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Teachers Without Borders

Vietnam demands English language teaching 'miracle' | Education | Guardian Weekly - 0 views

  • More than 80,000 English language teachers in Vietnam's state schools are expected to be confident, intermediate-level users of English, and to pass a test to prove it, as part of an ambitious initiative by the ministry of education to ensure that all young people leaving school by 2020 have a good grasp of the language.
  • But the initiative is worrying many teachers, who are uncertain about their future if they fail to achieve grades in tests such as Ielts and Toefl."All teachers in primary school feel very nervous," said Nguyen Thi La, 29, an English teacher at Kim Dong Primary School in Hanoi."It's difficult for teachers to pass this exam, especially those in rural provinces. B2 is a high score.""All we know is that if we pass we are OK. If we don't we can still continue teaching, then take another test, then if we fail that, we don't know."
  • "No teachers will be sacked if they are not qualified because we already know most of them are not qualified. No teachers will be left behind and the government will take care of them. But if the teachers don't want to improve, then parents will reject them because only qualified teachers will be able to run new training programmes."
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  • The state media recently reported that in the Mekong Delta's Ben Tre province, of 700 teachers who had been tested, only 61 reached the required score. In Hue, in central Vietnam, one in five scored B2 or higher when 500 primary and secondary teachers were screened with tests tailored by the British Council.
  • "B2 is achievable enough. The teachers I know want to improve their English but want their salaries to be higher so that they can have an incentive to try harder to meet the standard," said Tran Thi Qua, a teacher trainer from the education department in Hue.
  • A new languages-focused curriculum delivered by retrained teachers should be in place in 70% of grade-three classes by 2015, according to ministry plans, and available nationwide by 2019. English teaching hours are set to double and maths will be taught in a foreign language in 30% of high schools in major cities by 2015.
  • "The government needs to fund courses to help improve the quality of the teachers, and pay them more money, but I think if teachers don't want to improve, then they should change jobs," she said.
  • Rebecca Hales, a former senior ELT development manager at British Council Vietnam, said: "The ministry is taking a phased approach, which is commendable, but there are issues with supply and demand. They don't have the trained primary English teachers. The targets are completely unachievable at the moment."
  • "The teacher trainers we trained up are now at the mercy of the individual education departments. There's no evidence at this stage of a large-scale teacher training plan," Hales said.
  • "There are many challenges. We are dealing with everything, from training, salaries and policy, to promotion, how to train [teachers] then keep them in the system. I'm not sure if [Project 2020] will be successful. Other countries have spent billions on English language teaching in the private sector but still governments have been very unhappy with the outcomes."
Teachers Without Borders

"Teacher training in climate change education is in its infancy" | Education | United N... - 1 views

  • UNESCO is launching a Teacher Education Course on Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD) in late 2011
  • First, it helps teachers to understand the causes, dynamics and impacts of climate change through a holistic lens. Second, teachers are exposed to a range of pedagogical approaches that they can use in their own school environment. This includes engagement in whole school and school-in-community approaches. Third, teachers can develop their capacities to facilitate students’ community based learning.  Fourth, teachers can develop future oriented and transformative capacities in facilitating climate change mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction learning..    
  • In a nutshell, the course is designed to give teachers confidence in facilitating  CCESD inside and outside the classroom so that they can help young people understand the causes and consequences of climate change, bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors to reduce the severity of future climate change, and build resilience  in the face of climate change that are already present.
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  • The course is needed precisely because teaching about climate change is such a demanding task. Teachers need to understand what and how to teach about the forces driving climate change as well as its impacts on culture, security, well-being and development prospects. Their role is to show young people how they and their communities can respond to the threat.
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    "Teacher training in climate change education is in its infancy" ©Fumiyo Kagawa In advance of the tenth anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit (Rio+20), UNESCO is launching a Teacher Education Course on Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development (CCESD) in late 2011.
stephknox24

