|
An old Zambian proverb holds that, “when you run alone you run fast, but when you run together you run far”.
Maryla Bialobrzeska reports on the development of a new course funded by the Roger Federer Foundation that makes use of video and encourages teachers in Zambian Community Schools to work collaboratively to strengthen the quality of the learning in their schools.
Setting the scene
In Zambia barriers to accessing primary school education include long distances covered to reach schools, the negative impact of HIV and AIDS, high poverty levels in communities, lack of infrastructure and limited schools especially in rural areas.
It is estimated that approximately 600,000 children attend the over 3 000 locally built Community Schools which help to ameliorate the lack of government school provision at primary level.
Teachers in these schools are typically volunteers, with little or no formal teacher training. Key challenges experienced by Community School teachers include, lack of formal training both in content and pedagogic knowledge and lack of teaching resources. Additional stress is placed on these teachers with many having to teach very large and/or multi-grade classes with learners of varying ability. Then there are the personal trials. Teachers at Community Schools receive limited payment, often, being paid in kind with chickens, maize and vegetables by parents who survive as subsistence farmers.
The teaching challenge
In Zambia, as is the case across much of the African continent, the dominant teaching style is transmission style (chalk and talk), a style that promotes rote learning and passive memorisation of information, rather than enabling understanding and critical thinking. The transmission approach also fails to support the development of personal agency or to promote an awareness of the importance of life-long learning.
Saide’s involvement
Aligned to its mission of supporting the development of quality education in a range of southern African countries, the Roger Federer Foundation approached Saide to work in partnership with a number of Zambian organisations to develop and deliver an interactive learning and teaching methods course for volunteer teachers at Zambian Community Schools. Saide is designing and developing the course content while a number of Zambian-based NGOs including the Reformed Open Community Schools (ROCS) and the Zambian Open Community Schools (ZOCS) will be responsible for facilitating the course implementation.
The approach
Research related to how people learn points to the fact that this is best done by doing authentic tasks in a socially interactive or collaborative context (Jean Paiget, Lev Vygotsky, Yrjö Engeström et al).
Rooted in this framework, the course modules are designed to build teacher motivation and capacity in the implementation of interactive pedagogy. The course content supports teachers to plan and prepare learning activities with much emphasis placed on using locally found waste and natural materials to make the necessary learning resources. Click to see detail of interactive methods promoted in this course.
To model this approach, videos shot locally in Zambian Community schools were made. The Community School teachers will be required to discuss these videos in their study groups and then plan and implement similar activities with their own classes.
Producing the videos
Story board scripts detailing the lesson process and activities were prepared by Saide. Click to see storyboard exemplar.
A Zambian video production company was contracted to shoot the videos in local community schools. On site, support was provided by Saide coaching the teacher/s to implement the activity–based lessons which were the subject of the videos and additionally providing support to the videographers, ensuring that the relevant pedagogic focus was captured.
Course implementation method
The course has been conceptualised as a self-study course with limited support from external course facilitators. The assumption is, that working collaboratively through the activities, the teachers will support each other. Mobile tablets will be used to deliver the course content, a special application (App) is being designed by Saide and all course content, including the videos, will be uploaded into the app. Due to lack of connectivity in most of the Community Schools, the course will be delivered offline. The Roger Federer Foundation will provide solar chargers to all the schools that do not have a power supply.
The teachers in each school will work together in small study groups, discussing the course content and engaging with the videos which are used to exemplify various types of interactive learning processes and activities. The teachers will be provided with a set of guiding questions to think about when engaging with the videos. They will then be required to discuss these in their groups. As highlighted above, the course also requires that the teachers plan similar activities to those seen in the video and to implement these with their own classes. To complete the input → discussion → action → reflection learning cycle, the teachers will work in pairs and video each other’s interactive lesson implementation using the tablets. They will then discuss their own videoed lessons critiquing them in the study group.
The course on the tablet will be complemented by a print-based version — the Course Study Guide and Workbook. The participating teachers will be able to record their responses to various learning activities as well as their reflections either by typing them on the tablet or by writing them in their Workbooks.
Course duration
The course is planned for implementation over two, ten week terms, its total duration will therefore be 20 weeks. It comprises four modules, each five weeks long. It is anticipated that the teachers will spend approximately three hours a week engaging with the course activities.
Phased rollout
The intervention roll out design is conceptualised in a phased manner. The first phase roll out is intended to commence in early February 2017, with up to 300 schools participating.
Open licencing of the course materials
The Roger Federer Foundation has committed itself to releasing all the course materials as open educational resources (OER) and making them accessible to feed more broadly into the Zambian national education system as well as making them available for everyone else to use freely. |
