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Rana Najadeh, 12, recalled her horror as she bore witness to the destruction. “I got very scared when the soldiers came to demolish our class,” she said. “I rushed out to check on my six year old brother Suleiman, who was crying.” The demolition did not end there, however, as nine other residential structures were also destroyed that day, leaving 30 children and their families homeless. 

Thankfully, UNICEF and Islamic Relief Worldwide took action to address the tragic situation, by rehabilitating the school and providing a better environment for the students. In addition, UNICEF partnered with both the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO), to help the traumatized children find relief from their fear and anger by providing psychosocial sessions through dance, drama, arts and play.

amic Relief Worldwide took action to address the tragic situation, by rehabilitating the school and providing a better environment for the students. In addition, UNICEF partnered with both the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid Department (ECHO), to help the traumatized children find relief from their fear and anger by providing psychosocial sessions through dance, drama, arts and play. “Sometimes for children it is simply the opportunity to play and have fun – be a child – in a safe environment,” said UNICEF Deputy Special Representative, Douglas G. Higgins. “In the end, the psychosocial project is important for children to have a sense of stability, normality and opportunity to reach their potential.” Dkaika children are not the first ones to receive help however, as UNICEF has worked with ECHO since 2003 to help Palestinian children and their families cope with the conflict and violence that affects their daily lives. The activities focus on children who live in areas exposed to frequent home and school demolitions, as well as young Bedouins and children with disabilities. “We must not fail Dkaika children,” said the Deputy Special Representative. ”Education is the cornerstone for peace and security and is at the heart of equity.” var emailarticleloc = location.href; emailarticleloc = emailarticleloc.replace("http://www.unicef.org",""); emailarticleloc = emailarticleloc.replace("http://unicef.org",""); var emailarticle = "Email this article Email this article UNICEFBLOG.addentry({ linkClassName: "bloglink", image: "", title: "UNICEF provides support to Palestinian students through rehabilitation and psychosocial sessions", blurb: "DKAIKA, Occupied Palestinian Territory, 29 September 2011 - Located just 70 metres away from the Green Line - the 1949 Armistice Line – in Israeli-controlled Area ‘C’, the villagers of Dkaika are forced to suffer under the daily risk of home demolition and harassment. 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He said research had suggested that boys in Jamaica deliberately underperformed in literacy tests because the tests were carried out in standard English, and "to speak in standard English is considered a woman's activity". He went on to suggest the same cultural attitudes affected the learning of African-Caribbean boys in England.

"Boys are more interested in hustling, which is a quick way of making a living, rather than making the commitment to study. This is a supposed to be a street thing which is a male thing. "The influence of this attitude towards masculinity seems to be having a tremendous impact on how well African-Caribbean and Jamaican males do.

Johnson, the student teacher in Madison, said he believes the new performance assessment will serve as a valuable tool. "Passing the Praxis II just meant I had content knowledge," he said. "What's more important is for me to show I can convey that science knowledge to a class full of students."

Desiree Pointer Mace, assistant professor and associate dean for graduate programs at Alverno's School of Education, likes the assessment's layers: Teachers have to provide a written reflection of their teaching practice, and the 10- to 15-minute video gives some indication of how they interact in a classroom.

"It doesn't test what you can recall and push out; it tests the work of teaching and how you connect to students," Pointer Mace said. "Then the whole thing must be graded by someone who is independent but knows about teaching." Alverno has long emphasized performance-based exams and the use of video as a tool for self-critique, so Pointer Mace said it's not a huge shift for the program to adapt to the new assessment.

A number of research efforts of various sorts are underway trying to help provide some tentative answers to this important question, based on Worldreader pilots.  Most notable has been the iRead pilot in Ghana (here's an executive summary of the first independent evaluation commissioned by USAID [pdf]), which used a set of pre- and post- literacy tests to three groups

Worldreader is encouraged by the results it is seeing so far -- the biggest effects are being seen around grades 4-5, a result that many of the literacy experts attending the Worldreader presentation did not find surprising, for a variety of reasons -- but they are not yet seeing the types of 'blockbuster results' it is hoping.

Worldreader does appear serious and diligent in its approach, however, and so I look forward to receiving updates on the research output that I expect will emerge over time, which it plans to make available on part of its web site dedicated to "learnings". (Parenthetical note: Preliminary results from the World Bank's e-book pilot in Nigeria are expected later this year; background here, here, and here.)

The first challenge in this regard is (as always) money. Here Worldreader is now starting to confront a phenomenon known to many who have worked in the ICT4D area for awhile.  Finding funding support for small pilot projects, while not always easy, can be done. Large national educational technology projects are being funded in various countries around the world.  But what about the in-between level, where you do things at a much larger scale so that you can learn about how best to scale when you do things at a really big, national level?  Few funders seem able to provide support at this level.  As a result, one approach being explored is a franchising model, combining both donor and local partner funding, and a prototype 'Worldreader-in-a-Box' solution for local implementing groups is being rolled out and tested.

The first stage of Worldreader activities in introducing e-books and e-readers into a few small communities in Africa has convinced the organization and its backers that what it is doing is worth doing.  We no longer need to convince ourselves "if" we should be doing this, they say.  Now the question is, "how?" 

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.

But within India, there is widespread recognition that the country has not invested enough in education, especially at the primary and secondary levels.

In the last five years, government spending on education has risen sharply — to $83 billion last year, up from less than half that level before. Schools now offer free lunches, which has helped raise enrollments to more than 90 percent of children.

But most Indian schools still perform poorly. Barely half of fifth-grade students can read simple texts in their language of study, according to a survey of 13,000 rural schools by Pratham, a nonprofit education group. And only about one-third of fifth graders can perform simple division problems in arithmetic. Most students drop out before they reach the 10th grade.

Those statistics stand in stark contrast to China, where a government focus on education has achieved a literacy rate of 94 percent of the population, compared with 64 percent in India.

In response, AGSP made it a point to include bicycles as part of this area's scholarship package. By 2010 they had given out 817 bicycles to scholars, which have proved to be beneficial in many situations, whether for a student to get herself to a crucial exam, or to ride across town to a classmate's house for an extra study session.

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).

That’s exactly what’s happening in a project involving six Commonwealth countries that develop and share course materials – Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Seychelles, Zambia and Trinidad and Tobago.

Some secondary schools in Africa are considering the use of cell phones to reach students who cannot attend traditional classroom lectures.  Instead, they can listen to lessons sent by voicemail and even take tests by phone.

Public statements from government and ministers were switched to be deliberately supportive rather than dismissive of state schools. Finally, and most crucially, the government set out to build a respectful, collaborative relationship with teachers, unions, pupils and parents. "You cannot threaten, shame or punish people into top performance," writes Levin.