As head of a Non-Government Organization (NGO), we were asked to develop an education system in a rural province of one of the world's poorest countries with 1 million children.
The people are traditionally subsistence farmers and do not speak the national language. Due to a relatively large population and fairly minimal natural resources, many young people are now unemployed. By the way, our NGO had minimal resources, only enough for our team to live on.
Our system also had to work well for the very poor who have drifted to the fringes of the capital city and set up shanty towns. Many are unemployed. Some were self-employed recycling rubbish, some men had jobs as day laborers in factories and construction projects, and some women got jobs as household servants.
Assumptions
Developing schools in this way is a local socio-cultural change brought about by a change agent, which closely parallels some kinds of extension education and methods of church planting. Consequently, we figured that those lessons would probably apply to schools as well.
We had to assume that local people would eventually be able to fund their own expenditures and eventually run schools themselves. In the end, the schools would be theirs and the expats would leave. This only worked by seeking to interact with local cultural patterns. Sometimes we could follow them and we could speak something new into their culture. And sometimes we just had to put up with things we didn’t like but couldn't do anything about. The assumption that local people would take over forced us to be extremely innovative when working with the very poor, both in leadership training, and making the program affordable. The place to start was by building credibility and addressing felt needs.
The system needed to be simple enough for local people to reproduce using their own resources. This involved:
teacher training
administrator training
curriculum contents and textbooks
writing materials
low technology.
The system needed to be meritocratic and competency based.
When dealing with the very poor, we realized we probably needed to provide other kinds of assistance, for example, employment and health care.
People needed to see real working examples to believe that it's possible.
When we made long-term plans, they looked ambitious to the point of being unrealistic, and we accepted that they would probably need to be adjusted later on. But a set of long-terms goals was necessary to guide short-term planning.
A school system needs a suitable quality system, based on a defined system of suitable core values, e.g.:
Availability of opportunity: inclusiveness and non-discrimination. (In some locations, school registration has been done on the basis of the whole family to ensure that girls are included. The NGO may also need to have a policy in place for kids who work, are subject to abuse, and/or are in debt-bondage or other forms of slavery.)
Expectations of student behavior and the kinds of discipline that may be used
School should be an enjoyable experience that gives hope, builds, self-worth, and expands students' (and their parents') worldview beyond the village
Stakeholder consultation
Continual improvement
Curriculum purposes and minimum academic requirements, e.g. role and value of basic literacy and numeracy, better understanding than rote memory.
We might need to require that all particpating famillies enroll all children of enrollment age. We did not want to facilitate a situation where girl children were left out.
Exponential growth is possible, although the mass of new growth eventually slows it down. People naturally feel a need to consolidate, even if the program can and should continue to grow.
Wealthy people will generally produce larger, better schools (or at least wealthier ones), which accord with their aspirations for their children and their conceptions of what school should be. Similarly, poorer people will generally produce smaller, weaker schools (or at least poorer ones), which accord with their quite different aspirations for their children and their conceptions of what school should be. As their schools progress, they will more closely resemble the schools of wealthier people.
Education is a means of upward social mobility. As villages tend to be conservative, most poorer communities are incremental over a generation or longer and big change takes a while. However, a few remarkable individuals will float upwards. Part of the change is their socialization into higher socio-economic groups, at the risk of estrangement from their own group of origin.
Some staff are good initiators, but need others to come along and tidy up what they have done. Some staff are good maintainers.
Different locations will normally progress at different speeds, even if they progress through very similar stages.
Some upcoming leaders will fail and disappoint.
Some schools will die, and some with flourish.
Leadership structures tend to become hierarchical over time, then stagnate.
Established bodies tend to feel superior to new start-ups, and can feel threatened by their success.
Local political forces can be either a help or a hindrance.
Interpersonal problems in decision-making are the primary cause of failure.
In the early stages, expats need to be good at grass roots work. At later stages, they will be predominantly involved in training leaders.
A package
We needed to create a set method of how to teach it. "Proceduralisation" is the process of reducing difficult, complex tasks to easy-to-follow sets of steps, that is, making it into a procedure.
Similarly, we needed to develop a set of materials into "ready to use" packages comprising a set of student textbooks and a teacher’s handbook, all printed locally and cheaply in a culturally acceptable format. We also needed to do the same for teacher training.
