SOME weeks ago, the Federal Directorate of Education and Professional Training organised a wonderful summer fiesta for schoolchildren, with a wide range of skill-based workshops, seminars, lectures and activities. This kind of immersive experience with creative writing, financial literacy, digital technology and so forth, is the urgent need for students who haven’t got much exposure to global skills.

Sadly, these children will go back to teacher-led classrooms and traditional teaching after the summer break. Many precious steps forward, but some unfortunate leaps backwards too. It may be time to revisit what they are learning in classrooms and whether the curriculum and teaching methods support the skill development we must envision for a progressive, holistic application of knowledge.

Skill development starts in early years with knowledge of the world around us, roles and responsibilities, creative and critical thought, and strong foundations in numeracy and literacy. If we begin to benchmark the skills taught in our classrooms to global standards, we may hope to target the aims of the SDGs for education.

How far have our ways of teaching and learning evolved?

This includes reflective teaching practices that only equip teachers with books, and accompanying pedagogy focusing on real-life skills. We also need to integrate technological experiences for our early years’ students. Digital reading programmes, for example, are more efficient at teaching pronunciation, decoding and comprehension. Such programmes lead children through evidence-based reading strategies that start with prompts and clues to help the child think creatively, absorb the text, and develop the ability to give personal responses using their critical thinking capability.

Such programmes are not as competitive as a noisy classroom environment that has over 50 students and one teacher. In fact, technology affords the time and patience for students to learn at their own pace, and matches their comprehension ability. The programmes are user-friendly, structured to lead students through reading levels, and monitor their progress with timely reports showing reading hours, books covered and scores achieved on comprehension quizzes.

Literacy in the early years is not only about being able to read, but also acquiring the ability to express opinions, draw conclusions and gradually using language independently. A strong early years literacy programme will give students many opportunities to play with words, come up with unique perspectives, and delve into the possibilities of structuring sentences in multiple ways. Sadly, students are mostly preoccupied with the need to produce the ‘right’ answers, and in that vein, we end up encouraging mimicry where the teacher becomes the crutch that students come to depend on.

A strong math curriculum would enable students to learn in different ways. If one strategy isn’t working, a teacher’s challenge is to be able to offer different ways to help the student navigate concepts. Rather than ‘learning’ numeracy concepts, they can be taught to use manipulatives to visualise, analyse and draw conclusions.

Simple and easy ways to support children in accessing learning outcomes can lead to massive benefits as they progress through school levels. And the better their grip on learning, the faster they will develop confidence in their ability to excel in academics. Often, in our society, we equate confidence with being able to speak in public; we couldn’t be further from the truth. Confidence stems from one’s belief in their ability to learn, understand and apply what they know. The application of skills is the yardstick of confidence that we should be focusing on, especially in the early years. Instead, much of our focus remains on memorisation and reproduction in assessments and tests. Even the melodious tune used to learn the tables hasn’t changed in more than a century.

It’s time to look closely at what we are producing and how far we’ve changed our teaching and learning methods to evolve with the times. Teachers are no longer the only source of information, and students will inevitably turn to digital resources; but are we equipping them to understand, navigate and use the digital resources to their advantage and in responsible ways?

When children sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, do we ask them if they know what a star is made of? Do we ask them how far the stars might be from us? Do we ask enough questions to pique their curiosity about the world and their place in it? Do we give them the confidence in their own ability to find answers?

It’s not always what we teach, but how we teach it that determines the trajectory of success for our students.

The writer is a teacher, educator, author, and Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK. The views expressed are her own and do not reflect those of her employer.

neda.mulji@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 12th, 2024