Teachers

Emergency Child Care: Issues to Consider

By: Joan Lombardi

The demand for child care in low in middle income countries has been growing over the last few years. Fueled by the increasing number of working women and migration from rural areas to urban centers, the drumbeat for child care support around the world has grown. The recent pandemic has raised new and complicated pressures on a child care system that was already under-resourced and under-recognized in many countries.

As schools closed around the world, so has the need to close child care programs. It is difficult to protect the health of teachers, caregivers, families and the community when children are in group settings- whether called a school, a preschool or a child care center. At the same time, essential workers are experiencing difficulties doing their jobs while caring for and protecting their children. Essential workers can be defined as health care workers and depending on the community, may also include those working in food production and distribution (including markets), transportation, child protection, emergency services, and others.

Countries all around the world are faced with the dilemma of promoting physical distancing, while addressing the need to provide emergency child care for at least part of the workforce. Public officials around the world are encouraged to collaborate across sectors, particularly with public health, to develop procedures that promote the safety and healthy development of young children while supporting those working in emergency settings. It will be essential to follow the basic health protections outlined by the World Health Organization and as well as any country specific guidelines available.

Below are 10 issues that should be addressed:

1. Promoting family care wherever possible  

Family care is most often the best option for the care of children when parents have to work during an emergency. However, this is not always possible, particularly if grandparents and other supportive relatives live far away or are in need of a more isolated setting themselves. At the same time, young children should not be left solely in the care of siblings who may still be too young to carry out this responsibility safely. Young children need the protection of a caring adult to assure their safety and security.

2. Deciding if and where emergency child care is provided

There have been many questions raised about emergency care including, among others: What are the best options for providing care (in homes, in centers, in schools, near hospitals)? How best to utilize existing home based providers? Too often there is limited guidance available to inform these choices. Every community or country is having to make these decisions based on available assets, changing needs, and the best way to protect children and frontline workers. Since it is important to provide as much space for individual children as possible to avoid the spread of the virus, it is best to limit the size of the group and to follow whatever health guidelines are available.

3. Establishing health and safety procedures

All of the established health measures to protect people from the spread of the virus should be reinforced in emergency child care. These includes procedures for handwashing, and others outlined by WHO. While access to clean water and supplies may be difficult in very low resource communities, it is essential that frontline workers providing emergency child care work together with community health services to establish and follow such procedures. These should include procedures for screening children and providers and assuring that those who are sick remain home.

4. Training all emergency child care providers and providing protective equipment and supplies

Caring for young children is a serious responsibility and needs special preparation, especially during times of emergencies. Child care providers should be trained in health and safety procedures, including appropriate interactions with children, families and each other. Protective supplies and equipment should be provided to all emergency child care providers and health supports should be available at all times. 

5. Assuring adequate nutrition while children are in care

Assuring children have adequate food and nutritional supplements are particularly important to protect and promote healthy development. Often children receive a significant portion of their daily nutrition in child care or other early childhood programs. The use of such programs for food distribution and supplementation is critical for the children and their families.

6. Encouraging opportunities to promote early learning

Children do not stop learning in crises. They are learning as they interact with adults who are caring for them and responding to their needs, including the stress and isolation they may be experiencing during this crisis. Since many preschool programs have been closed, there is a need to provide parents and caregivers with tools and supplies needed to promote early learning.

7. Providing health messages and other information to families

Child care and other early childhood programs interact with parents every day. Through these services, families can be linked to the emerging information and resources that can support them through the pandemic. These should include ways to stay socially connected. Emergency child care should be seen as a gateway to reaching parents as well as a service to care for children. 

8. Providing pay for child care providers   

Child care providers around the world have been impacted economically as their programs have closed. This comes on top of a system that historically has failed to recognize the needs of child care workers or provide adequate compensation. In order to assure safe and healthy conditions, emergency providers need supplemental resources to operate and child care services that remain closed should have the resources needed to recover.

9. Assisting parents in paying for care

The pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the income and well-being of families. Even before the pandemic, parents were having difficulty finding and paying for child care. Early childhood programs should be seen as a public good. During these difficult times it will be important for child care expenses to be included as part of social protection mechanisms.

10. Recognizing child care as a core community support

During the emergency response and recovery from this crisis, child care should emerge as a core service in a system of community supports for children and families. As such, new ways of supporting and connecting child care to health and nutrition, social protection, child protection, education and ongoing services should be established. This is an opportunity to build back better than where we were before and create a child care system that works for children and families around the world.

Resources

World Health Organization - https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019
UNICEF - https://www.unicef.org/parenting/
Early Childhood Development Action Network - www.ecdan.org
IFC, World Bank - Child care in the COVID 19 Era: A guide for employers

Stay tuned to ECWI’s Knowledge Hub for additional resources for navigating COVID-19 specific to the early childhood workforce.

Analysis – Developing the early years workforce: what does the evidence tell us?

By: Rachel An and Sara Bonetti

Originally published by the Education Policy Institute.

There is mounting evidence that high quality early years provision can have lasting positive effects, not only on the children who participate but on society overall. According to a recent study, children who attended high quality childcare with skilled and caring staff started school, on average, three months ahead in literacy and language, were 20 per cent more likely to do better on their GCSEs and earned more as adults than those from low-quality settings.[1]

However, the evidence provides only mixed answers to the question “What really counts as high quality?”, when it comes to the early years workforce. Some studies found a clear link between the quality of provision and the presence among the staff of a person with a degree-level qualification,[2] particularly in deprived areas.[3] On the other hand, a more recent study showed that the presence of a graduate had a very minor impact on children’s outcomes.[4]

Despite the difficulty in identifying exactly which specific qualifications and characteristics make for highly-qualified staff, both researchers and practitioners tend to agree that a highly qualified workforce is crucial for high-quality provision. And while further research is needed in order to explain this relationship, we consider it important in the meantime to address the inherent problems of low pay, low qualifications and a poorly valued workforce. Government policies over the past few years have sought to increase access to early years programs for different groups of children, with little acknowledgement of the value of the workforce, as the following suggests:

  • New qualifications for early years staff and regulations for childminders were introduced in 2014, deepening the already existing “qualifications divide”, where a majority of childcare workers with low level of training and qualifications are set apart from the small minority of qualified teachers in nursery and reception classes in terms of perceptions, pay and career progression.[5]
  • Free early years entitlements have grown from variable local arrangements to a national universal offer over the past twenty years (the most recent development being a 30 hour entitlement for working families), but subsidies given to early years providers are lower than market value (even under the new proposed prices), placing financial stress on providers and stunting staff wages and benefits – while also driving up childcare costs overall. [6]
  • Funding for the early years is at an all-time high – in 2017/18, 7 billion, or 0.48 per cent of our GDP will be spent on childcare[7] – but early years teachers’ salaries have experienced a decrease in real-terms. While pre-primary teacher salaries increased on average by 6 per cent in OECD countries between 2005 and 2014, in the UK, the change was a negative 15 per cent (the only other country faring worse was Greece). [8]

This demonstrates that well-intended provisions for the early years have often been implemented without sufficient regard for its workers. And so, despite recognising the importance of highly-qualified teachers for children, and ultimately to society, the status and working conditions of early years educators have deteriorated as their nominal wages remain stagnant, workload stays high, benefits continue to be subpar to teachers at other levels and even new increased funding proposals towards their programs are seen as insufficient.

It is no wonder that teacher recruitment and retention issues are widespread in the early years sector. Teaching, particularly to young children, is no longer an attractive profession, making it harder for providers to secure highly qualified staff. In 2014, the UK had the fourth highest percentage of teachers under 30 in pre-primary education [9] and staff turnover has risen in recent years to 18 per cent in 2016. [10] In addition, the government has missed recruitment targets the past few years and there has been a decline in the total number of level 3 childcare certificates (the minimum qualification to be an Early Years Educator) awarded. [11]

But while early years teacher shortages are a widespread problem across England and many other countries, this is not a universal issue. Here, we will look into the case of Finland, where teachers at all levels of education are highly regarded and teaching is one of the most valued and attractive professions. We recognise the vast cultural, historical and societal differences between Finland and England. Thus, we will end with a look across the pond at New York City’s recent successes in early years recruitment despite their historic teacher crises and similar approach to early years education.

In Finland, early years teaching is highly respected and all teachers are treated as professionals. Their difference in the treatment of early years practitioners starts with competitive teacher training programs and extends into the practice of high autonomy. Teaching institutions remain highly selective, even for the early years and applicants are admitted based on various measures including essays, entry tests, interviews and a high motivation to teach. There are no alternative routes into teaching.[12] All staff in early childhood education and care (ECEC) centres must have at least an upper secondary qualification, with one in three staff members needing a higher education degree. Even family child minders have some degree of specialised education, while all pre-primary teachers have a bachelor’s or a master’s degree.[13]

In addition to being highly professional, the Finnish early years workforce is treated as such by their governing bodies, education system and society. Therefore, they enjoy high workplace satisfaction and autonomy. For instance, the government provides no national performance guidelines for children, instead fostering a strong relationship between teachers and parents with a focus on a child’s development and overall well-being. All assessments are between the teacher and the child with feedback to parents. Early years staff also enjoy high job satisfaction and security. Ninety per cent of trained teachers remain in the profession throughout their whole career despite the very moderate pay.[14]

In stark contrast, our government’s efforts to raise qualifications and professionalise the early years workforce have led to unwanted consequences, such as reducing existing workforce and potential for new entrant, thus exacerbating the teacher recruitment shortage.[15] The succession of different requirements and qualifications over the past decade – from the 2006 introduction of the Early Years Professional Status to the post-2014 requirement for A-C grades in GCSE maths and English for a level 3 Early Years Educator (later broadened to allow functional skills as an alternative) – has fostered mistrust and confusion in the sector.[16]

And while we agree with the general aims of these efforts – to raise the standards of our early years provisions and qualifications of providers – the difficulties encountered in professionalising our early years workforce show not only a lack of correspondence between the early years sector and government, but also a key difference in the position of early years workers in England. The high regard for the teaching profession encountered in Finland does not translate in England, the hair-or-care stereotype steers high-achieving, ambitious students away from early years teaching and devalues early years work. The large impact that adding passing GCSE grades as a requirement to be an Early Years Educator had on teacher recruitment attests to this problem. And even compared to Initial Teacher Training programs for Qualified Teaching Status in primary and secondary schools, the Early Years Initial Teacher Training attracts fewer students with first class degrees and more from the lower second class.[17]

As these failed efforts to revamp the profession show, we cannot change the early years sector overnight. But large-scale improvements in a short amount of time are possible, as New York City has recently demonstrated. Within two years of rolling out their universal pre-kindergarten program for 4-year-olds in the fall of 2014, the city was successful in nearly quadrupling the number of available free full-day pre-kindergarten seats, from 20,000 to 53,000 in the first year and then to 73,000 in the second. To make this possible, the city had to recruit two thousand extra early years lead teachers and hundreds more teacher’s aides and assistants.[18]

There is much we can take away from how NYC managed to find and recruit such a high number of qualified early years teachers over the course of just several months. First, high investment. Unlike Finland, where high cultural valuation of teachers provides a surplus of those willing to teach, New York had to attract teachers – both from students who might not have considered teaching and from already qualified teachers outside their system – to meet their needs. This was made possible in large part by the acknowledgment and subsequent willingness of the city to spend an unprecedented amount on the early years. The city successfully battled for $340 million per year of funding from the state of New York,[19] a significant amount to ensure competitive teacher pay, and dedicated $6.7 million for a large-scale partnership with the early childhood professional development institute at the City University of New York to maintain a supply of qualified teachers.[20]

