Parents pay their monthly school fees through Kenya's mobile money system, M-Pesa, which allows people to transfer cash via text message.
'The Magic' Of Replication
The exact same lesson being taught in this classroom is being taught in every other sixth grade class at Bridge schools across the country, says Bridge co-founder Shannon May.
"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."
That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.
It also allows Bridge to rapidly expand and bring in more "customers."
That's Bridge's goal. Its target customers are the hundreds of millions of parents around the world who live on $2 day and yearn for better schools for their children.
To keep tuition costs low, Bridge depends on large class sizes. Their ideal class size is 40 to 50 kids, but the classes can get upward of 70 students.
Over the past four years, Bridge has grown to be the largest chain of private schools on the continent. And some advocates for universal education find this troubling.
There are other private schools across Africa seeking to teach the so-called poorest of the poor, but their models and size are quite different from those of Bridge.
Criticism Of Method
"If somebody suggested that kind of an educational model, in this country they would be laughed out of the educational community," says Ed Gragert, the U.S. director of the Global Campaign for Education, which advocates for increased access to education in the developing world.
"That's not how kids learn best," he says. "Kids learn by interacting with each other. It seems like we are going back for the sake of somebody making a profit to where a robot could teach that class."
He says, however, he does admire the rigor of the Bridge model. School is in session from 7:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. five days a week. On Saturday, classes run from 9 until 4.