The central role of teachers

A collaborative effort, Teachers Upfront is lending a helping hand to the teaching profession in South Africa. In a series of education dialogues started in March 2011, Teachers Upfront seeks to address the problems faced by teachers in South Africa today through presentations and seminars on different educational topics.

These dialogues are later reported in the Mail and Guardian in an effort to continue the series’ aim to encourage public discourse around these issues.

Teachers first

The first of these dialogues was dedicated to the central role played by teachers in the South African Education System. It took place on 29 March 2011 at Wits School of Education in Johannesburg. The session examined the treatment of teachers by their peers, learners, and parents, and highlighted the challenging environments in which teachers have to work. Too often, it seems teachers are blamed and shamed, rather than supported and appreciated.

Delivering the keynote address, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Town, urged delegates to support teaching professionals, particularly those working in challenging environments. Referring to teaching as a “noble profession”, Ramphele remembered her most influential teachers, from her mother to her primary school teachers who encouraged her love of science and medicine.

Ramphele’s speech added weight to one of the main aims of Teachers Upfront – to support teachers as key agents in creating a quality education system.

Vision of a teacher

Ramphele also positioned teachers as role models who give with love to push their students to greater heights. For Ramphele, the gap between this vision of a teacher and the perception of teachers today (unmotivated, ill-equipped, and uncaring) can be attributed to the deep wounds that characterise our society – wounds that manifest in self-destructive, negative, or apathetic behaviour on every level of society, from the individual to the community that should serve that individual.

For Ramphele, the effects of apartheid and of a society unable to properly cope with its history are obvious in South Africa’s damaged teachers who have lost a sense of connection with their purpose and their learners. The cure for this disconnection is healing and support, rather than blame and shame, which leads merely to further feelings of negativity.

Speaking about teacher morale, Yael Shalem, Professor at the Wits School of Education, supported this view, pointing out that ‘teacher’ should not be a homogenous category – teachers are individuals with different races, genders, cultures, and languages. Not all teachers face the same socio-economic challenges, so thinking about them as a single group is counter-productive.

Shalem reminded delegates that teachers working in improvised schools have very different work challenges to those in well-resourced schools. Shalem described this as a “dual economy of schooling [that] exists between those children who have a second and third site of knowledge acquisition”, such as access to books and the Internet at home, and “those children whose only site of learning acquisition is the school”.

Teaching in South Africa

In Shalem’s view, the following four variables are important to a good quality teaching environment yet up to 70% of South Africa’s teachers are not in a position to benefit from them:

• Access to learners who are prepared for schooling, mentally and physically
• A reservoir of cognitive resources at school level
• A well-specified curriculum
• Functional school management

The absence of these variables proves that school failure cannot be blamed solely on teacher inefficiency. So many more factors are at play – difficult home environments, poverty, lack of learner preparation, and inadequate resources all have roles to play in the challenge that is teaching in South Africa today.

The challenge of teaching in a township

This multifaceted view was supported by Phumi Mthiyane, a teacher at Realogile Secondary School in Alexandra, Johannesburg, whose contribution to the discussion highlighted the day-to-day challenge of being a teacher in a township. In Mthiyane’s words, her success as a teacher is based on a teaching mind-set that is “open, humble and willing to change”. At present, Mthiyane and her school are benefitting from training support for Mthiyane from Wits School of Education and a community radio project for learners, courtesy of Alex FM.

While the teaching profession has a long way to go when it comes to changing its reputation, initiatives like these education dialogues and related projects can offer opportunities to rework how teachers experience their own development and are perceived by others. As Mthiyane points out, “Fear does not make us work; being inspired does.”

One Laptop Per Child comes to South Africa

CoZa Cares is delighted to be working closely with the new One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) South Africa Foundation as its implementation partner in South Africa. A number of pilot projects are planned for 2013, and as part of our own preparation, we organised a three-day training session at Kingsmead College in Rosebank, Johannesburg from 10 to 12 December.

As part of our mission to share knowledge as openly as possible, we invited stakeholders involved in ICT in Education to join us for the training, including the Department of Basic Education (DBE), the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre, Bridge, and the Kliptown Youth Program, who are already using OLPC’s XO laptops in their aftercare programme.