For the 2016-17 school year, starting salaries of lead preschool teachers ranged from $44K to $56K, and while disparities in pay do exist, those working at community-based centres will still earn a comparable amount to centres in New York districts[21] – made possible through signing and hiring bonuses, part of a $16.9 million pledge to close the gap.[22] This is significantly higher than the median American pre-school teacher salary ($28,570 in 2015)[23] and almost double England’s starting salary for pre-primary teachers (18K to 22K in pounds), which is also notably much lower for those working in private, voluntary or independent centres despite recent measures to close this pay disparity.[24]

Second, clear routes to teacher training and certification. Unlike in England, where there are various qualifications and certifications for early years teaching, all NYC lead teachers are required to have a bachelor’s degree and a New York State teaching certificate for early childhood (NYSEC). But NYC has also set up a ‘Study Plan Lead Teacher’ position for those who do not hold the NYSEC, and this program has been key in drawing high quality teachers from across the country and even from abroad. All they require from candidates to start teaching is a bachelor’s degree in early childhood, completed childhood education coursework or significant experience, along with a commitment to obtaining a NYSEC within three years.[25]

And while this is all highly promising, we acknowledge that it is still too early to judge the system’s long term successes due to its newness. Additionally, comparing cities to countries comes with a lot of qualifiers. While NYC had the option of attracting talent from across the state, the country and even from abroad, drawing from a large outside geographic area is not as much of an option, or recommended, for countries where high-quality teacher recruitment will need to work more within the system. Further, NYC had the advantage of finding funding from beyond their tax base – being highly dependent on state and federal governments for the program to work – while in England, finding large amounts of additional funding for the early years will be a challenge.

But, since it is clear from past policies that our government does want to improve the quality of our early years provisions, there is much to be learned from abroad. Our efforts to professionalise the workforce have previously not been successful as something more than just higher qualifications is needed to make hiring better educated recruits feasible. In Finland, their high entry requirements, intensive initial training and autonomy are enabled by a high cultural regard for teachers at all levels of education. In New York City, rapid mass recruitment of new, qualified teachers was facilitated by competitive pay and clear routes to develop and certify lower-qualified but experienced and motivated staff.

Likewise, our staffing situation will not improve unless we couple our efforts for higher entry requirements with other policies that can raise the value of early years teaching while supporting the sector through the changes. The epidemic of low teacher recruitment and high dropout that our early years face is only symptomatic of a much larger problem: the low status of and insufficient regard for our early years practitioners.

If we truly do believe in investing in our nation’s future – and there’s no reason not to, the evidence on the importance of early years is only growing – we must not only seek to raise the qualifications of early years teachers, but we must also shift our current outlook and treatment towards them. It’s time to show in action that our early years educators do matter.

This article was published on the Education Policy Institute website. You can find the original article here.


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Teacher well-being is a critical and often overlooked part of school health

Originally published on Child Trends. By: Alexandra CoxBonnie SolomonDominique Parris

As education stakeholders consider improvements to school climate, school safety, and student well-being, many have turned their attention to the role of schools in promoting mental health. While most of this attention focuses on students’ mental health needs, it is also essential to explore ways of supporting teachers and school staff who often experience high levels of stress.

Relative to professionals in other sectors, educators experience significantly more stress and suffer more often from mental health problems. In fact, 61 percent of educators reported that their work is “always” or “often” stressful. Failing to address the mental health needs of teachers (concurrent with our focus on student stress and trauma) may affect their ability to address critical needs among students. Teacher wellness has been linked not only to teachers’ physical health, but also to stability in schools and to teaching effectiveness and student achievement. Moreover, teachers’ emotions and stress levels have been found to influence those of students and other teachers. In Child Trends’ preliminary research on creating healthy school environments, students, educators, and policymakers all mentioned teacher wellness as an important factor in the overall health of a school.

Research points to several key sources of stress that can undermine teacher wellness: high-stakes job demands, limited resources and professional autonomy, and negative school climate. Heightened attention to student test scores in recent years has placed teachers under increased scrutiny, as their professional success is measured in large part by student performance on standardized exams. They must also navigate challenging student behavior and complex parent and family needs. Teachers are often expected to drive student success for a diverse set of learners and intervene across a range of challenging situations with limited materials, assistance, and control over school and classroom decisions. In fact, teachers are less likely than any other professional group to report feeling that their opinions matter at work.

Existing research suggests that the availability of supports and resources to address students’ needs may affect teacher wellness; preliminary findings from Child Trends research indicate that unmet student needs may be a potentially critical source of teacher stress. When a student experiences trauma at home or lacks sufficient resources to thrive in the classroom, her teacher is often the first to notice that something is wrong and to respond. In the absence of sufficient student support services at the school, or systems that link students with needed services in the community, the teacher may feel helpless to meet the needs of that student. Alternatively, the teacher may become the student’s primary support system. Both scenarios are emotionally taxing for the teacher.

While elements of the school environment and structure seem to cause considerable stress for teachers, the mechanisms commonly suggested to reduce teacher stress tend to focus on the teacher’s responsibility for self-careSelf-care practices such as meditation, exercise, or participation in a support group are inexpensive and straightforward to implement, and certainly have the potential to alleviate symptoms of stress. However, these practices do not address the root causes of teacher stress and may divert attention from the systemic stressors that exist in schools today. Instead, we should address these sources of stress and embrace a holistic approach to teacher wellness. Promoting teacher wellness requires attention to physical and mental health, professional development and support, and resources needed to be effective in the classroom, among other things.

Any profession is bound to have its stresses, and teaching is no different. But when we accept that an unhealthy level of stress is inherent to teaching, and place the burden of stress reduction on the individual teacher, we limit our ability to improve overall school wellness. We can better shape healthy schools for teachers and students by addressing the underlying causes of chronic stress and cultivating environments that promote teacher wellness. Ultimately, such attention could lead to healthier, more supportive school communities and more positive outcomes for students. When teacher wellness becomes a norm, so too will student success.

This article was published on the Child Trends website. You can find the original article here.