Factors that Promote Implementation of Peace Education Training - 0 views

  • What factors influence whether or not teachers trained in peace education actually teach about peace?
  • It involves getting the adult students to express their concerns about violence in their lives, presenting an analysis of different peace strategies, and arguing that teaching about alternatives to violence is an effective way to deal with the threats of violence both in schools and in the broader community.
  • The objectives of the course are to explore the role of violence in the lives of students, to consider the effect of violence upon educational practices, to examine how peace education can help deal with violence, and to provide examples of peace education activities and curricular ideas.
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  • The main hypothesis of this study is that theoretical knowledge about violence and nonviolence is not enough to motivate teachers to become peace educators. They need further support, either in their personal or professional lives, to pick up this new curricular area.
  • Lantieri and Patti say that coaching and practice are key components in whether or not teachers used the peace education material in which they received training:
  • to mentor their development as peace educators.
  • district-wide support
  • peace education should not just be an add on used by a few teachers, but rather should involve all levels of the school.
  • teacher training
  • A supportive administration
  • rganization siz
  • specific characteristics of the program, school-based factors and community support.
  • Much training in peace education comes from outside consultants and is limited. As a result educators are not trained in conflict resolution as extensively as they are in subject areas, so that they may feel insecure about pursuing it in their classes.
  • if the participants in this study find that peace education provides immediate benefits, they are more likely to incorporate into their educational practices.
  • he presence of a supportive administrator is the most important ingredient in whether a particular innovation gets adopted
  • personal friendships and kinship ties provide support for these individuals to become peace educators.
  • One course alone will not begin to make a peace educator.
  • From these responses it can be concluded that knowledge of subject matter is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for peace education curriculum reforms. Professional educators also need personal and professional support for a world view that embraces peace in the midst of a violent culture that glamorizes violence.
  • Family support, feelings of urgency, and professional factors like administrative support and positive school climate help teachers deal with the overwhelming nature of this subject matter
  • How can school leaders provide a climate that supports the use of peace education curricula?
  • The impact of peace education upon students is very hard to assess because students could take years to transfer learning about nonviolence into positive peaceful behaviors. Because of the complex factors that influence human behavior, it is almost impossible to demonstrate that a teacher's activities result in a specific behavior on the part of a student. What this study does show is that teachers feel they benefit from learning about peace strategies and that incorporating peace education reforms has positive benefits for professional educators struggling to deal with problems of violence.
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    Factors that impact the Implementation of Peace Education Training
Teachers Without Borders

National council of teacher education begins revamp of teaching education system in cou... - 0 views

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    ALLAHABAD: The National council of teacher education (NCTE) has taken an initiative to reform and revamp teaching education system in the country. Following the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education-2009, the government is now gearing up to reform the teaching education system with an aim to improve the quality of procedures and practices. Following the exercise, all courses of teacher education like BEd, MEd, NTT (Nursery Teachers Training), BPEd and MPEd will get revised.
Teachers Without Borders

Kenyan Teachers demand Education Spending Increase | Teacher Solidarity - 0 views

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    Teachers in Kenya are demanding that the government increase spending on education The Kenya National Union of Teachers (KNUT) has given the government 2 weeks to enter talks on overdue allowances to cover housing, commuting and health as well as extra allowances for teachers working in the most difficult areas. These were all promised at the end of a dispute in 1997. They are also demanding increases for heads. senior teachers and special needs teachers and the employment of early years teachers. The union says that if Kenya is to have good guality education for all, the government needs to invest $4.78 billion.
Teachers Without Borders