Also present at the event were two award-winning school principals from Limpopo, Phuti Ragophala and Mmipe Mokgehle. Both their schools form part of the Mankweng Cluster, which is the proposed area for the OLPC SA pilot programme.

One Laptop Per Child

The three-day event was originally designed to be five days long, but was compressed to fit the schedules of stakeholders. It was run by two members of the Rwandan OLPC programme, Desire Rwagaju and Jimmy Intwali, and supervised by OLPC’s Vice-President of Operations and Africa, Sergio Romero. Both Rwagaju and Intwali are based at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology.

The first day of the event was dedicated to giving an overview of what OLPC is and does (locally and worldwide), the focus on teacher practice and its impact on learning, and the journey from traditional to 21st century teaching methodology. Trainees were also introduced to the XO laptop and the Sugar Operating System that runs on it.

The second day covered the Sugar learning environment, looking at teaching principles and methodology, the OLPC deployment guide and logistics.

The third and final day had the trainees getting to grips with the technical side of the XO laptop during a hands-on workshop covering XO assembling and dissembling, installation and configuration, maintenance and repair; with trainees getting to dismantle and reassemble the laptops.

OLPC in Rwanda

The event was very well-attended and all the trainees present expressed their excitement about the XO and an extreme desire to get OLPC implemented in South Africa.

Rwagaju handled the majority of the first day’s presentation with assistance from Intwali and Romero, illustrating his presentation with several different models of the OLPC XO laptop. Rwagaju’s presentation can be simply summarised in the video below, which is the first part of OLPC’s marketing video. According to Rwagaju:

We only ever need to play this video to governments once and they buy into our project.”

Rwagaju also spoke about the OLPC project in his homeland. Rwanda’s deployment began in 2007, supported by G1G1 donations and by President Paul Kagame’s vision for the country that included universal access to the Web. In 2008 the XO was introduced to the first 10,000 students.Rwanda currently has the highest deployment level in Africa with around 210 000 laptops distributed to schoolchildren across the nation. They estimate that they will have full nationwide saturation by 2017.

Besides Rwanda, OLPC is in 44 different countries on 6 continents. OLPC’s mission is to empower the world’s poorest children through education:

We aim to provide each child with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop. To this end, we have designed hardware, content and software for collaborative, joyful, and self-empowered learning. With access to this type of tool, children are engaged in their own education, and learn, share, and create together. They become connected to each other, to the world and to a brighter future.”

Education has a brighter future B Smart ZA Cares

Schools and communities

Categories: Education

With the support of the Wits University’s School of Education, the University of Johannesburg’s Education faculty, the Bridge Education NGO, and the Mail and Guardian, Teachers Upfront is encouraging debate around the teaching profession in South Africa through a series of education dialogues.

The third dialogue was held at the University of Johannesburg on 2 August 2012. Discussion centred on the topic of Schools and Communities.

It takes a village

The education crisis in South Africa requires the commitment of teachers, learners, schools, and communities if solutions for success are to be correctly implemented. This was the message from the third Teachers Upfront dialogue. Misheck Ndebele, Education lecturer at Wits University, emphasised the importance of parental involvement in learner success. In his words:

“Lots of improvement in attendance, achievement, and participation can be attributed to the involvement of parents and a close co-operation between schools and families.”

Noting that success goes beyond the classroom, Ndebele pointed out that learners whose parents are actively involved in their education tend to be more successful as adults. Ndebele described his own research into parental involvement at 40 Gauteng schools – through which he identified the following as critical criteria for learner success:

• Communication
• Parenting at home
• Student learning
• Volunteering
• School decision-making
• Collaboration with the community

Based on this research, Ndebele recommended that a school-family partnership course be part of every teacher-training curriculum in the country.

Community involvement in student success

This view was supported by Theresa Moila, Senior Manager for Education at the Transnet Foundation, who later reminded delegates that parents have a responsibility to educate and socialise their children while teachers get on with the job of delivering a quality curriculum.

In research in South Africa, where parents and communities are involved, learner success is seen more frequently. Dr Al Witten of the Centre for the Community School at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, expanded the definition of ‘community’ to include universities such as his own, which works with the Eastern Cape’s Manyano community schools network.

Calling on communities to collaborate to ensure the success of education programmes, Witten said:

“We should think about the community beyond geography, though, and involve individuals [such as school leaders] or organisations that support schools, wherever they may be.”

Speaking of school leaders, Witten called on individuals to cross boundaries and work towards the common goals of teaching and learning.

Quality teaching and learning

One such leader is Lamile Faltein, principal of Limekhaya High School in Uitenhage’s Kwa-Langa township in the Eastern Cape. Faltein highlighted the challenges at the school, rebuilt in 1995 after a 1976 fire. Reviewing dismal Matric results, Faltein remembers thinking “there must be challenges I don’t know about”. He asked previous learners to complete questionnaires about their experience at the school and learnt that many of them were not able to complete their exams because their teachers were ill-equipped to teach them.

To remedy the situation, Faltein invited in experts to ensure his staff had the knowledge base necessary for their subjects. With these helping hands, teachers at the school are now formally accountable to the school’s governing body and Faltein has instituted measures such as class visits to monitor teachers’ lesson preparation.

Limekhaya High School’s vision reads:

“We strive to provide a quality education service to produce balanced learners who will play a leading role in advancing the respect of human rights and the economic development of the country.”

According to Faltein, this vision was crafted by the community itself.

Communities’ participation and support

Communities are crucial, Faltein said, to monitoring and supporting schools. Limekhaya works with the community, reaches out to poorly performing schools, employs social workers to help learners, and has developed a learner resource centre. Faltein urged other school leaders to work with community steering committees that monitor teaching quality and hold their school accountable for learner performance…

The dialogue was marked by strong consensus that schools cannot solve the education crisis on their own. Strong leadership and community participation and support are essential to creating a sense of common responsibility for learner achievement.

Watch this space for B Smart ZA's New Website

B Smart ZA will be in touch to launch our new Website of Bettering Education in South Africa.


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Class of 2013: To Succeed in the Digital Age, Always Remain a Native

You don’t think it will happen to you, but it will -- I guarantee it.

Right now you maybe a true digital native. You not only know the difference between Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook, but you also get how the cultures differ too. I bet you had a tablet before everyone else in your class or workplace. And maybe, just maybe, you’re in the Google Glass Explorer program. (Or at least you hope to be.)

But one day, maybe not for many years, the gravity of life will loom. Your business and personal responsibilities will grow. Hardened habits will settle in and you may not be as digitally savvy as you are today. You may even (gasp!) become a Luddite.

My advice to young grads and, really anyone in business, is this: don't let your digital skills and knowledge decay. Do the best you can to remain an Internet native throughout your life. Even better, encourage others around you in business to do the same.

Disruption is the new normal. The businesses that are able to shed the outdated vestiges of the past will be in the best position to succeed.

This begins with you. Fight the urge to let old habits - even digital ones - settle in.

I am in my early 40s. Therefore, in many other areas of my life I lose this battle. Again, gravity sometimes wins and willpower is a limited resource.

However, when it comes to my adoption of new digital habits, I am, if anything aggressive in my own life. My job requires that I stay ahead of the curve and encourage 4,600 people in our firm and our clients to do the same.

I would encourage you to adopt a similar mindset no matter what industry you are in. The more comfortable you are with disruption, the more you will be able to roll into it, rather than run away from it.

Here are some of the simple changes I am making right now ...

I am disrupting how I consume news...

The forthcoming demise of Google Reader is encouraging me to shake up my news workflow - even though there are other RSS readers out there. While the service is not being shut down until July I have already nuked the habit by moving most of my consumption to Pulse and Flipboard, which I use as a front-end to LinkedIn and Twitter

I am weaning myself off physical keyboards...

At home, on the go and in meetings, I am trying to kick the habit of using physical keyboards in favor of using touch-screen and voice inputs. While I am still nowhere near as proficient as I am with a physical keyboard, I am slowly building muscle memory over time. Once I am adept, I may adopt the same at my office as well.

I no longer consume physical media and soon I will stop creating it ...

After several years, I have successfully migrated all the physical media I own - books, magazines, newspapers, movies, etc - into their digital equivalents. Yes, this cost money but now I have them everywhere I go. I am in the process of doing the same with my notes as well, though I still find that culture can get in the way. (A lot of my meetings are over meals so taking notes on a phone is difficult and sometimes rude. I scan these notes.)

I am living a more quantified life...

Adhering to the old Peter Drucker adage “What gets measured gets done,” I am now constantly seeking out ways to get data-driven feedback. Thanks to the real-time data my Fitbit provides, I have finally lost those pesky last 10 pounds by walking more in good weather and taking the stairs when it's not. The next step is for me to make similar data part of my work streams.

I am communicating more visually...

People don't have as much time to read anymore. Distractions are everywhere. You have to find a way to break through the noise if you hope to have your ideas heard. Visual storytelling is a good way to align your message with the way the digital brain works. I have started experimenting with apps on my tablet and computer that allow me to surprise and (hopefully) delight to get my message across. I haven't done so yet here yet, but stay tuned.

How are you staying native? Leave your thoughts in the comments. More minds are better than few and I am always looking for good ideas.

Photo: Tanya Little/Flickr/Getty Images

How Social Media Improved An Entire School District

A few days ago, we shared a video interview with Kristin Magette, Communications Director at Eudora School District in Eudora, Kansas, who shared how Eudora Public Schools had set out to create a “digital-friendly school district.” Kristin also shared some thoughts on social media and their digital friendly school district in a guest post for the folks who helped them plan out and set up these services. We thought that she offered some excellent insight, and her guest post includes a few links to the district’s social media efforts so that you can see for yourselves what they’ve been working on.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. At school, they make us nervous. We hear stories about teachers losing their jobs and students losing their innocence. We see the nasty rumors and insults that can flourish online. So if we clamp down and keep social media out of our schools, we’™ll be good. Right?

Wrong.

We live in the digital world. And when students and parents enter our schools, they don’™t check their lives at the door. 

Whether it’™s young children watching online videos to laugh and learn, adolescents navigating friendships, or parents looking for updates on a lock-down, they’™re using social media. But for those of us who work to mentor, encourage, and protect children – and keep peace in the community – the digital world can feel overwhelming, even dangerous.

When my district acknowledged that our students are citizens of the digital world, we realized that we were missing out on so many of its opportunities. As a district, we really weren’t:

• Using social media, video and blogs as teaching tools.
• Helping students learn safe and courteous online behavior.
• Communicating with parents through the real-time, content-rich exchange that social media provides.
• Encouraging others to engage with us – to celebrate our successes, grieve our losses, and sometimes even challenge us to do better.

In late 2011, we began to look at social media as an exciting opportunity to be embraced by our district – and more than a year later, we haven’™t looked back. Of course, we’™ve had hurdles to clear along the way. We needed real changes to our Internet filters to give teachers (and some students) access to Facebook, Twitter and the like. We needed board policy that outlined our expectations for staff and students. We needed training for our teachers to understand the great potential that exists in the digital world. And we needed procedures that employees would follow to ensure accountability and responsible use.

We worked through those challenges last year and through the summer, and our teachers have embraced our digital-friendly school district, much to the delight of our students and parents. A good place to get a taste of how we’re using social media right now -“ it’™s always changing! – is the social media directory on our district website. This is where parents and fans can find us in the social media world, including some pages that are open to the public and others that are restricted to certain members.

By far, the liveliest place you’™ll find us is on our district’™s Facebook Page. While there have been some difficult moments on our page, the support we receive is overwhelming — and our Facebook community truly has become a place of celebration, sharing and connecting. Two-way communication isn’t always comfortable — anyone who’s lived with teenagers or run a town hall meeting knows that! – but it ultimately creates greater trust, transparency and support.

Our teachers and students have produced more YouTube videos this year than ever before, both for learning and fun. Teachers are finding outstanding networking opportunities through Twitter chats. Our elementary school teachers who use Facebook for work say that communication with parents has never been better. Our high school students have embraced Twitter to share the good news from their school and connect with teachers. Sure, it takes monitoring, and it requires a level head to handle the negative comment that pops up now and then. But the increased engagement and support are more than worth it.