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Improving the quality of preschool programs starts with supporting teachers

By: Vidya Putcha

Photo Courtesy of J. McConnico

 

Preschool — often the first time that children interact with the education system — can be a powerful opportunity to support children’s growth and development at a critical stage in life. In Ukraine, the government has acted on a strong commitment to preschool education by providing families with affordable opportunities through its public system of education. However, like many other countries, the system struggles to keep pace with demand. In 2014, for example, 90,000 children were waiting for places in public preschools, with 15,000 in Kyiv alone. Additionally, more attention is needed to improve the quality of preschool programs.

Finding ways to better position and support preschool teachers, who are at the core of the system, is crucial to addressing these challenges. In an effort to learn more about their role and provide recommendations for how to strengthen this workforce, Results for Development (R4D), the Ukrainian Step by Step Foundation and the Institute for Education Development recently carried out a study on preschool teachers in Ukraine. This research was published in a new report, Supporting the Early Childhood Workforce at Scale: Preschool Education in Ukraine, and surfaced critical insights which may be illuminating for policymakers in other countries looking to strengthen the roles of personnel working with young children and families:

1. Provide ample opportunities for hands-on learning early on in preschool teachers’ training.

While nearly all preschool teachers in Ukraine have completed some higher education in teaching, a number of preschool teachers we spoke with described having limited practical opportunities during their higher education. Higher education programs were described as being heavily lecture-based and focused on outdated approaches, with opportunities for student teaching often coming too late in the program and facilitated by teacher educators with very little teaching experience themselves. We also learned that it is difficult to sustain a healthy pipeline of preschool teacher candidates, as many graduates of teacher training colleges and universities do not go on to work in preschools. This may be a product of higher education institutions not effectively fostering a professional interest in preschool teaching among its students.

Hands-on learning can help prospective teachers understand how to apply new knowledge to their work in preschools. At the same time, these opportunities may allow teachers to reflect on their future careers and help to sustain their interest in the field.

2. Offer a range of in-service trainings and ensure that teachers have opportunities to connect and learn from one another.

Encouragingly, preschool teachers are able to receive in-service training every five years with funding from local budgets. We heard that teachers appreciate these opportunities and particularly enjoy being able to connect with and learn from peers. Teachers we spoke with advocated for more of these opportunities, which suggested to us that practical knowledge from peers may better address their professional needs than training courses. However, while these in-service training courses seem to be beneficial to teachers, there are concerns about the quality and variability of the trainings, in particular, that teachers have limited choice in offerings which often do not reflect varying needs and interests.

Many teachers are already poorly compensated so it is important that they have access to training and professional development opportunities that do not require their own personal financial investment. Since teachers may have varying experience and backgrounds, designing different types of training courses, giving teachers the freedom to choose those that best meet their needs, and facilitating peer learning opportunities, can help in ensuring the relevance of offerings.

3. Provide more targeted support on engaging with parents and identify ways in which feedback from parents can be incorporated in programs. 

Teachers and other school personnel frequently noted that communication with parents was their biggest challenge. Teachers felt that parents were not involved enough in their child’s development and ignored recommendations on how to support children at home through activities such as reading. At the same time, although many parents we spoke with lauded preschool teachers in public institutions for the work that they do despite low pay and heavy workloads, we learned that a growing number of families are enrolling their children in private preschools as they are drawn to the modern approaches that teachers in these school employ as well as the flexibility offered by these schools.

Efforts to better understand these dynamics could help in strengthening relationships and ensuring that families’ needs are being met in public institutions. Teachers also need support from senior teachers and leaders to help them better communicate with parents in order to ensure complementary home and school environments.

4. Hire and train auxiliary staff to offset challenging workloads and allow for more targeted support to children with special educational needs.

While teachers were strongly motivated by a desire to work with children, they described heavy workloads often resulting from large class sizes and paperwork. This was often further compounded by insufficient time and experience to provide individualized support to children, particularly those with special educational needs who were more frequently part of classrooms after the recent shift to inclusive education in the country. A new initiative to introduce the role of teacher assistants to support inclusive classrooms has been met with great enthusiasm and has potential to alleviate some of these challenges.

Efforts to deploy and mainstream auxiliary staff roles can help to unburden teachers and improve their ability to provide individualized support to children.

Empowering preschool teachers to thrive in their day-to-day interactions with young children can be challenging, given limited resources and the complexity of working with this population. While the insights above are only a small sample of how we can course correct, they offer ideas for how the early childhood workforce can be supported to make a lasting change in the lives of young children. The Early Childhood Workforce Initiative looks forward to supporting countries with knowledge and evidence as they embark on efforts to support these critical individuals. 

 


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Quality preschool starts with supporting teachers


 

World Teachers’ Day poses the opportunity to celebrate teachers and their important role in the lives of young children. Early years educators are a part of children’s lives at a critical time in their development. These professionals — through their day-to-day interactions — have the opportunity to transform a child’s developmental trajectory. Today we revisit a blog post by Vidya Putcha of Results for Development, which shares key insights for decision makers to strengthen the roles of early years teachers.


Preschool — often the first time that children interact with the education system — can be a powerful opportunity to support children’s growth and development at a critical stage in life. In Ukraine, the government has acted on a strong commitment to preschool education by providing families with affordable opportunities through its public system of education. However, like many other countries, the system struggles to keep pace with demand. In 2014, for example, 90,000 children were waiting for places in public preschools, with 15,000 in Kyiv alone. Additionally, more attention is needed to improve the quality of preschool programs.

Finding ways to better position and support preschool teachers, who are at the core of the system, is crucial to addressing these challenges. In an effort to learn more about their role and provide recommendations for how to strengthen this workforce, Results for Development (R4D), the Ukrainian Step by Step Foundation and the Institute for Education Development recently carried out a study on preschool teachers in Ukraine. This research was published in a new report, Supporting the Early Childhood Workforce at Scale: Preschool Education in Ukraine, and surfaced critical insights which may be illuminating for policymakers in other countries looking to strengthen the roles of personnel working with young children and families:

1. Provide ample opportunities for hands-on learning early on in preschool teachers’ training.

While nearly all preschool teachers in Ukraine have completed some higher education in teaching, a number of preschool teachers we spoke with described having limited practical opportunities during their higher education. Higher education programs were described as being heavily lecture-based and focused on outdated approaches, with opportunities for student teaching often coming too late in the program and facilitated by teacher educators with very little teaching experience themselves. We also learned that it is difficult to sustain a healthy pipeline of preschool teacher candidates, as many graduates of teacher training colleges and universities do not go on to work in preschools. This may be a product of higher education institutions not effectively fostering a professional interest in preschool teaching among its students.

