Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) – Sharath Jeevan & James Townsend
To solve the global learning crisis, teachers and education systems need to find a new mutual accountability.
Ninety percent of children across the developing world are now enrolled in primary school—a testament to the efforts of governments, donors, and nonprofits in improving education access. But 240 million of these children, despite the fact that they are enrolled, are learning almost nothing; they are victims of the global learning crisis. This crisis threatens to be the civil rights issue of our time, preventing a whole generation of children from realizing their potential and fully participating in their societies.
It’s hard to ignore the role of teachers in this crisis. Many perceive them as the main culprits in failing schools—a perception that’s not entirely unfounded. In many developing countries, 25 percent of teachers are absent on any given day; when they do show up, they spend less than half their time teaching, and when they do teach, instruction quality is extremely poor. But if we look deeper, it’s clear that much of the underlying problem lies in the interplay between teachers and the education systems in which they operate.
At STIR, a nonprofit that has worked intensively with 12,000 teachers across India and Uganda, we believe that teachers can form the solution to the learning crisis. But to realize this vision, we need to create a “New Deal” between teachers and their education systems, based on a new mutual accountability, with four core tenants in mind:
1. We need to start by re-igniting the professional spark in teachers and to bring back the intrinsic motivation of teaching. Teacher motivation is fragile and nuanced; education systems need to move beyond blunt “carrots and sticks.”
Teacher morale is at an all-time low—for example, according to a national poll, 84 percent of Ugandan teachers want to quit the profession. Rather than adopt the deficit model that underpins most teacher training, our organization starts with the positive. For example, we’ve found that taking part in a micro-innovation search—where teachers share their classroom innovations with each other—generates huge, positive buzz among teachers and helps restore their intrinsic motivation.
Mansi Gupta, a STIR teacher in a government school in Delhi, India, with her students. (Photo courtesy of STIR Education)Government-run schools today tend to use blunt carrots and sticks—from biometric fingerprinting to performance-related pay —but our teachers tell us time and time again that what they most crave is recognition from other teachers, parents, and local officials. We have developed an aspirational pathway—modelled on the Royal Colleges in fields such as medicine and surgery—where teachers begin their journey as an associate teacher changemaker and can progress up five “rungs” to distinguished fellow. We are also experimenting with a number of mechanisms to sustain teacher motivation—rewards such as featuring their picture in a local poster campaign, lunch with a local district official, or learning visits to neighboring schools. We believe these motivators are much more enduring, cost-effective, and scalable for education systems, and strengthen the intrinsic motivation for teaching.
2. If we invest in the right structures and support for sustained teacher collaboration, skill improvement will follow.
There is no doubt that teachers’ skills need to improve in a whole host of areas—less than 10 percent of current teachers in many Indian states, for example, pass basic competency tests. In development, we often dump well-intentioned, one-off “training” programs on teachers, where teachers have no real ownership over their learning and there is no chance of sustained improvement. Some estimates by NGOs in Uganda show that only 10 percent of teachers who receive one-off training change their behavior in the long term.
We believe that the best investment in educational training is enabling collaboration between teachers over a number of years. Ideally programs embed collaboration into existing, enduring support and training structures. At STIR we do this through teacher-changemaker networks—30 to 50 teachers from different local schools who meet monthly to discuss issues they are facing and work together to develop solutions. Through this process, teachers become students again; they develop inquisitiveness, desire for improvement, and confidence that learning is possible. They develop professional and 21st-century skills (such as collaboration, communication, reflection, and critical thinking) that will last a lifetime and that they can impart to their students. They also challenge each other to change mindsets about their students—specifically, that all children on their watch are capable of learning.
Once the social capital of these networks has been built, we find they can be very effective vectors for all kinds of further skills-based training. For example, we have launched reading and classroom management “challenges” that expose teachers to key evidence-based practices in these areas, and then challenge them to innovate and put these into practice in their classrooms. The response from our teacher networks has been overwhelming.
by MindMake via MindMake Blog