When other districts ask us how we do it, or tell us all the things that could go wrong, our superintendent, Don Grosdidier – who has virtually no personal experience in the world of social media – sums it up this way:

There are risks and rewards, but if we can manage the risks, the rewards are far greater and worth the trouble.

Professional development, policy and procedures help us manage the risk. And the rewards are improved parent communication, enriched student learning, increased community involvement, and powerful professional networking for teachers. It’s hard to argue with that!

Why School Leaders Should Build An Intentional School Culture

For school leaders, defining a school’s culture – the core values, practices and organizational structures – is a necessity. In fact, a school’s ability to improve performance depends on it. But fostering a performance-based culture is not something that can be completed and checked off a single to-do list; it is an ongoing process.

How do schools accomplish this? It’s all about intention. High-performing schools are intentional about creating culture by introducing clear cultural expectations, and holding staff and students accountable to these core values. When clear expectations for behavior are established and reinforced – while allowing room for reflection and adjustments to these standards – a growth-minded, results-driven environment can be achieved.

I recently led a workshop on the topic of school culture for the New York City Department of Education’s New Schools Intensive (NSI), program for school leaders that are opening new schools, and one of the big takeaways was the importance of communication.

When setting expectations, clear communication is key.

High-performing school leaders are effective in messaging that school is a place with specific standards that enable both staff and students to thrive. I often share the following example with school leaders and find that it resonates – unlike an elevator or a place of worship, where there are unspoken norms for behavior, new schools and existing schools that aim to rebuild their culture need expectations to be stated explicitly.

These values are upheld through established cultural elements that are consistent and visible from classroom to classroom. Such elements often include instituting a Student Code of Conduct, identifying one positive behaviors or mega-cognitive skill per month to highlight across the school, drafting guidelines on issuing rewards and consequences for student behavior and establishing school routines (e.g. arrival, dismissal, hallway transitions) and rituals (weekly celebrations, achievement-oriented field trips, class cheers).

Building & Reinforcing Expectations

The work does not end with establishing standards. School leaders building an intentional culture not only introduce expectations, but also reinforce them when individuals act inappropriately. First and foremost, the saying “actions speak louder than words” rings true – school leaders and staff who model the behaviors they seek in their students help to create a stronger culture. Students are more likely to show school pride if teachers join in on the excitement, as well as listen and show respect if teachers return the favor.

When it comes down to it, school culture is built in small, easy-to-ignore moments.

When someone acts in a way that is at odds with a school’s values, expectations and norms, school leaders and staff are faced with the decision of letting it go, or intervening to make it clear that “we don’t do that here.” What could be viewed by some as an easily excused moment is actually an opportunity to remind everyone involved that the school’s culture needs to be front-and-center.

“We Don’t Do That Here.”

The phrase, “we don’t do that here,” involves a deliberate choice of words. The messaging is key. “Here” withholds judgment about whether the behavior would be appropriate elsewhere; “we” enforces the idea that the school is a community, rather than shaming or excluding the individual from that community; and the overall message is straight to the point, reinforcing that school is a place where certain behaviors are expected.

It is important to note that these conversations will always be uncomfortable. During the NSI workshop, attendees participated in a role-play activity to practice initiating difficult conversations. The goal was to get comfortable “being uncomfortable”. Without constant reinforcement through these difficult conversations, a school’s cultural values won’t stick.

It Takes Work (And Professional Development)

Intention requires deliberate and consistent professional development. Just as students will not embrace a school’s cultural elements overnight, neither will staff. A common strategy among effective school leaders is to create a year-long “Culture Calendar” that includes recurringplanning meetings, reflective discussions and practice sessions to allocate time for collaboration with staff.

These tactics are just one element of establishing a performance-based culture. Using platforms like Kickboard, collecting and analyzing student data and other factors all play a role here. But it all comes back to intention. A strong school culture does not form on its own; it is built.

Jennifer Medbery is a former math teacher and founder and CEO of Kickboard, a web-based school analytics platform that allows educators and school leaders to capture, analyze and securely share critical student performance data. For more information about Kickboard’s school-wide solution or its free starter accounts for individual educators, visitwww.kickboardforteachers.com.