Making schools count
Tshwarelo Hosia | Monday June 20, 2022 06:00
Only modest gains have been made, measured in inches and not miles. This is a worrisome scenario because a quick turnaround in education (and not slow incremental changes) is the only vehicle that can deliver a secure post diamond future. The clock is ticking and urgent measures should be taken to speed the process of change.
The solution to the current climate of stagnation lies in rethinking and refining strategy. There is need to shed and discard discredited efforts and shift away from the culture of doing more of the same.
Getting out of this impasse demands taking lessons from the likes of Rachel E. Curtis and Elizabeth A. City on the rubrics of a good education turnaround strategy. The duo in their book strategy in action appear to have diagnosed well the cancer that continues to eat and render impotent our system’s wide ranging interventions.
Our biggest undoing is failure to follow to the letter the rubrics of a good strategy. According to Curtis and City, a good strategy is defined as “a few key carefully considered things that the system works on, that when put together, create a powerful engine for systematic improvement.” In short, it is a series of well-informed, educated bets focused primarily on the instructional core. Any education strategy seeking meaningful changes should not be wandering about as it runs the risk of losing touch with the core business of watching closely the triangular relationship between students, teachers and the curriculum in a classroom setting.
Instead of trying to do everything, committing to too much and trying to respond to everyone’s interests, the system must reduce the ‘noise’ and settle for key high impact interventions. And surely the one area worthy of special attention is pedagogy in the classroom. If teachers and students and the curriculum do not gel then there is no hope for change towards improved learning outcomes. The agenda should be narrowed to updating pedagogy through a continuing process of teacher professional development. Above all a strategy should not be static rather it should be a living and dynamic entity that continues to evolve based on progress made, results and lessons learnt. Quality matters more than quantity and therefore is no harm in having a strategy that can fit into a single page.
Over commitments to ventures irrelevant to the instructional core is overwhelming the system’s overstretched limited resources. In our jurisdiction, unfortunately, the grave mistake the system continues to make is that of pursuing an over crowded strategy, where there is emphasis on coverage of more ground to the detriment of depth. This challenge is evidenced in the overloaded and content anchored curriculum, which clearly produces the unintended consequences undermining good pedagogic experiences in the classroom. It is in this light that trimming the curriculum should be considered another top priority. At the end of the day the system should audaciously introspect and turnaround in an educational direction. Teaching and learning should be the epicentre of all activities.
Five key areas require special attention. These are:
l Strengthening governance and accountability.
l School principals should undergo training to acquire instructional leadership (focus on instructional core) and they should take full responsibility over what is happening and not happening in their schools. They cannot afford the luxury of outsourcing their responsibilities or shifting the blame to external factors outside their sphere of influence.
l Teachers should be subjected to a robust and rigorous training regimen placing emphasis on strengthening pedagogy (note emphasis on instructional core),
l The curriculum should be cut to size to weed out irrelevant content (this would lead to enhanced curriculum delivery) and
l Strengthen external oversight. Regional and sub regional officers should also undergo training on instructional matters in order to sharpen their oversight responsibilities. The primary focus of oversight bodies should be dissemination of best teaching and learning practices. And lastly the central ministry should restrict itself within the precincts of policy matters. Too many cooks at the operational level spoil the broth.