Why America's teachers are enraged - CNN.com - 2 views

  • Thousands of teachers, nurses, firefighters and other public sector workers have camped out at the Wisconsin Capitol, protesting Republican Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to reduce their take-home pay -- by increasing their contribution to their pension plans and health care benefits -- and restrict their collective bargaining rights.
  • Public schools in Madison and a dozen other districts in Wisconsin closed as teachers joined the protest. Although Walker claims he was forced to impose cutbacks because the state is broke, teachers noticed that he offered generous tax breaks to businesses that were equivalent to the value of their givebacks.
  • The uprising in Madison is symptomatic of a simmering rage among the nation's teachers. They have grown angry and demoralized over the past two years as attacks on their profession escalated.
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  • Teachers across the nation reacted with alarm when the leaders of the Central Falls district in Rhode Island threatened to fire the entire staff of the small town's only high school. What got their attention was that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama thought this was a fine idea, even though no one at the high school had been evaluated.
  • The Obama administration's Race to the Top program intensified the demonizing of teachers, because it encouraged states to evaluate teachers in relation to student scores. There are many reasons why students do well or poorly on tests, and teachers felt they were being unfairly blamed when students got low scores, while the crucial role of families and the students themselves was overlooked.
  • Teachers' despair deepened last August when The Los Angeles Times rated 6,000 teachers in Los Angeles as effective or ineffective, based on their students' test scores, and posted these ratings online.
  • The real story in Madison is not just about unions trying to protect their members' hard-won rights. It is about teachers who are fed up with attacks on their profession. A large group of National Board Certified teachers -- teachers from many states who have passed rigorous examinations by an independent national board -- is organizing a march on Washington in July. The events in Madison are sure to multiply their numbers.
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    Thousands of teachers, nurses, firefighters and other public sector workers have camped out at the Wisconsin Capitol, protesting Republican Gov. Scott Walker's efforts to reduce their take-home pay -- by increasing their contribution to their pension plans and health care benefits -- and restrict their collective bargaining rights.
Teachers Without Borders

TWB holds capacity building workshop in Nigeria - 1 views

  • The upcoming workshop will attract over 1,200 teachers according to the list of schools and number of teachers provided by the Nasarawa State Ministry of Education to Teachers Without Borders Regional office in Abuja.
  • According to  TWB’s Africa Regional Coordinator, Dr. Raphael Ogar Oko, “the teaching mastery workshop program in Nasarawa State was initially designed to educate experienced teachers who will mentor beginning teachers and NYSC members deployed to serve in schools without the basic teaching qualification. After implementing the program in two areas, Karu and Uke, it was discovered that the teachers in schools needed the professional development workshops also in addition to the NYSC members that are being deployed to schools. Based on requests from teachers, school heads and proprietors of schools as well as the local education authority, TWB has decided to make the program open to all teachers in Nasarawa State as a demonstration of our commitment to teacher development and appreciation of the cordial relationship with the Nasarawa State Ministry of Education”.
  • The Teachers Without Borders Certificate of Teaching Mastery (CTM), which is recognized by the Teachers Registration Council of Nigeria as a teacher professional development course is a free, self-paced, peer- and mentor-supported teacher professional development program.
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  • The Nasarawa State workshop is the first in 2011 and will be followed by similar programs in Akwanga and other LGAs in the State. When asked about the ultimate hope of this programs, Dr. Oko said that “initiatives like this should help our nation establish a culture of professional development among educators, create a network and community of professional development educators in schools and communities as well as utilize resources and technologies to advance professional development which is missing in our educational practices in Nigeria”.
Teachers Without Borders

Reuters AlertNet - Teachers go back to School in Sudan - 0 views

  • Ikotos, South Sudan-a scenic region that belies its tragic past. For the past two decades the area has been ravaged by conflict, disease and deprivation. Basic services are scarce with education facilities suffering from a desperate lack of trained teachers and teaching resources.
  • Education is vital to the recovery of a region. Education will enable Ikotos' youth to escape a life of poverty and lead prosperous lives.
  • UNICEF has launched an initiative to get children back to school but there is a significant and unaddressed gap in teacher training. Education was near nonexistent during the civil war and has been slow to recover. Schooling mostly takes place in temporary shacks or under trees with limited or no teaching resources. Only 67 out of 353 primary school teachers in the Ikotos region received any training at all. Not only are most of the teachers untrained but some of have not completed even primary school education. Few have access to basic teaching materials. Without sufficiently trained teachers, increasing the rate of school attendance will be ineffective. With 11,809 pupils in Ikotos needing education, this is a desperate situation and a severe block to Ikotos's recovery.
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  • local NGO All Nations Christian Care (ANCC) is now building a teacher training college. With three rooms, two teacher trainers and an array of teaching resources, the school is the future of education services in Ikotos.
  • The project has secured sponsorship from the Government of South Sudan to train 50 new teachers every year. The training centre aims to be self-sustainable within 2 years. Without trained teachers, education will be severely limited.
Teachers Without Borders

