What Have I Been Doing -10 months on?

Having just read through one of my early blogs, on arrival here at the district, on what I had been doing in my first month, I thought you might be interested to see what I have been doing 10 months down the road and looking ahead to my final 2 months of time here in Rwanda.

There are many times I reflect on how much of my time has been wasted and the district has not taken full advantage of my background and I am sure no-one will be surprised to hear that I have still been unable to sit down and have a constructive discussion with my DEO as to where the priorities are and how this fits in with my role here. Everything here is done in fire fighting mode with little forward planning and meetings are called at a moments notice when you are expected to drop everything and attend. Even more annoyingly school visits are cancelled at the last minute because of an impromptu meeting at the district or sector.

But I have gradually ( buhoro, buhoro – slowly by slowly) discovered there are opportunities to create my own niche and I have finally managed to get the message across that I have not come as a clerical assistant to carry out filing tasks or salary interrogations or text book procurement, all of which I have done, in order to try and prove that I am adaptable and willing to support the district in whatever capacity I can. Unfortunately, I think there are still huge gender issues, which exist within the district and also within the schools, and it is taking a long time to break down those barriers. Within the district staff, the only roles held by women are in the clerical field although I am told that selection is all done fairly.

Carrying out data analysis has really stretched my IT skills to the limits, as someone who had never even used an excel spread sheet before, one of the first tasks I was given was to input onto a spread sheet, all the mock Pr6, O level and A level exam results for each of the 85 government schools in the district (literally thousands of pupils) all of which come in paper form and in no organized standard format. From this, I then had to identify the best and poorest performing schools, all of which is required by the district and mayor but none of which is acted upon other than rewarding the best schools and moving the Head Teachers from the poorest performing schools. I have more recently been working with 5 of the poorest performing schools and providing training for Head Teachers and staff. One of the drawbacks is that they are all in the remotest parts of the district (could there be a connection?) and require long and arduous moto rides to get there.

Two schools which I have been working with closely, applied for a global schools partnership through the British Council and were successful in getting linked to a school in the Isle of White and the other in Wales and then the  partnership in Wales was awarded a reciprocal visit grant which will hopefully take place before the end of this year but has been delayed because of the difficulty the Rwandan Head Teacher has had in getting a passport. Getting these partnerships established and maintaining communication has involved a huge amount of planning and paperwork as I have been acting as intermediary between the respective schools as neither school has computers or electricity. With one of the schools, which has a mere 3,500 pupils, I have been working with staff to improve English and communication skills to support their partnership and of course everything is done using group methodology to try and wean teachers away from the chalk and talk style of teaching they are used to. We are now in the process of putting together another funding bid through Connecting Classrooms.  With the other school, I have been working with S2 and 3 classes to produce a school magazine, which they eventually hope to be able to send to their counterparts in Wales.

This district is particularly fortunate to be involved with another NGO ( Non Government Organisation) – Plan Rwanda and I have been doing a lot of work with them. They have 4 main focus areas: girls education, early childhood , youth empowerment and advocacy. I met this particular NGO when they organized a 3 day conference for PTC ( Parent ,Teacher Committee) where there were representatives from the community, head teachers and pupils. I was asked to speak to the group ( with a translator) about how we work with parents in my country and the follow up to that was that I was then asked to prepare and deliver a 3 day workshop for communites on early childhood development, along with a couple of Rwandan facilitators.

Plan Rwanda are a financially healthy organization and are able to provide attendees with transport costs and snacks and lunch which always guarantees a good turn out and the 3 days were very rewarding, working with a group of 65-70 village and cell leaders, health workers and teachers who would all be involved in setting up community childhood centres with the aim of providing a good preparatory setting for children ( and parents) before starting school. I likened it very much to our mother and toddler/playgroup situation which we were involved in, when my own children were very young and before nursery education had taken off in Scotland.

Following on from that training, I have run various resource making workshops, demonstrating how it is possible to use natural resources and recycled materials to create “learning through play” opportunities – right up my street! I have also met with community groups to talk about the importance of a good start at the early stages and the importance of transition from childhood centres to school and building on what children already know. It’s amazing how often I have referred to Curriculum for Excellence in terms of eventual outcomes for students and how the aspirations for the future generation in Rwanda are very similar to our own in Scotland but most importantly how we need to give our children the best possible start, at their most formative stages.

At the request of Head Teachers and following on from initial needs analysis visits, I have produced a training workshop entitled “What Makes a Good  School” sound familiar?? where we explore the qualities of a good school, good teacher, good lesson and then finally a good lesson plan, all with lots of interactive group work and hands on activities. The main message I try to get across is that the most valuable asset a school can have is good leadership with good teachers and that it isn’t all about classrooms with electricity and computers. At the start, it is always quite hard to persuade teachers that it is perfectly acceptable to get up and move around the room and talk to one another as the activities dictate, but once they get the hang of it, the problem is getting them to stop!

