Read PNG April

Read PNG

Travelling again has boosted the spirits and I again feel that I might be making a bit of progress with my relationship with PNG and understanding what I’m doing here. Over the fence to PNGEI sits the Curriculum Development and Assessment Department (CDAD) of the Department of Education. It is on the same site as PNGEI and literally only separated by a fence but the gates in the fence are symbolically welded shut: communication between the two institutions is effectively zero.

CDAD is however the home of a World Bank multi-donor funded project called Read PNG. This project is co lead by an ex VSO volunteer with whom I have now worked on two different workshops alongside a colleague from PNGEI in the role of capacity building as well as facilitating.

Read PNG have carried out comprehensive research into reading levels at elementary and lower primary level in the Madang province of PNG through an EGRA (Early Grade Reading Assessment) study. From the findings of this study a reading scheme of work was written comprising of a teachers manual with scripted lessons and built in assessment tasks and a student reader with decodable texts and short stories. I became involved with planning and facilitating a weeks training on using the scripted lessons and assessments for 60 primary school teachers from 15 Madang schools.

The principal aim of the training model was to ensure that teacher’s felt confident to use the scripted lessons in the classroom. For the trial to be successful we wanted to be sure that teacher’s understood the need to stick to the script without expanding or improvising (not easy for any teacher as we all like to feel autonomous in our own classrooms). Having sufficient knowledge of phonics and phonemic awareness and being able to use this on a practical level was also vital for the teachers. Therefore for the first two days facilitator led sessions were dominant. We modeled teaching scripted lessons, taught sessions on basic phonics and phonemic awareness, taught and modeled strategies for using both the decodable texts and the stories in the student readers and held practical sessions on games to develop phonic skills. The next three days were given to practice and this in my opinion was where the training model was most successful. Teachers had the opportunity to micro teach parts of lessons within their groups and receive feedback and support from their colleagues before eventually each getting the chance to teach a complete lesson and receive one to one feedback from one of the facilitators.

In measuring the overall success of the training we will see how effective the lessons were in practice when the teachers return for the second weeks training in mid June. By then they will have delivered the first six weeks of lessons and the children will have undertaken the first end of unit assessment.

Another aim of the training week from a VSO point of view was the capacity building aspect for the language lecturers. Counterparts accompanied both my VSO colleague and me in both the planning and training stages. This gave them the opportunity to develop their expertise and skills in language training and also gave us invaluable knowledge with reference to the realities of the classroom and the politics of schools.

For me it was a great week on all fronts, topped off by all the teachers and ourselves being taken on a cruise around the islands off the coast of Madang at the end of the last day. A positive end sits long in the memory, I look forward to part two!