Education Week: State of Mind - 0 views

  • Researchers at Public Agenda conducted a cluster analysis of the survey results, revealing three distinct groups of teachers. Based on their individual characteristics and attitudes about the profession, teachers naturally fell into three broad categories, which the researchers call the “Disheartened,” “Contented,” and “Idealists.”
  • The view that teaching is “so demanding, it’s a wonder that more people don’t burn out” is remarkably pervasive, particularly among the Disheartened, who are twice as likely as other teachers to agree strongly with that view. Members of that group, which accounts for 40 percent of K-12 teachers in the United States, tend to have been teaching longer and be older than the Idealists.
  • Only 14 percent rated their principals as “excellent” at supporting them as teachers, and 61 percent cited lack of support from administrators as a major drawback to teaching. Nearly three-quarters cited “discipline and behavior issues” in the classroom, and seven in 10 cited testing as major drawbacks as well.
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  • By contrast, the vast majority of teachers in the Contented group (37 percent of teachers overall) viewed teaching as a lifelong career. Most said their schools are “orderly, safe, and respectful,” and are satisfied with their administrators. Sixty-three percent strongly agreed that “teaching is exactly what I wanted to do,” and roughly three-fourths feel that they have sufficient time to craft good lesson plans. Those teachers tend to be veterans—94 percent have been in the classroom for more than 10 years, a majority have graduate degrees, and about two-thirds are teaching in middle-income or affluent schools.
  • However, it is the Idealists—23 percent of teachers overall—who voiced the strongest sense of mission about teaching. Nearly nine in 10 Idealists believe that “good teachers can lead all students to learn, even those from poor families or who have uninvolved parents.” Idealists overwhelmingly said that helping underprivileged children improve their prospects motivated them to enter the profession
  • and 36 percent said that even though they intend to stay in education, they plan to leave classroom teaching for other jobs in the field.
  • half the Idealists believe their students’ test scores have increased significantly as a result of their teaching, a higher percentage than the other teachers in the survey.
  • A 22-percentage-point difference separated the Idealists and the Disheartened (88 percent to 66 percent) in their faith that good teachers can make a difference in student learning. Idealists strongly believe that teachers shape student effort (75 percent), whereas just 50 percent of the Disheartened believe that. Only one-third of the more disillusioned teachers were very confident in their students’ learning abilities, compared with nearly half among the other groups (48 percent of the Contented and 45 percent of the Idealists).
Teachers Without Borders

Rwanda: MINEDUC Shifts Focus to Teachers' Quality - 1 views

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    "Kigali - The Ministry of Education (MINEDUC) has turned its focus to teacher quality assurance to improve the quality of education. This was declared yesterday at the opening of a two-day summit on teacher education, management and professionalisation. According to the Minister of Education, Dr. Charles Muligande, the quality of education in the country cannot be attained if the teachers who are the backbone of the change are not taken into account. "The enhancement in the quality of education can be attained through improvement of infrastructure. However, unless the quality of the teachers is assured, nothing can be attained," Muligande said."
Teachers Without Borders

CBSE's new evaluation system leaves teachers groping in dark in Bangalore - Bangalore -... - 0 views

  • A year after the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system has been implemented, and two years since the introduction of the new grading system in schools affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE), teachers appear to be groping in the dark. There are vast variations in the manner in which the system is being implemented.
  • Though the approach, when it was first introduced, was touted as being child-centric, many teachers feel that its implementation is not practical, given the reality of large class sizes in many schools.
  • “It is a very detailed system of evaluation, and teachers are ill-equipped to do it. It’s too idealistic,” remarked Raman.
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  • The onus on the teacher is high, and many teachers are still learning the ropes.“In the first year, teachers found it quite cumbersome. Even now, teachers are learning the system,” said Mansoor Ali Khan, general secretary, Management of Independent CBSE Schools’ Association and secretary, Delhi Public School (DPS).
  • DPS conducts a five-day workshop each year, so that teachers understand the system better and new staff can be oriented to it. Experts are also brought in to address teachers.
  • Menon draws attention to the fundamental concern: “What is important is that teachers are able to diagnose learning difficulties in a child. This is not merely a question of assigning a mark or grade. The whole concept of CCE would be defeated if teachers cannot identify which child has understood the concept taught, and which hasn’t.”
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    A year after the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system has been implemented, and two years since the introduction of the new grading system in schools affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE), teachers appear to be groping in the dark. There are vast variations in the manner in which the system is being implemented.
Teachers Without Borders