Why? Hmmm. Lots of reasons:
Proceduralization and a fixed curriculum also simplified teacher training. During the first stages, teachers only needed to learn how to do it our way. Later on, they could learn to teach using a different theories of learning.
To give to a replacement instructor if a teacher retires, gets sick, etc.
To simplify improvement of materials
To simplify audits by having everything in a neat, sensible order
To multiply the program and avoid re-inventing the wheel each time
And perhaps other reasons ...
A word of caution. Packages should not lead teachers to think that "the book is the teacher" and they are only facilitators. We needed to select suitable people and give them some teacher training. They needed to learn to take initiative, develop and monitor a healthy class environment, and respond appropriately to problems.
The generational timeframe
Many kinds of community development are very long term, because it takes generational change to be most effective. In other words, we knew we could expect only a relatively small amount of short-term incremental change. Most of the major change will occur in the next generation, so working with larger populations of children is essential. In this kind of scenario, ten years is a short program. If a generation is thirty years, then a full program takes about thirty years.
In fact, short-term help can be counterproductive in these circumstances. Local people get disillusioned with people who come, make promises, do something that might help a few people, then leave. This doesn't create long-term change.
What made it work?
Parental and community support.
Some kind of immediate benefit to all parties involved.
Creating new opportunities for the future.
Creating new aspirations and realistic pathways for the younger generation.
This kind of project would have wound down if we did not develop local leadership. We thought that it was wiser to expect to give long-term support. In any case, change in the environment is inevitable, and the program will probably keep evolving.
This kind of change is probably more effective when it involves change brought about by education.
We thought the first wave would get a basic primary school education, and that most children would choose to go onto the traditional occupations of their parents (farmers, small traders, traditional crafts).
We planned for most of the children in the second wave to do a full junior high school education, after which many would do a vocational qualification.
We are still planning for children in the third wave to have the opportunity for a full high school education, with the possibility of higher education.
If there is a fourth wave, the majority of students will achieve a full high school education, with relatively easy access to subsequent higher education.
In each of the first three waves, only a small group could go further. They tended to be either the educational or the social elite. Some acted as role models; they were to some extent the guinea-pigs for higher programs, but also proved to children and parents in future waves that people of their group could do further education.
The underlying subtext was to accommodate socio-cultural change, to be manifest in several ways:
Raise employment aspirations.
Adapt to a higher standard of living and social class.
Raise their aspirations for their children.
Reduce their powerlessness.
Participate in regional and national discussions.
The role of teacher education
It didn't take long to realize that starting a network of schools is probably the easy part.
The hard part was training the teachers. We learnt early that nothing can move ahead without a core team of competent teachers, and the program would quickly fail without a viable system of giving prospective teachers new skills and ways of thinking. The system needed sufficient incentives for applicants to take on the role, but enough safeguards to ensure that unsuitable people were not admitted.
We decided on a teacher training system that was practicum-based (as opposed to campus-based) for several reasons:
It favored applicants who wanted to teach rather than those who wanted a free education.
We could implement it straight away with fairly immediate benefit to people on the ground, unlike a campus situation which would offer benefit only several years later.
It enabled an education system to grow incrementally and be easier to manage.
We had no means to build campuses and support students through a period of campus-based study.
We thought that campus based education could build a wider worldview and professional prestige, but it could also create dissatisfaction with village standards of living and raise aspirations to leave the village.
On the negative side, we noticed that many prospective teachers had erroneous conceptions of education. (For example, they tended to expect only rote-learning; they thought that it was fair to assess reading using a text that students had already memorized and could recite without reading it.) In a field-based practicum, it was difficult to ensure in that each new crop of teachers would develop a good concept of education and would not use their teaching role to reinforce their errors.
In the first instance, the only entry requirements were:
Demonstrable good character, which needs some careful defining and checking according to local context
The skills which one hopes to teach (e.g. literacy and numeracy)
Support of the local community group
Proficient in the language of teacher training (e.g. national language)
Good communication skills
Teachable attitude, willing to accept correction if necessary
Agrees to follow the rules of the program.
These rules created some messy local politics. Most of the applicants were local women, but the local old men (and some of the older women) wanted to control everything they did and enforce their sometimes erroneous views of education. We had to educate more people as to their roles and program standards than we had anticipated.