Hands-on learning can help prospective teachers understand how to apply new knowledge to their work in preschools. At the same time, these opportunities may allow teachers to reflect on their future careers and help to sustain their interest in the field.

2. Offer a range of in-service trainings and ensure that teachers have opportunities to connect and learn from one another.

Encouragingly, preschool teachers are able to receive in-service training every five years with funding from local budgets. We heard that teachers appreciate these opportunities and particularly enjoy being able to connect with and learn from peers. Teachers we spoke with advocated for more of these opportunities, which suggested to us that practical knowledge from peers may better address their professional needs than training courses. However, while these in-service training courses seem to be beneficial to teachers, there are concerns about the quality and variability of the trainings, in particular, that teachers have limited choice in offerings which often do not reflect varying needs and interests.

Many teachers are already poorly compensated so it is important that they have access to training and professional development opportunities that do not require their own personal financial investment. Since teachers may have varying experience and backgrounds, designing different types of training courses, giving teachers the freedom to choose those that best meet their needs, and facilitating peer learning opportunities, can help in ensuring the relevance of offerings.

3. Provide more targeted support on engaging with parents and identify ways in which feedback from parents can be incorporated in programs. 

Teachers and other school personnel frequently noted that communication with parents was their biggest challenge. Teachers felt that parents were not involved enough in their child’s development and ignored recommendations on how to support children at home through activities such as reading. At the same time, although many parents we spoke with lauded preschool teachers in public institutions for the work that they do despite low pay and heavy workloads, we learned that a growing number of families are enrolling their children in private preschools as they are drawn to the modern approaches that teachers in these school employ as well as the flexibility offered by these schools.

Efforts to better understand these dynamics could help in strengthening relationships and ensuring that families’ needs are being met in public institutions. Teachers also need support from senior teachers and leaders to help them better communicate with parents in order to ensure complementary home and school environments.

4. Hire and train auxiliary staff to offset challenging workloads and allow for more targeted support to children with special educational needs.

While teachers were strongly motivated by a desire to work with children, they described heavy workloads often resulting from large class sizes and paperwork. This was often further compounded by insufficient time and experience to provide individualized support to children, particularly those with special educational needs who were more frequently part of classrooms after the recent shift to inclusive education in the country. A new initiative to introduce the role of teacher assistants to support inclusive classrooms has been met with great enthusiasm and has potential to alleviate some of these challenges.

Efforts to deploy and mainstream auxiliary staff roles can help to unburden teachers and improve their ability to provide individualized support to children.

Empowering preschool teachers to thrive in their day-to-day interactions with young children can be challenging, given limited resources and the complexity of working with this population. While the insights above are only a small sample of how we can course correct, they offer ideas for how the early childhood workforce can be supported to make a lasting change in the lives of young children. The Early Childhood Workforce Initiative looks forward to supporting countries with knowledge and evidence as they embark on efforts to support these critical individuals. 


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Reflections from the AfECN Conference

Denise Bonsu, Results for Development

Last month, I had the pleasure of attending the African Early Childhood Network (AfECN) Conference in Nairobi with my colleague Kavita Hatipoglu. The event was monumental, not just because it was the largest international conference on Early Childhood Development (ECD) to take place in Africa but also because it was my first work related travel with R4D. As someone with a growing interest in ECD, I was ecstatic to find out that I would be setting foot on African soil after a four-year hiatus and attending an event that would provide me with a crash course on ECD.

The beginning of the conference was nerve-wracking. I had just arrived in Nairobi and was extremely jet-lagged following many hours of travel. Upon entering the conference room, I was swallowed up by a crowd of over 800 people including government officials, researchers, funders, and many other experts in ECD from different corners of the world. Although initially intimidated at being surrounded by well-known experts in the field, my fear quickly dissipated as I was sucked into the buzz and excitement of the crowd and began conversing with the other participants.

Conference Highlights

One of the highlights from my first day was witnessing President Uhuru Kenyatta’s speech during the opening ceremony. Kenya’s ECD sector has undergone remarkable transformation in recent years and accessible, comprehensive, and equitable early childhood care and education is slowly become a reality for millions of young children. Recent accomplishments include an increase in the general enrollment in preschool from 69.4% in 2012 to 77.1% in 2017 and a 32.8% increase in the number of teachers trained in early childhood education during that same period. Despite these achievements, the President emphasized the need for more work and highlighted the challenges that Kenya still faces with high adult: child ratios, a lack of teaching resources, and low cross-sectoral collaboration. To tackle some of these issues, his administration plans to develop an integrated early childhood development policy to ensure the coordination of services across ministries for young children and families.

To emphasize this point, the President called on the wives of thirty-one county governors who were attending the conference and urged them to remind their husbands to prioritize ECD. This moment was important because it showed that ECD was a priority for high-ranking officials in the context of a decentralized system.

Following the opening ceremony, we were whisked away to various plenary and parallel sessions on topics that included the following:

Strengthening Systems for Children with Disabilities

As someone with a strong interest in supporting children with disabilities in low and middle-income countries, I was encouraged to find out that the conference featured multiple presentations on this subject area. Although over 53 million children under the age of five worldwide have a developmental disability, this group does not receive much attention in ECD discussions, especially in low and middle income countries. Children with special needs have a higher risk of experiencing marginalization, abuse, and behavioral and emotional problems and are less likely to be enrolled in formal pre-primary education programs due to the stigma that surrounds disabilities in many countries. Pre-primary teachers are often ill equipped to support these children as their pre-and in-service training focuses on traditional teaching methodologies that do not cater to diverse learning styles. This session explored how pre-service early childhood teacher education programs can be strengthened if they include mandatory courses on assisting children with disabilities and stressed the importance of providing members of the workforce who routinely support students with disabilities with in-service training on this topic. Providing the workforce with these trainings will not only reduce the stigma surrounding children with disabilities, but also create a pathway for these children to thrive later on in life. Although these sessions left me feeling disappointed at the extent to which children with disabilities have been ignored in ECD policy discussions, I left the session hopeful that programs could be bolstered to better support these children and their families.

