The man from the Ministry

The problemThere was an article in a London newspaper a few days ago about the 107 languages used by London residents, raising questions about the cost and practicality of educating children with such diverse linguistic needs. Harry Kuchah Kuchah in Cameroon is faced with a situation where 256-258 languages are spoken, more than double the total found in London, and with far fewer resources to deal with the challenges this inevitably leads to.

I always had difficulty accepting James Tooley’s blanket condemnation of teachers in remote rural areas. In his book, The Beautiful Tree, one of the main premises is that state teachers in rural areas cannot be relied on to provide any level of good education. He even had the statistics to prove it and that was the main justification for supporting the emergence of less regulated private schools.

Several of the sessions at IATEFL2015 addressed the issue of providing effective education in rural areas and all of them painted a far more optimistic picture than Tooley. One thing that struck me very much about Tooley’s book is that, although he consulted the private education sector widely, he didn’t talk to the state school teachers to find out why there was so much absenteeism. Turns out that if you talk to people, and even better, involve them, then you can start to effect improvements.

Harry Kuchah Kuchah is based in Cameroon and shared his journey from teacher to Ministry Inspector to researcher.

The teacher

As a teacher he had to cope with overlarge classes in cramped and even dangerous buildings with very few resources. His solution was to give his students an enormous amount of autonomy to the extent that they became co-teachers.

  • Cramped classrooms? Take the students outside.
  • Lack of resources? Ask the students to source texts with which to work.
  • Large classes? Break the class into groups, each working with the resources they have brought.
  • Mix of materials? Ask the learners to suggest ways to use the materials.

But why don’t all teachers do this? Why didn’t what Kuchah Kuchah was doing percolate through the school and beyond?

Solution to overcrowdingBecause this mode of working does not fit the Ministry mandated ways of doing things. And where do the Ministry policies come from? From wave after wave of donor organisations which each come with a different preferred pedagogy. In one 10 year period, starting in 1999, there were 12 different mandated pedagogies for teachers to learn about and implement. And they had to be implemented, at least nominally, otherwise the funds associated with the donor organisations would not be released. One major driver against innovation was a deficit approach to INSET. So as a teacher, if you got training, it was because you were failing in some respect.

An inspector calls

Then during his time as an education inspector Kuchah Kuchah found a huge mismatch between the lesson plans filed by the teachers and the survival teaching strategies observed in the classroom. This in turn led to the research to find out how to implement pedagogically appropriate methodologies on a large scale.

The investigation

So started an extensive data gathering operation based on asking both teachers and learners what they perceived as good teaching. This may sound obvious, but had never been done before.

The word then went out seeking good teachers. These good teachers were then observed over several lessons and allowed to choose which lesson they thought was the best. Once the best video was chosen for each of the good teachers, Kuchah Kuchah had them talk through the lesson video to find out what they were thinking at various points in the lesson and why they took the pedagogical decisions they did.

He also asked the students whether the good teachers were good and found some interesting differences of opinion in some cases (where teachers recommended by the ministry or the head teacher were not at all recommended by the students!).

The power of working from strengths

He gathered groups of teachers and showed them the videos of these best lessons and asked them to pick out what was good about what they were seeing. Ostensibly this exercise was to home in on what constitutes good teaching in the Cameroon context, but the simple act of seeing the videos already had a positive effect on the teacher focus groups. Many of them commented on their intention to change their practice as a result of what they had seen.

The final stage of the research was to mske use of an existing resource, the Teacher Association. Kuchah Kuchah established the priorities of the teachers by asking the teacher association members what three questions they would want answered if they could undertake research. By gathering all the questions and clustering them it became clear that the concerns of the teachers centred on three main areas:

  1. Lack of resources
  2. Strategies for multilingual and large class instruction
  3. Motivating students

There were some wonderful comments relating to this part of the research:

“This is the first time in my career that I attended a workshop for two full days and was not reminded that I have to follow instructions. I did not even feel at any point that there was a national inspector in this room; everything happened as if I was talking with my friends who share the same experiences like me.”

“…the facilitator, though a national inspector, brought down himself to a primary school teacher that I am; he was indeed like an inexperienced primary school teacher learning from us. This made my own learning very simple and interesting.”

And that is how you find out what the priorities are regarding pedagogy in Cameroon!

All in all I found this to be an excellent example of the power of bottom up innovation by building on strengths. Quite a contrast to the partial view offered by Tooley.

IATEFL 2015 blogger