Our regional seminars for trainee teachers included:
Modeling the kinds of teaching we want to students to copy,
Observing master teachers, by DVD if necessary (e.g. subject matter where we did not have specialist expertise),
Creating a sense of collegiality between trainees,
Clarifying educational expectations: the nature of learning, the role of creativity and curiosity, the role of competency,
Basic skills: how to prepare effective lessons plans, classroom communication, classroom management and discipline, how to learn from other teachers.
Senior training staff did unannounced field visits to see what actually happened and to offer solutions. Some classes went very well and we were encouraged to see people on track for success. However, it was often difficult and frustrating. Travelling was more time-consuming and tiring than we had anticipated, and classes were often cancelled for no good reason. In a few locations, we reluctantly had to withdraw support because classes were extremely erratic with no hope of correction.
Working as a teacher's assistant offered several benefits, and I think it generally minimized many problems :
They were acculturated into the school and classroom environment.
They became accustomed to the range of normal responses of children.
They had opportunity to observe proficient teachers.
They gained experience in a controlled, supervised environment doing a less demanding teaching role.
They were of relatively immediate benefit to the education system.
It would have been ideal to have one student Teaching Assistant for each proficient teacher, and this would have been the fastest way to bring people into the system. But in the real world, some schools were better than others and some teachers were better than others. Some were be good teachers, but not suitable mentors. Consequently, we gave some schools more student Teaching Assistants that others.
When they could visit other teachers, they could observe, give support, answer questions, and appraise performance.
Of course, they needed to do assigned homework, such as some reading, and tasks based on fill-in templates (e.g. teaching plans, teaching observations, student observations).
Early childhood teachers benefited from a childcare, playgroup, or kindergarten component in their pathway, but there are arguments for and against:
For
Childminding is something that most people already needed to do.
Students need to learn quite a lot of complex knowledge about early childhood behavior and learning patterns. Childminding is an excellent opportunity to learn it.
It is a natural pathway to primary school teaching, especially the lower grades.
It is easy to introduce with local community facilities.
Against
Many local people thought it was a waste of time and resources: "Anybody can look after kids."
It was not a sustainable occupation in its own right in a very poor country unless it had a clearly valuable educational role.
Some countries saw kindergarten as primarily academic rather than child-play.
Content 05
Teacher career pathways
Those who did well in community literacy groups could progress to higher levels, such as middle school teaching assistant, middle school teacher, high school teaching assistant, high school teachers in specialist subjects, high school principals, and regional administrators. The exact titles of qualifications progressed from various lower certificates, through a Diploma, and eventually to a degree.
The system also needed a way to select some to become school principals. We knew that the usual error is to presume that a competent teacher is well-suited to become a good principal, and then take good teachers out of the classroom and put them in an office. Admittedly, school principals need enough teaching skills to guide their teaching staff and most usually still do some teaching. However, they also need a strong capacity for leadership and management, which some excellent teachers do not have.
Such a program also needed a failsafe (i.e. face-saving) system for people who don't move up the ladder. The simplest way was to use written examinations for promotions; students had to pass the exam before we started collecting evidence of competence. Although written examinations do not indicate teaching proficiency, they have several advantages. First, they are easy to centralize and regulate; this prevents the problems of people trying to use political pressure, corruption, and manipulation to gain promotions. Second, they are generally socially acceptable; it's easy to say, "You have to pass the exam to get a promotion." Third, they are academically respectable when it comes to academic certification.
Vocational education posed a particular challenge as it posed at least three possible starting points:
Informal apprenticeships where young people work with local artisans. Communities normally already have such a system in place (e.g. father to son) and it might mainly perpetuate local inefficiencies, especially if there were no employment opportunities. Still, it would be worth asking whether it is a useful model.
Local neighborhood literacy and numeracy groups for older children, teenagers and adults. I'd plan for two hours per week for each group.
A stream of studies in the seminal high school system.
Eventually, vocational training would develop into vocational training centers in the same way that schools developed: Start small and prove the idea, and train instructors on the job at first. When the system works, it can be professionalized and institutionalized.
