Rwanda is going through drastic improvements in the education sector at all levels; from early childhood education to university. These changes are all designed to improve the quality of learning. However, this aspired change for quality seems to now be a problem stuck in the bonnets of all stakeholders. I read an article in the local media on the planned scrapping off national exams for Primary Six. In response to the article were piles of concerns from various readers worried over the fact that this would adversely affect the quality of learning.
As a classroom teacher, I read this article with a significant level of courtesy. Why? For, as a teacher, I asked myself a number of questions: What is my role in promoting quality instruction in my class? Who are the other stakeholders in promoting quality learning? What ratio (or percentage) is the contribution of each stakeholder? How do other places in the world promote quality learning? These concerns perturbed me and I began to look around for possible answers or views of other people.
Within this spate of time, I happened to be travelling to Kampala when I chanced to share a seat with a Rwandan student who was going back to school in Uganda. I felt compelled to ask this young fellow why he goes to school in Uganda. His answer was this one "puzzling thing” called "quality education”. His response triggered two divergent aspects in my mind: First, when shall we have an education system that reverses such a trend and pulls students in the region to come over and study in Rwanda? Then, there was this second aspect that consoled my doubts, the natural tendencies and the belief that our students in Rwanda are quite intelligent (I didn’t say more) compared to other students across the world. This second argument has been backed by the fact that many of our students who get a chance to study in universities and colleges abroad, including USA, Europe and other parts of the world, have continued to excel in their academic works.
As a teacher, I am compelled to believe that the Government, as the biggest stakeholder in promoting quality, is committed to doing its role and has continued to support quality learning. However, other stakeholders like parents, teachers and community need to up their game in order to create the synergy which can enhance quality learning. There are other factors such as poverty levels, ignorance, distances travelled by students, insufficient instructional materials, and crowded classrooms that seem to affect quality learning. However, there are many high performing individuals in both private and public sectors who went to school in conditions far below the ones mentioned above and have by all means demystified these road humps, and are performing quite well in their respective fields. These fellows studied under trees, did not have books, travelled long distances, did not see a textbook until high school, but still excelled in their academic works.
Yes, times have changed. Perhaps these were highly motivated people in their studies, and probably their teachers were tutors of higher calibres as opposed to our current teacher training trends. As a teacher, I have encountered a complex web of bad indicators of schooling without learning. Several schools are styling up by adopting international curricula, inferring that local curricula are inferior. As a classroom teacher, I do affirm that, a well-crafted and properly delivered local curriculum is logically similar to breastfeeding a child by a well-fed mother. How many of our great performing citizens got their education through foreign programmes?
The big question still prevails; what is quality learning? A few years back, I read about Edward Deming (1950), who talks about quality control and quality assurance. In quality as concerns education, we ought to pay adequate attention to a couple of concerns here: Do national exams promote quality learning? In my very personal view, they do not promote quality learning; unlike what many of my colleagues do feel. Examinations come in as a form of a summative assessment to tell the teacher/parent or government, that the learned content was mastered by the student. Additionally, most of us teachers use examinations as a method of quality control and it is what society uses to judge school performance. I strongly feel that educational quality needs to be checked from the word go. As soon as a child enters Nursery One, quality assurance ought to start.
Recently, I read a report about malnourishment. This has a negative bearing on a child’s cognitive development; hence, his/her academic performance in school. If the Primary Six examinations are scrapped off and the money is used to eradicate malnutrition, improve teacher training, attract talent in the field of teaching, equip schools, and offer basic training to parents, quality would significantly go up than keeping on spending so much on national examinations that many in the First Worlds have long abandoned, having proved they are irrelevant. A breast-fed baby by a well-fed mother remains imperative logic for good brain development.
Let me run away from this complex network of issues, for a while, and go to my side as a teacher. If any expert in Classroom Audit or an instructional expert came to classroom while teaching is going on, he/she would leave many a class lamenting. A lot of talking takes place in classrooms that loosely translates into authentic learning experiences. Is this the worst scenario?
Parents make up another constituency with an enormous stake in what schools are doing. However, they seem to have either opted for an inert involvement style or at worst, alienated position from school system. They cannot demand meaningful accountability from teachers of their children. I also strongly believe that our parents need to be empowered in demanding for accountability from teachers and school leadership. For instance, I can’t recall if I have ever invited parents of my pupils to class to get them to learn about any new curriculum, especially the philosophy and the methodology it has to take. An effective mode of implementing this Competency Based Curriculum (CBC) requires concerted efforts from all constituencies of education. If parents do work with teachers, a lot can be achieved way beyond what the national tests can offer, as far as quality is concerned. But are we up to this task as classroom teachers? Most of us are stuck in the survival level of teaching. At the end of the day, it’s like a t onne off your head!
What are teachers up to anyway? The exclamation for quality learning seems to be seated at the hearts of many people. We have all had a chance to go to school; therefore, we have ideas about learning unlike other fields. If you see a plane flying, you may hardly claim that you can fly it; while with teaching, many out there feel they too can do something in class irrespective of whether they are trained to be teachers or not. When changes are introduced in Education, which in any case is a must, we as teachers largely remain merely at the receiving end; and how do people expect us to embrace these changes unquestioningly, anyway?
At the beginning of this year, there were CBC teacher training sessions for three days. I sat in the room, and watched all the teachers in the training room. Since, as it was with most of the other teachers, my role was rather passive, my brain was actively categorising the attendees and this is what I saw:
• Alienated groups • Conformist groups • Pragmatic followers • Passive followers • But also the active ones who I consider to be exemplary were present.
Sadly, the smallest fraction was that of the exemplary groups. So teachers still have a big role to play in promoting quality learning.
The factors of removing the exams may not adversely affect quality. I talked to a teacher friend of mine in the USA, Rachel; and asked her how they promote quality in their American schools. She told me their students get university/college entry as a result of the trust they have in their schools, not by examination results.
Students take an external examination at Grade 10 usually in the form of PSAT, PACT, SAT, ACT, and AP subject tests. A few other grades may do Mathematics and literacy tests. The other factors that promote quality learning, as mentioned by Rachel, are: students’ motivation and ambition as well as parents’ demand of higher standards. In a nutshell, students are highly motivated and are ambitious; parents demand the highest education standards. An external primary leaving examination does not have a large drive for quality. Instead, most Primary Six students are given drills and longer hours of learning just to help them pass national tests, period. Does this translate into quality learning? I don’t know. We as teachers must be sure that we do right things the right way. Paying attention to results is not a mistake, but it has left many of our children inept to perform yet they have good report transcripts. My submission is that quality assurance in education that places focus on standards, processes, policies guidelines will help answer this problem of quality learning in schools.
The writer is a teacher.