Focus on the Early Learning Workforce

I found this session interesting because it highlighted the importance of putting children at the center of their learning experience and resonated with my work with the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative. Although research increasingly shows the benefits of play-based approaches, many African teachers primarily employ teacher-led approaches and encourage rote learning. To address this challenge, the Open Society Initiative in Southern Africa (OSISA) supported a “materials re-development” process in Lesotho and 10 other African countries from 2011 to 2017. These materials were re-developed using the resources developed and used in Eastern Europe by ISSA, co-host with R4D of the Early Childhood Workforce Initiative. This process involved the piloting of resource kits comprised of content modules, activity modules, facilitator guides, and children’s activity books in select classrooms. The activity books, in particular, were bright and colorful and featured pictures to appeal to young children. At the end of the piloting process, teachers stated that the kits not only fueled their students’ interest in learning, but also encouraged their own collaboration with students. This experience in Lesotho highlights how teachers can effectively use low-cost materials to create a positive environment that places children at the center of the learning process. Although play-based methodologies have not traditionally been employed in certain African pre-school settings, I am excited to see what lessons can be learned and achievements made as this practice becomes more widespread.

Wrapping up the last day

On the last day of the conference, I was both excited to be returning home to loved ones but also sad that the experience was almost over. As I walked out of the conference room to prepare for the long journey back, I paused in front of a showcase of a play area featured by Kidogo, a social enterprise that delivers early childhood care and education to children in East Africa. A little girl was seated in the middle of the showcase and drawing on a sheet of paper while her caregiver smiled and watched on. As I proceeded towards the exit, it dawned on me that by investing in the caregiver and providing her with the opportunity to flourish within the profession, we are ensuring that the little girl in the play area is able to grow into a healthy, productive, and well-rounded citizen of the world.


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What Lies at the Heart of Teacher Education? Boxes Within Boxes, Worlds Within Worlds, Seeing and Being Seen

By: Maaike Nap

Originally published by Learning for Wellbeing Magazine. Find it here.
 

1. Introduction

As a teacher educator, I tell trainee teachers that their starting point should be each pupil – not the lesson plan, nor the books.

Try and see the encounter in the classroom, I urge them, from the perspective of the individual pupil as you engage with her or him. How does the pupil experience this moment within education, in the here and now? What experiences and emotions has he or she brought from the world outside and what perceptions are uppermost in her or his mind today as the lesson proceeds?

These questions – I could explain to trainee teachers, if I were to think aloud in their presence – are questions that I am asking myself right now with respect to all of you, because I have to try to be your role model in this. My relationship to you provides a sort of mirror image of your relationship to pupils in the classrooms where you carry out your practice lessons and where you will one day be fully qualified teachers. I ask you about your needs and intentions and the dreams that you bring to your education here and I hope that this will move you to ask the same of pupils in classrooms. (Such a relationship resembles the Chinese boxes that fit inside each other – my relationship with trainee teachers encompasses their relationship with pupils in their classes.)

Tremendous courage is required if you take each individual pupil as a starting point, because this is an exploration of the unknown -- you have to let go of the lesson plan as the map that you can be certain of because you created it and you know it thoroughly. You become vulnerable, as you enter into dialogue and shared reflection, as you search together for answers, as you acknowledge doubts and uncertainties and sometimes even failure. I bring myself as a whole person to classroom encounters in order to encourage trainee teachers in turn to engage as whole persons so that they will in the future reach out to their pupils as whole persons. This is my experience of worlds within worlds – the worlds of individual children, of individual trainee teachers and of individual teacher educators. Often treated as separate worlds, they can and must interlock through moments of open human contact.

2. ‘Do you see me?’

One of the exercises with trainee teachers that I like to use is to ask them to form small groups and to discuss a video clip that zooms in on one particular child within a classroom. The trainee teachers share with me their perceptions of the child, after which they inevitably ask me if they were ‘right’ and if their impressions were ‘correct.’ I tell them that there are no correct answers and that the essence of being a teacher is to relate to each child as a being in himself or herself, with an unfolding meaning and purpose that is distinctive to her or him alone.

This however was not my own experience from my time as a pupil in school. We were expected to work in silence and as individuals, and my school report cards were full of complaints that I was too talkative. Secondary school only increased my feeling of not being ‘seen’ by my teachers as a person in my own right. When I graduated from school, my teachers asked me what profession I planned to go into and they were startled by my answer – ‘A teacher.’ They expected that answer from model pupils who sat in the first row and dutifully noted down all that the teacher said, without chatting with classmates or exchanging silly notes with them as I did.

Yet I was sure that I wanted to be a teacher, at the same time that I rejected the prevalent model of ‘a good teacher’ and ‘a good pupil.’ From early on, my mother remembers, when people asked me about my future plans my reply was that I would become a teacher and a mother. As a child, I loved to enact scenes from home and school with dolls.

I was fortunate that my parents did ‘see’ me for who I was, from my early years onwards. They did the same for my brother as well. When he did not excel academically, they refrained from pressurising him to work harder at school. Instead they found activities outside school that encouraged his interest in art and craftwork. Today he has found his place within the profession of design.

Similarly, when I graduated from university, my parents brought to the celebration a book they had compiled of poems I had written as a child and a collection of my playful notes to classmates. I tell trainee teachers that they have to learn to ‘read’ each individual child as a distinctive person. My parents’ compilation of my poems was an expression of how they had truly ‘read’ me.

3. Home and school

When I left home to train as a teacher, I moved from the town where I had grown up to the city of Nijmegen (where I have lived ever since). Residing in a small student room was more than compensated for by the wide horizons of pedagogy that teacher training opened up for me. I felt confirmed in my choice of profession despite my difficulties as a pupil in secondary school.

My subdued rebelliousness in school made me sympathetic to children who were considered ‘troublesome.’ As a trainee teacher, I worked with groups of children who had been given this label. I tried to ‘read’ each one of them. I talked with one boy until I realised that his restiveness in class was related to the closely printed pages of his mathematics book. I created an alternative book of maths exercises for him, with only one sum to work out on every page. This took me considerable time, and the boy’s changed attitude to maths and to school more generally was truly rewarding.

After teacher training, I studied ‘Family pedagogy’ at the University of Nijmegen. Children do not experience school and home as separate worlds, and both teachers and parents can only ‘read’ a child fully if their perspective integrates home with school. As a teacher educator I have learned a lot from my two sons and from my husband who teaches in a Montessori school.

My four-year-old son can be frustrated and angry when events do not go according to plan. I have no magic formula to offer him. I can only support him in finding small steps that can help him move forward from frustration. ‘How can I help you?’ I ask him. I was happy when he responded, ‘If you stay calm, that helps me.’

His older brother is seven-years old and full of questions about the school system. Why is his class divided into three reading groups according to ability? When the national tests are taken in the classroom, why does his class have to work as individuals and why is helping each other strictly forbidden? ‘Helping people is something we should do, isn’t it…?’

A new generation of pupils and parents have stimulated change in classrooms and schools, so that my memories of life in school are no longer true for my sons. Parents are not ready anymore to leave children at the school door in the morning and then collect them from the door at the end of the school day. At my sons’ school – admittedly based on non-conventional pedagogy – the school week opens and closes with parents present in the classroom.

4. The world beyond

After my university studies and before I took up employment, I travelled for five months in Thailand, Indonesia and that region. I knew that my life and work would be in the Netherlands, and I wanted to glimpse the wider world. I had no formal study plan for my travels, but children were very visible in the countries that I visited. I was intrigued to note the similarities between the games that children played in cultures that were familiar to me as well as those that were very distant. Most striking were the abilities of children in the region to entertain themselves and each other for long periods in activities that had strong learning potential, on the basis of very few material objects and in informal groups of mixed ages. Later, Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn brought this back to me.

I too found it liberating to travel with a bare minimum of material things, just one set of clothes on my body and a clean set in my backpack. I am able to recreate this experience for my family when we camp in the European countryside in the summer, living in a tent with as few things as possible and enjoying the natural environment as fully as we can, with my sons’ play resembling that of the children I saw in Thailand and Indonesia.

When I returned to the Netherlands, I was happy to be employed at the institution where I had trained as a teacher, and my task was to observe and guide trainee teachers during their practice lessons in schools. This was an opportunity to give each such trainee teacher the feeling of being ‘seen’ as a person developing a feel for the chosen profession of working with children in schools, and not as someone being forced to conform to the single template of ‘a good teacher’ that was applicable to every trainee. I was not much older than the teacher trainees that I worked with and I think that this enabled an open relationship. When I meet these former trainees, they still speak warmly of the written observations that I provided after their practice lessons. I hope that the experience has given them a sense of being seen that they will share with their pupils.

5. The pedagogical moment

In due course I joined the faculty and was given responsibility for teaching pedagogy, a role that continues until today. I introduced exercises such as the following one, captured here on film:

Trainee teachers look into each other’s eyes – in pairs – in order to fully experience what it means to see, to be seen, to show oneself and to feel that one is being truly seen by another. The ensuing discussion among trainees then broadens the perspective beyond eye contact, to the establishment of significant intuitive connections between teacher and pupil. See video:

I try and integrate my classes in pedagogy with the teaching of other subjects, with collaboration proving more effective when colleagues share the perspective that teacher education goes far beyond the mastery of content to developing sensitivity to each child in the classroom. My collaboration with the drama teacher, for example, allows the here and now in individual experience to come alive within our shared class. An integrated curriculum draws separate subjects together in a wholeness that can fully support trainee teachers in their learning processes and that should resonate with respect and openness for the individuals who are learning.

Some trainee teachers come to class with the intention of ‘learning as much as possible,’ which equates to leaving at the end with their exercise books full of notes. Once during a class I asked trainee teachers to grade at various moments how involved they were with what was going on in class. When they showed their ‘graphs’ to me, they expected that I would compare it with the norm. I then explained that there is no norm and that each pupil in their classroom will have an individual trajectory of engagement with the proceedings during the class. A valuable discussion followed, during which the trainee teachers realised that patterns of involvement and temporary inattention had less to do with the merits of the class that I was presenting than with individual rhythms and preoccupations. They identified their different patterns with skills and insights that rendered them my colleagues in shared learning, through teamwork that was very different from conventional teacher-student hierarchies. Such an exercise opened their eyes to possible patterns of attention and inattention among their prospective pupils. This is an example of what I call the ‘pedagogical moment,’ of learning together that includes my continuing education, allowing me too to show vulnerability in an environment within which mutual trust has been built so that I can share my hesitations when moving forward with the trainee teachers.

Education is not about learning the ‘right’ answers. It is about paying attention to and valuing people’s diverse learning processes, stimulating a dialogue between the learner and his or her environment. The teacher educator’s contribution is to trust in the different potential that every trainee teacher – and every pupil in a classroom – brings with her or him, and to ensure that each person feels recognised in who they are and what they bring in their distinctive rhythms based on individual experience and interests. Pedagogical concepts are best absorbed when a trainee teacher can relate them to life experiences that touch the emotions. Learning is not imposed from outside but comes alive within, when both student and teacher take shared responsibility for the situated learning process and when both are fully present as whole persons, alert and sensitive to the possibilities of the moment, responding to questions and to the human being behind the questions. Teachers (and teacher educators) accompany each learner on her or his unique journey of unfolding potential, stopping together occasionally to consult or to draw attention to the moment, asking questions of each other and continually seeking new questions.