The next steps in vocational training would be more difficult to implement because it would depend on having working models of what to do, staff who have accepted newer ideas, and some kind of venue, although it could easily be community-based rather than campus-based.
The most likely areas of training in the first instance are those that optimize opportunity in their existing economic structures. The first is agriculture and appropriate technology, including agricultural support industries such as welding, construction, basic mechanics, water supply, etc. The second is micro-enterprise, to create new jobs where there currently are none.
Consequently, we have the following career pathways:
For early childhood, we built up the following range of levels:
Community literacy and numeracy instructor
Early childhood teaching assistant
Early childhood teacher
Primary school teaching assistant
Primary school teacher
Primary school principal
Primary school:
Community literacy worker and/or childcare (volunteer)
Primary teacher assistant (student teacher)
Primary teacher (full-time paid)
Primary school teacher mentor for trainees (full-time or part-time paid)
Primary Principal (full-time paid)
Primary regional administrator (full-time paid)
Middle and high school:
Community literacy worker and/or apprenticeship supervisor (volunteer)
Middle or high school teacher assistant (student teacher)
Middle or high school teacher (full-time paid)
Middle or high school teacher mentor for trainees (full-time or part-time paid)
Middle or high school Principal (full-time paid)
Middle or high school regional administrator (full-time paid)
Take-up patterns
It was very difficult to predict actual take-up patterns, but it was fairly easy to forecast several probable scenarios.
It was quite likely that programs in some locations will close down, and this actually happened. They were not always viewed as failures; it depends on the reasons. For example, if local demographics change dramatically, a good program could be no longer viable.
Similarly, some would not progress. For example, some literacy groups continued on without becoming seminal primary schools, and some seminal primary schools did not add seminal middle schools.
Progress depended greatly on people's capacity to absorb change, which varied from place to place. Rural people are typically quite conservative, and some were disagreeable to the following generation getting a much higher education than themselves. Even in the city, where implementation can move more quickly, people faced a "plan vs. reality perception dissonance." That is, even if we implement a plan perfectly, the final reality appears to be different from the plan. People tended to forget the plan and to focus on the practical realities that they faced later on.
As an aside, we had to consider whether take up might instead follow the so-called "hype cycle," a pattern that has the following stages:
(Source: Wikipedia, s.v. Massive open online course)
A new service creates unrealistic expectations in both providers and consumers.
Those expectations generate rapid growth.
When the service fails to meet expectations, acceptance goes into rapid decline.
The service appears to have failed.
Both providers and consumers develop a set of realistic expectations.
The providers deliver proficiently based on a set of realistic expectations.
To a considerable extent, the purpose of a plan is to minimize the unhealthy extremes of the hype-cycle and to plan the best possible pathway from introduction to proficient delivery.
Critical Success Factors
Success depends of various factors. Here are some of them, in no particular order:
People need to see a working example somewhere among "people like us" that they can emulate. The example should not be schools for rich city people who have schools anyway).
Peoplel need a sense of identity as a program
Do you have venues in each location?
What administrative systems are in place?
You'll need books, both textbooks and books for enjoyable reading afterwards, perhaps a seminal library system.
Community consultation and support is essential.
You'll have to keep attendance records for staff and students
What levels of staff competence do you have? You'll need systems for benchmarking competence and assessment.
You'll need rules and quality standards, including administration standards. You'll also need a compliance system to monitr implementtion an progress. If people are not accustomed to working with them, they need to be clear and simple at first. (Later on, when the program is more complex, you'll need more sophisticated systems.)
I'd recommend a system of unannounced inspections. This will let you see what actually happens, not what people can stage-manage for you. It is also more effective as a way of teaching people in context.
Internal and external audits for compliance with quality standards
Strictness with standards compliance for programs to progress to the next developmental stage.
Risks and risk management
Risks
Local village power politics, disagreement between local leaders
Dishonesty
Loss of key personnel, both national and expat
Incident causing loss of good reputation
Loss of enthusiasm after a very good start
Discouragement of local people, even if they do a good job
Lack of skills that were not anticipated
Withdrawal of resourcing at community level
Attendance patterns: too many students to teach effectively, too few students to be viable, attendance is to erratic to make progress achieving learning goals
Hidden or latent expectations of foreign funding
Accused on non-compliance with government programs
Probability of people (both staff and students) becoming victims of management mistakes while pioneering a new system
What if people want to start with a full-blown school system? It is clearly unrealistic with the resources at hand.