allAfrica.com: Namibia: Quality, Shortages, and Concerns of Teachers - 0 views

  • What is lacking, however, is specialised training of teachers, which limit the implementation of inclusive training, he said.
  • Few teachers have specialised training, and none have formal training for multigrade teaching. This means that there is a lack of skills to pitch lessons at different grades, while many teachers generally struggle with classroom management.
  • A shortage of teachers in the fields of accounting, mathematics, languages, computer studies and geography has been identified.
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    AVAILABLE figures point out that the majority of teachers have Grade 12 with at least three years' tertiary education. "So, who is fooling who?" questioned Minister of Education Abraham Iyambo, in obvious reference to the less than satisfactory performance of most schools. What is lacking, however, is specialised training of teachers, which limit the implementation of inclusive training, he said. Few teachers have specialised training, and none have formal training for multigrade teaching. This means that there is a lack of skills to pitch lessons at different grades, while many teachers generally struggle with classroom management.
Teachers Without Borders

Global Campaign for Peace Education Newsletter: July 2012 (Intro by Matthias ... - 0 views

  • TWB and Tijuana Department of Education completed Technical Assistance Mission (Mexico) With the support of the Office of Education and Culture of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Inter-American Program on Education for Democratic Values and Practices, Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and the Baja California Department of Education recently completed a Technical Assistance Mission focusing on Peace Education in Mexican schools. As a result of this program, TWB’s Peace Education program has been endorsed as an official teacher professional development program throughout the state of Baja California. In the coming months, the program will be scaled through a partnership between Teachers Without Borders and the Baja California Department of Education and will reach 12,000 state teachers and, initially, 1,500 schools in the city of Tijuana. The Department also plans to work with Teachers Without Borders to develop Peace Education as a middle school subject.
  • Intro to Peace Ed Part I: Core Concepts – Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and National Peace Academy (NPA), online (June 19 – July 17, 2012) For more information click on the link above.
  • Intro to Peace Ed Part 2: The Scope of Peace Education – Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and National Peace Academy (NPA) – online (July 24 – August 19, 2012) For more information click on the link above.
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  • Intro to Peace Ed Part 3: Pedagogy & Practice – Teachers Without Borders (TWB) and National Peace Academy (NPA), online (September 3-30, 2012) For more information click on the link above.
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | DRC: Millions miss out on basic education | DRC | Children | Education - 0 views

  • KINSHASA, 14 November 2011 (IRIN) - Access to basic education in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains poor, with up to seven million children across the vast country out of school - despite a 2010 government decision to make primary education free.
  • It said 25 percent of the primary school-aged children and 60 percent of adolescents were not enrolled in classes.
  • "Even with the announcement of free primary education, parents, many of whom are unemployed and have little means of sustaining themselves, are bearing most of the costs involved in educating their children because of delays in releasing the funds for free education," Ornelie Lelo, communications officer for an education NGO in the capital, SOS Kinshasa, told IRIN.
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  • "Many of the public schools in existence are in deplorable conditions; no blackboards in many of them; in some, children sit on the floor due to lack of desks, and the most worrying concern is encroachment on school land by individuals, many of whom are connected politically," Lelo said. "One can find a pharmacy, restaurant or even bar right in the middle of a school compound - it looks like all open spaces in schools are up for grabs.
  • Education officials have expressed concern over the severe shortage of teachers in public schools. In primary school, the national average is one teacher for 37 pupils, according to the national statistics, but in marginalized or rural areas, there can be more than 100 pupils per class.
  • Tshimbalanga said the average monthly salary for a primary school teacher was $35-40 and since the teachers' salaries are often several months in arrears, parents were forced to chip in. "Generally, teachers, like other Congolese workers, survive on very little, some even less than $1 a day, yet the cost of education is borne by parents, sometimes even up to 65 percent of the total cost," Tshimbalanga said. "In rural areas, some teachers supplement their earnings by working as casual labourers on farms; those in urban areas end up begging for money from their pupils' parents just to survive." To improve the quality of education, Tshimbalanga said, the government had to pay teachers properly. He said the teachers’ union entered into an agreement in 2004 with the government for teachers to be paid a minimum of $208 monthly but six years later, this has not been implemented.
Teachers Without Borders