Along with some other ELA’s we have put together a 3 day training programme on Time Management. This came about at the request of one DEO who recognized that managing time is one of the biggest weaknesses in Rwandan culture. Nothing ever starts on time, in spite of all sorts of threats and we have taken to recording the arrival time of participants at training, as some manage to turn up just before the Fanta break or even worse just before the end of the training in order to claim attendance. I have now delivered this training 4 times in different districts to Head Teachers and Sector Education Officers and a couple of weeks ago was asked to deliver the training to the Forensics Department of the National Police Force. The follow on to that is that we have been asked to deliver the training to two groups of CID in August. The training continues to evolve each time we deliver it but the key messages are about keeping a work life balance, prioritizing and being able to delegate and using measureable and realistic targets to make the job run smoothly, efficiently and of course on time. We provide a couple of role plays, the- “before” time management training and the- “after”, which the Rwandans find hilarious as they recognize just how bad they are at time keeping but in the end they will just shrug and say “but this is Africa!”

During genocide memorial week in April, I spent a week in Kigali with 5 other ELA’s to work on a staff development toolkit which would offer the district education officers, sector education officers and Head Teachers a menu of training workshops which we could offer in terms of support and also to clearly get the message across that our role is to work at a strategic level and not in classrooms with class teachers where Head Teachers would most like us to be.

During the week, we identified 6 key areas where we felt our expertise could be best employed: Leadership, Development Planning, Data Analysis, Pedagogy and Management, SEN and Gender and then broke each of these down into manageable workshop size chunks along with trainers notes and accompanying handouts. It was a fairly mammoth task which we did not get completed within the week but we each undertook to take away another couple of workshops to complete and finally the whole package has now gone to the Rwandan Education Board for approval but should on completion, make the task for any future ELA’s coming to Rwanda more straightforward.

Since December, I have been hounding my DEO to make sure that the revised curriculum documents for English, which have been sitting in Kigali awaiting collection since last summer, are distributed to schools, particularly once we realized that the national exams for 2011 were based on the new curriculum. The revised curriculum for Primary and O level has removed much of the endless and irrelevant grammar that is so often seen being taught in schools in favour of a more topic based approach and involving far more discussion and dialogue, comprehension and creative thinking. Finally 4 weeks ago, the documents arrived and have been delivered to schools but the down side is that I have been asked to prepare the Pr6 and O level mock English exam and provide a workshop to go over the key changes in documents! I think my own English teachers would turn in their grave if they knew what I had been asked to do!

The final major piece of work I am currently involved with is to do with special educational needs and again this came about through discussion with head teachers where the whole concept of inclusion, particularly with so many children with needs, has been a major challenge. I had arranged with 2 of our special needs volunteers to come to the district to offer 3 separate trainings for representatives from each school by dividing the district into smaller and more manageable numbers. However a chance remark to Plan Rwanda about support for transport costs, turned the whole exercise into a major training programme for the whole district, involving 105 Head teachers, 14 sector education officers and the DEO in a 3 day training programme with 10 VSO volunteer facilitators.

The programme was to include a major assessment project, where schools would be asked to undertake a much more rigorous and accurate assessment of pupils with an impairment and to try and evaluate the severity of that impairment. The World Health Organisation has stated that 10% of the population has some sort of impairment and this is in no way reflected in the return of numbers currently submitted to the Ministry. Of course many, many children with an impairment do not come to school or have already dropped out of school and the next part of the project will be to try and get accurate numbers in this area.

Part of the training was to provide Head Teachers with an understanding of the different types of impairment and a simple assessment tool, which teachers could understand and use to identify the needs within their classes. We had several planning meetings in Kigali and then the week prior to the training, another volunteer and I went out to 4 different schools in the district to trial the materials and then produce a report for the 5^th day to validate the materials. We then used 5 facilitation groups for the actual training, with two volunteers in each, which meant producing 5 sets of all the different resources we used and by the end I was seeing rice sacks in my sleep! At the end of this month we will come together again to carry out the same process for another district.

So what now…… I have just learned that I have been successful in a bid for funding for a gender project that I hope to at least get initiated before I leave at the end of August.

For those of us left here over the summer, we plan to carry out a whole raft of training while teachers and particularly Head Teachers are on holiday. The schools break up on the 20^th July (it is only in the last week that schools have been informed that they will actually stay on for an additional week and not break up on the 13^th as originally planned- how well would that go down at home???) They still have a longer holiday than normal due to the fact that a census will be carried out in August and many teachers have been asked to undertake this task. But the concept of holidays only means that pupils will not attend school, not that head teachers have free time so this is an ideal opportunity to offer our workshop menu and we will visit each others districts to help one another out with the training programmes.

On reflection, perhaps my time here has been more productive than I thought, but I am very well aware I am only leaving a tiny scratch on the surface. My hope is that I have laid down a few foundations for my successor( a PhD in philosophy who is coming from Canada) to build on. I love the poster which says 

  

             If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping under a net with a mosquito!”