Student Teaching Assistants are easily given classes from time to time (e.g. the regular teacher takes off a sick day or even ceased in the position). This creates some tensions, especially if the TA's were not up to the task or found it unreasonably stressful, and could result in a burnout or dropout rate.
Rapid growth generates unforeseeable problems, so the program could easily collapse if it expanded too quickly or if emerging problems were not handled very quickly. The actual maximum growth is usually below what is theoretically possible.
Transport in devolved systems can take more time and be more tiring than is easy to anticipate, especially if roads are bad.
Pressure on local coordinators to succeed may be stressful and create burn-out.
Local coordinators who do not exercise initiative could fail, i.e. by feeling overwhelmed by circumstances rather than being in control of them.
Untrained personnel would be dumped in a teaching role when others suddenly dropped out. (Drop out reasons could be valid, such as sickness, not just discouragement.)
We might not be able to deliver our side of the deal either. For example, the government could change policy, we could lose key personnel, our funding might be reduced, etc.
Specific risk management
Written agreements in place regarding use of foreign funding, program ownership, and assignment of responsibility, principles of operation. Compliance system for same.
Liaison with government regarding plans, and permits if necessary
Teachers and anybody in local school governance need to learn how to maintain an appropriate role in the wider community, and not use their position to accumulate power.
We might need to generate our own literature in the local language.
For potential problems caused by rapid growth:
Sound preparation
Incremental progress with easy natural transitions between stages.
Let each stage run for enough time before progressing to the next stage.
Start with a procedural zed management system so people don't have to make difficult judgment decisions before they are trained to do so.
Timeframe
We followed the layout below, indicating that the fastest reasonable timeframe for implementation is thirteen years. Even then, the number of years is a minimum. Implementation does not progress to the next stage unless existing programs are working satisfactorily.
Other places might decide on something different because some of the segmentation into years is arbitrary. For example, after the literacy program is proven and adequately stable, we could add new groups each following year.
Entry
One year
Negotiate entry to locale and set up on site
Stage One
One year
Consultation, planning, enrolling a small group of trainee teachers, perhaps start one neighborhood literacy group.
Stage Two
One year
Pilot project literacy groups
Seminal group of trainee teachers
Stage Three
Five years
Second wave of literacy groups
Larger group of trainee teachers
Seminal primary schools (grades 1-5)
Stage Four
Five years
Third wave of literacy groups
Larger group of trainee primary school teachers
Second wave of seminal primary schools
Seminal group of trainee middle school teachers
Seminal middle schools (grades 6-10)
Stage One: Consultation
Early in the whole project, we consulted various communities, and their responses varied greatly:
Some communities were consistently supportive and receptive.
Some were very receptive at first, but then faded as people became distracted with other things.
Many of them had internal politics and power-jostling, which they usually tried to keep secret from us. We had difficulty working with them.
Their motives were usually mixed. For example, some thought that we would channel gifts of money to them. Others had selective memory; they remembered what they would get from us but not their obligations. Some prospective teachers seemed to be sincerely interested in children's education, while others might say anything to get a paying job.
We found some propective teachers who could not joint the program as volunteers. They needed a paying job with an income in order to live.
Some had expectations that we could not meet. For example, they wanted to start at an advanced stage, which we could not do.
The discussion also raised awareness of possible other discussion topics.
What kinds of things do local people want?
What do they already have in place? How do they evaluate it?
Do you need to phase in use of the national language?
What kinds of job can their kids realistically aspire to?
How do they traditionally pass on knowledge to the next generation?
What kinds of knowledge do they see as valuable? For example, basic vocational skills may be more helpful in the immediate future than higher qualifications. You may need to look first at jobs that kids could actually get after school, but for which education adds value. In this sense, "added value" may mean: easier to get a job, easier to keep a job, able to continue learning, higher pay, able to use a higher income.
Clarify expectations:
People in some locations wanted to go straight to a new building with K-12 programs, but that is actually a long term goal. We agreed to it as a goal, but needed to explain the value of starting small.
They expected the NGO to pay for everything, include wages. In the long term, we believed that this is usually counter-productive.