Midterm report: Tanzania's educational revolution needs investment | Global development... - 0 views

  • Enrolment at primary schools nationwide has leapt from 59% in 2000 to 95.4% today, putting the impoverished country well on course to achieve the second millennium development goal (MDG) of primary school education for all by 2015.
  • half of pupils will fail to qualify for secondary school, with 3,000 girls a year dropping out due to pregnancy.
  • The progress has come with a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. Enrolment has grown so fast in Tanzania that the school system is creaking with overcrowded classrooms, shortages of books, teachers and toilets, and reports of corporal punishment being used to keep order. In short, it seems that quality has been sacrificed for quantity.
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  • 32-year-old Grace Mayemba, who teaches English, Swahili and social studies. "It's so hard because there are so many," she says."They are noisy and can do anything. To make each child understand is very difficult but you have to try your best.
  • Salima Omari, 36, a science and maths teacher, faces classes of 76 pupils. "It's difficult to cope with when you want to give one-to-one support. There are only four toilets for the whole school and two for the teachers, and there is not much water. The MDG has been good for Tanzania overall, but it was rushed."
  • With significant donor support from Britain and others, the government has allocated more than 2tn shillings (£856,000) for education in 2010-11, about double its spending on health. But most schools still lack electricity or water – nine in 10 children cannot wash their hands after using the toilet. Education activists warn that Tanzania, where half the population is below 18, still has a long way to go to achieve the MDG in spirit.
  • "Students will be enrolled, but in a few months, because of no shoes or textbooks, they can easily drop out," says Anthony Mwakibinga, its acting co-ordinator. "Boys often drop out for child labour near diamond mines. Girls drop out because of early pregnancy or marriage in some areas."
  • In Tanzania, parents are still expected to contribute to teaching materials, uniforms and even classroom construction. Still, it's not enough. Mwakibinga says he has come across classes of 200 pupils where quality inevitably suffers. "What do you from expect from a classroom of 200 children, even if the teacher works like a donkey? What if the 200 children have no books?"
  • The national teacher-pupil ratio has climbed from 1:41 in 2000 to 1:51 today. New teacher training colleges, including some in the private sector, have opened in a bid to meet the demand, but some trainees are allegedly rushed through in three or four months. The profession also suffers from low public esteem.
  • One teacher, Florence Katabazi, 37, says: "I chose teaching and to this day people think I'm a failure. People say, 'I want my son to be a doctor or lawyer, not a teacher,' It's shameful to be a teacher. Everyone runs away from the profession. If they want to be an accountant, they just use teaching as a bridge. At the end of the day we've got 10,000 half-baked teachers and only 400 good ones."
  • Struggling to maintain classroom discipline, some of the country's 160,000 primary school teachers resort to corporal punishment. Noel Ihebuzor, Unicef's chief of basic education and life skills, says: "They see it as controlling children and don't feel they are doing anything wrong. They were brought up that way. We've had stories where parents take children to the head and say, 'He's stubborn, cane him for me.'"
  • "Another problem is the provision of decent training services to teachers. The ministry has tried to develop a management strategy this year but it has not been implemented because of scarce resources. It's good to have a target, but a target without resources is a problem."
  • the pass rate for the primary school leaving exam is just 49.4%.
  • One teacher has a class of 166, with some pupils forced to lie on the bare concrete floor during lessons. They keep up spirits in the dusty, tree-lined central courtyard by playing steel instruments on the bandstand. In headteacher Abdallah Mgomi's office, a typed sheet of paper on the wall reminds anyone who reads it: "Quality is never an accident."
Teachers Without Borders

Education failures fan the flames in the Arab world « World Education Blog - 1 views

  • Education is a key ingredient of the political crisis facing Arab states. Superficially, the education profile of the region is starting to resemble that of East Asia. The past two decades have witnessed dramatic advances in primary and secondary school enrollment, with a step-increase in tertiary education. Many governments have increased public spending on education. The 7% of GDP that Tunisia invests in the sector puts the country near the top of the global league table for financial effort.
  • In Egypt, the education group most likely to be unemployed is university level and above, followed by post-secondary. Around one quarter of the country’s male university graduates are unemployed, and almost half of its female graduates.
  • For all the expansion of access and investment in education, the Arab states have some of the world’s worst performing education systems. The problems start early. In this year’s Global Monitoring Report we carry a table showing the distribution of performance across different countries in reading test scores at grade 4. In Kuwait, Qatar and Morocco, over 90% of students scored below the lowest benchmark, indicating that they lacked even basic comprehension.  In fact, these countries held the bottom three positions in a group of 37 countries covered.
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  • The median (or middle-performing) student in Algeria, Egypt and Syria scores below the low-benchmark; in Tunisia they score just above. In other words, half of the students in each country have gone through eight years of school to arrive at a level that leaves them with no working knowledge of basic math. In Saudi Arabia and Qatar, over 80% of students fall below the low benchmark. The median student in both performs at around the same level as their counterpart in Ghana and El Salvador – and Qatar is the worst performing country covered in the survey.
  • Why are education systems in the Middle East and North Africa performing so badly? In many countries, teachers are poorly trained – and teaching is regarded as a low-status, last-resort source of employment for entrants to the civil service. There is an emphasis on rote learning, rather than solving problems and developing more flexible skills. And education systems are geared towards a public sector job market that is shrinking, and for entry to post-secondary education. Most don’t make it. And those who do emerge with skills that are largely irrelevant to the needs of employers.
  • Moreover, many Arab youth view their education systems not as a source of learning and opportunity, but as a vehicle through which autocratic rulers seek to limit critical thinking, undermine freedom of speech and reinforce their political control.
  • To a large extent, the protest movement across the Arab States has been led by educated youth and adults frustrated by political autocracy and limited economic opportunity. This has deflected attention from an education crisis facing low-income households in primary education – and from the needs of adolescents and youth emerging from school systems with just a few years of sub-standard education.
  • The Arab states have an unfinished agenda on basic education.  They still have 6 million primary school age children out of school – around 16% of the world’s total. Despite the vast gap in wealth between the two countries, Saudi Arabia has a lower primary school enrolment rate than Zambia. The Arab world also has some very large gender disparities: in Yemen, primary school enrolment rates are 79% for boys, but just 66% for girls.
  • Consider the case of Egypt. On average, someone aged 17-22 years old in the country has had around nine years of education. That’s roughly what might be anticipated on the basis of the country’s income. Scratch the surface, though, and you get a different picture: around 12% of Egyptians have had less than two years of education.
  • High dropout rates from primary and lower secondary school are symptomatic of parental poverty, poor quality education, and a sustained failure on the part of the Egyptian government to tackle the underlying causes of inequality. Adolescents from poor backgrounds entering labor markets without a secondary education are carrying a one-way ticket to a life of poverty, insecurity and marginalization.
  • The political crisis sweeping Arab states is the product of many years of political failure. The aspirations and hopes of young people – who are increasingly connected to each other and the outside world through the Internet – are colliding with an atrophied political system governed by complacent, self-interested elites who are disconnected from the population.
Teachers Without Borders

IRIN Africa | SOUTH AFRICA: Poor marks for education | South Africa | Children | Educat... - 0 views

  • CAPE TOWN, 11 May 2011 (IRIN) - Instead of providing much needed opportunities, South Africa’s ailing education system is keeping children from poor households at the back of the job queue and locking families into poverty for another generation.
  • The study, "Low Quality Education as Poverty Trap", found that the schooling available to children in poor communities is reinforcing rather than challenging the racial and economic inequities created by South Africa’s apartheid-era policies.
  • The government allocated R190 billion (US$28 billion) or 21 percent of its 2011/12 budget to education, but 80 percent is spent on personnel and the remainder is not enough to supply thousands of schools in mainly poor areas with basic requirements like electricity and textbooks.
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  • Yet the top 20 percent of state schools - which largely correspond to historically white schools and charge fees to compensate for insufficient public funding - enjoy adequate facilities and attract the best teachers.
  • When seen in regional context, South Africa grossly under-performs, given that it has more qualified teachers, lower pupil-to-teacher-ratios and better access to resources," the report on the study noted.
  • many teachers had received an inferior education as a result of apartheid's "Bantu" education system, which was deliberately designed to disadvantage black learners and only ended in 1994 when a new democratic government came into power.
  • "The focus needs to be on teachers' development," said Cembi. "We've had changes in the curriculum since the new [post-apartheid] era, but we find not much focus on training teachers."
  • n recent years, SADTU has called for the reopening of training colleges because the shortage of teachers has meant that some schools in poor and rural areas have had to hire individuals who do not meet the official requirement of holding a teaching diploma.
  • Her view was backed up by the Stellenbosch study, which identified the lack of regular and meaningful student assessments and feedback to parents as another major weakness in the education system.
  • The researchers found that the job prospects of school leavers were determined not only by the number of years of education attained, but the quality of that education.
Teachers Without Borders

Canada News: Ontario to increase teacher training to two years - thestar.com - 0 views

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    Teacher training in Ontario will be bumped up to two years starting in 2014, says the provincial government. The Liberals, who promised the move during the 2011 election campaign, began consultations with education groups on Wednesday about the change. Three to four additional sessions are planned for April and May. Teachers typically earn a four-year undergraduate degree and then spend another year at university completing their bachelor of education. (Ten of the 13 universities with education programs also offer the degrees concurrently so students can complete the two at the same time.) The Liberals have said more training is needed given the challenges and increasing demands teachers face. The expanded program, the details of which have yet to be finalized, will include more practical, in-class training for new teachers.
Konrad Glogowski

Educators in Exile - 0 views

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    Much of the literature surrounding education in emergencies focuses on the impact of armed conflict on children. Surprisingly little focuses explicitly on teachers, and yet it is commonly acknowledged that the biggest influences on the education a child receives are the knowledge, skills and attitudes of their teacher. Through field research from Kenya, South Africa and Uganda, the study examines the role and status of teachers in emergencies. It identifies the issues refugee teachers face and makes recommendations on how policy can better address their particular needs and protect their rights, and thus improve access to and quality of education to populations affected by an emergency. The research findings also include data on South Sudan and the status of teachers returning there from exile.
Teachers Without Borders

Using technology in the classroom requires experience and guidance, report finds - The ... - 2 views

  • It’s older, more experienced teachers – not younger, so-called digital natives – who are experimenting more with new technology in the classroom, a new report suggests.And although Twitter, YouTube and mobile devices have infiltrated Canadian classrooms, the study finds that educators have serious concerns that students are “not-so-savvy surfers” – too prone to accept information published online as fact and be led astray.
  • “At the ground level, across the country, our impression is that teaching how to use technology takes precedence over the key critical thinking and ethical skills that youth really need,” said Matthew Johnson, director of education at Media Awareness Network, the not-for-profit group that conducted the research.
  • The report’s scope is small, involving just 10 elementary and high school teachers from across the country, but detailed. Titled Young Canadians in a Wired World, it is the third phase in an ongoing examination by Media Awareness Network of youth online. It takes a narrow focus on how teachers are using technology in the classroom and what barriers exist to maximizing these newest teaching tools.
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  • The Ottawa-based group will use the findings to shape a larger national survey it hopes to conduct next year.
  • n order to teach students how to be better digital citizens, the teachers surveyed said the training wheels have to come off the Internet: The filters schools use to block unverified websites prevent students from learning how to exercise good judgment.One elementary school teacher described a learning opportunity that arose when his students stumbled across a website sympathetic to the Nazis. The site’s racism, which was cloaked in careful prose, wasn’t obvious to the students.
  • The teachers said filters are also problematic because they prevent access to useful teaching aids. Teachers in Quebec and Ontario described not being able to show videos in class because YouTube was blocked. And one teacher in Atlantic Canada described a failed campaign to get Twitter unblocked so her students could collaborate on math questions.
  • “I don’t see a lot of new teachers coming in knowing how to apply technology,” said Zhi Su, a teacher and technology director at John Oliver Secondary School in Vancouver.Fresh out of college, few new teachers experiment with new technologies because they have the potential to be disruptive. It’s experience, and the confidence that comes with it, that is allowing teachers in their 40s and 50s to lead the way, according to the report.
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