About the Author
Maaike Nap is responsible for pedagogy and related curriculum development at the College of Education for primary school teachers attached to the Hogeschool Arnhem Nijmegen, which is a university for applied sciences in the Netherlands. Her pedagogical vision is one of transformative learning through personal learning trajectories for which teachers and students share responsibility.

About the Publisher
Read more about Learning for Wellbeing Magazine.

Teacher Pay in Latin America & the Caribbean

By: Sarah Stanton and Ananya Subrahmanian

Originally published by The Dialogue's PREAL Blog.

Teachers are an essential component in the success of any education system. High-quality teachers are critical to student learning, and competitive salaries are one of the most effective ways to attract and retain effective teachers. However, teachers in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region have fewer opportunities for salary raises compared with employees in other sectors, and the raises they do receive are often small relative to their compensation. The consequences of these salary policies can be felt throughout the region: rising rates of teachers—especially the most talented—leaving the profession, poor learning outcomes for students across the region, and limited opportunities to recognize effective teachers. A review of current policies reveals that most LAC teachers receive a salary heavily linked to seniority and qualifications, with limited opportunities to earn financial compensation for strong performance, and those opportunities that do exist are often for a one-time bonus rather than a permanent raise.

HOW ARE TEACHER SALARIES DETERMINED?

Salaries are most often determined by career ladder indicators, such as qualifications, years of teaching experience, or administrative positions. Although these indicators require a certain level of determination and ambition, there are also frequent opportunities to obtain them throughout an educator’s career. However, some salary raises are determined by performance-based indicators which can include competence-based tests, to assess mastery of content and pedagogy; teacher evaluations, including feedback from colleagues, supervisors, and students as well as formal observations and portfolio documents; and student learning outcomes, which consider test scores and other learning assessments. Unlike career ladder indicators, these performance-based measures provide financial incentives to teachers who prioritize professional development and student learning. Indeed, evidence has shown a strong association between performance-based salary increases and student learning outcomes. Additional determinants of salary increases include compensation for specific tasks beyond teachers’ standard responsibilities, for example working overtime or in a high-risk area.

Although compensation increases can involve either a raise of one’s base salary or a one-time bonus payment, the former is seen as a more effective reward for teachers. However, bonus pay is politically, technically, and financially easier to implement, given their one-time, fixed amount status.

The figure below shows the types of policies each country in the LAC region uses to determine teacher salary increases. Information was collected from 20 countries via government websites, Dialogue reports, and other policy publications.

Table courtesy of The Dialogue's PREAL Blog

Several key trends emerge from the data:

The majority of countries use a limited set of indicators to determine salary increases: Most countries rely heavily on qualification and seniority—both of which are career ladder indicators—to determine salary increases for teachers, and few countries use more than two or three indicators to determine raises. Mexico and Costa Rica stand out as two countries that include multiple and diverse indicators to determine teacher salaries, including career ladder and performance indicators. Overall, however, teachers throughout the region have fewer opportunities for increasing their salaries, since fewer indicators leads to fewer opportunities for financial reward.

Base salary increases are a more common policy mechanism than bonus pay for performance:  Only five countries in the LAC region—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico—have policies for bonus pay, and only Ecuador and some Brazilian states use multiple indicators. Bonus payments are not appropriate for recognizing achievements such as seniority and qualifications, which accumulate over time and do not fluctuate. Instead, bonus pay is consistently determined based on performance-based indicators linked to evaluations or student performance, which can vary from year to year. This heavy reliance on base salary increases rather than bonus pay means that teachers are consistently recognized for loyalty to the profession, but not skill in its execution.

Few countries with teacher evaluation systems use performance results to offer financial incentives: Thirteen of the countries surveyed have formal teacher evaluation policies. Most of these evaluation systems have been in place for a few years and are administered regularly, but surprisingly few countries use the results from these evaluations to determine teacher compensation. Only six of the countries with formal evaluation systems have financial rewards linked to a positive performance review, and in only five countries do positive evaluation results lead to an increase in one’s base salary, the exception being Ecuador, which has a one-time bonus payment. Within these six countries, the consequences tied to teacher evaluations results vary; Chile and Ecuador, which have strong evaluation systems, reward positive results with salary increases and penalize poor performance with extra training and, potentially, dismissal. Colombia and Cuba reserve consequences for negative evaluation results, but offer no reward for positive ones. Honduras, which has only just begun implementing teacher evaluations, has not yet developed any concrete rewards or penalties tied to performance. The Dominican Republic, which also bases salary increases off evaluation results, does not have a mandatory evaluation system in place.

CONCLUSIONS

While career ladder-based indicators such as qualifications, seniority, and administrative positions have long been used as a basis for salary raises in the LAC region, they fail to recognize exceptional performance or incentivize excellent teaching. This is not to say that these indicators are unimportant—they have the potential to increase job stability, prevent high turnover rates, and encourage commitment to the profession. However, they are over-utilized relative to performance-based indicators. The majority of the countries discussed above employ three indicators or fewer to determine teacher pay increases, but they rely heavily on those which are linked experience rather than performance. A policy that attempts to balance recognizing seniority with incentives to improve—by increasing focus on performance-based indicators —could be a more effective way to incentivize improved teaching and learning outcomes.  For example, Chile, which has one of the strongest education systems in the region, uses only three salary indicators, but employs both career ladder-related and performance-based inputs to determine salary increases.

Despite the lack of policies for performance-based pay in the region, the majority of the countries represented above have developed and implemented frequent teacher evaluations. Building these systems requires strong institutions and technical knowledge; countries should be applauded for their efforts to increase teacher accountability and encouraged to taking advantage of existing evaluation systems to recognize and improve teacher performance. For countries that cannot afford the cost of increasing salaries across-the-board, bonus pay could serve as a cost-effective starting point to reward teacher performance. In order for any of these policies to be effective, however, teachers and administrators must buy into the validity of the evaluation system and its use as a tool for determining pay. Improving opportunities for salary will incentivize effective teaching and improve the quality of the teaching profession and educational outcomes across the region.

This post is also available in: Spanish

The PREAL Blog is the blog of the Inter-American Dialogue’s Education Program. Find the orginal post here.