In one cultural group, local authorities had given monetary compensation for people to attend education. Consequently, people expected the school system not only to provide education for free, but also to pay them to be students. These people, though poor and needing education, were poor candidates for a sustainable school system.
What are the legal requirements? We asked others in our network of NGOs. In some regions, governments impose a curriculum, the use of a language that students do not speak, and fully equipped "books and bricks" schools with teachers who hold teaching degrees. It is easy to adopt as a goal, but it was an impossible option as a starting point. In a few cases, this is the only kind of school that local communities will accept, a view that might keep them out of the education system for the foreseeable future.
We also consulted other education professionals, asking the following kinds of questions:
Are there already curricula in other dialects or languages that we could use as a model? Do our curricula need to be easy to replicate in other dialects or languages?
Have other people tried it and made mistakes? What lessons did they learn?
What resources are for sale locally, if any (e.g. student textbooks, stationery, teacher training texts)?
Is it a good orthography? Is it already standardized or can we modify it?
Stage Two: Neighborhood literacy and numeracy groups pilot project
The starting point was to establish small, local programs that had maximum chance of success. We ran three pilot neighborhood literacy and numeracy groups in locations that were different enough to represent a wider cross-section of the community, and close enough to the center to observe and monitor. The groups needed to be large enough to gain useful feedback for future planning, and the ideal size is 8-10 students per group. They needed to be positive enough to set a precedent and be an example later on. We planned to have half a dozen trainee teachers to act as assistants.
The program was done in the local language using borrowed community facilities. A shady veranda was the most common. Groups were part-time study. We planned for the ideal of about two hours per day for primary age children, but we found that it was not necessarily realistic. In the plan, these small groups would be the nucleus of primary schools. The program was staffed by qualified people who could be an example to trained teachers, and they were assisted by volunteers from the trainee teacher program.
Not every community that wanted to participate was a suitable candidate. Communities had to meet some basic conditions:
Local community support
Agree to funding arrangements
Agree to curriculum
Agree to staffing arrangements (including trainee teachers)
Nominate at least one suitable candidate teacher
Agree to attendance and behavior requirements
Provide a suitable venue within walking distance of prospective students
A viable number of prospective students
Honesty in all financial matters
In some cases, it was better to combine nearby communities to create a viable site.
Resourcing needed to be agreed on as early as possible:
The program provided some resources through 100% subsidy: Teacher training staff and curriculum
The program provided some resources through partial subsidy: textbooks and stationary,
The local communities provided some resources with no subsidy: venues and furniture.
Stage Three: Neighborhood literacy and numeracy groups
We revised the neighborhood group approach and implemented it on a wider scale with a broader sample of locations, for example, an inner city slum, a community of town fringe-dwellers, a rural agricultural village, and a remote community that was quite isolated.
Stage Four: Seminal primary schools (grade 1-5)
We assessed the neighborhood literacy and numeracy groups. Those that were successful progressed to stage four, seminal primary schools. The criteria were as follows:
Institutionally stable
Local community support
Self-funding
Instructors have demonstrated competencies
Instructors have maintained satisfactory attendance at training
Students have maintained satisfactory attendance
Students have attained required competencies
Maintained compliance with conditions over a specified period of time (say two years)
Adequate administration
Honesty in all financial matters
As for the curriculum, the schools added other subjects to the basics of literacy and numeracy, for example: health, general knowledge of the country (government, money, geography, etc.), basic science, art, and national language.
Resourcing was a little more complex than literacy groups, and needed to be agreed on as early as possible. We discussed several modifications:
The program partially subsidized one meal a day for children.
Most communities viewed school uniforms as the sign of a "real" school, but parents almost always saw them as very expensive. The actual decision to have uniforms was always local. Our main requirement was that each school had the same policy for all its students; we did not want students who did not wear uniforms as second-class citizens in their school community.
Stage five and following
We are now up to this stage. We estimate that the system will be easier to scale up when norms are established in the organizational culture.
Add middle schools (grade 6-10)
Add a seminal system of training school management
Add vocational high school.
Appoint teacher trainers, possibly teachers who show the aptitude to do so.
Add a college system, based on the teacher training program.
Appendix: Research directions
Field studies would produce a good source of research data for studies in:
