Blog: Running Summer Schools

'Summer Schools' is the fetish of a few slogan mongers to denote additional tuitions given to reinforce poor learning, remedy wrong learning, review misunderstood concepts in class during August holidays or during both April and August holidays. These classes are meant for low ability students wherever they are and will be led by teachers other than those in charge of the class. The emphasis will be on literacy and numeracy.

How will a new teacher define the curriculum he has to implement? In fact he should not use the text as it is, but should provide an adapted version that will be within the reach of the student. How will this new teacher recognize the specific weaknesses of his pupils? Will the mainstream teacher give a feedback and carry out a handing over exercise to the new teacher before the latter assumes responsibility of his class?

Will the Ministry of Finance which is supposed to drive the project going to appoint an academic Director to plan, monitor, supervise the project if it does not rest within the hands of the Ministry of Education which has an eloquent record of failure of being effectively helpful to students of lower ability over successive years?

Upfront the unit in charge of summer schools will have to take one year to share the extant curriculum to one that contains essential curricular objectives. The National Curriculum Framework is a valuable document that can guide the curriculum developers of weak learners. Every subject requires a teacher specialist, a curriculum developer as a nucleus of the team. This is a curriculum for the reintroduction, consolidation and validation of skills and concept, knowledge that have not been acquired in class. Every lesson must be presented within the framework of an interactive pedagogy which the Enhancement Programme is supposed to be dependent upon. There is nothing less effective than the teacher dominated model where talk overwhelms the lesson. The academic director must be strong enough to transform traditional teaching into one that uses the conventions taught to teachers, when they were learning pedagogy.

It is unfortunate that the Minister of Education should have decided to pilot test the project when for aeon years the same Ministry has been running remedial classes, reinforcement lessons. Why should only 12 schools benefit from a group of 40 odd schools that register a performance below 50 % at CPE. Is the Ministry thinking of the many weak students who are ignored in classes of star schools because they belong to either poorer homes or lack the parental support successful students obtain? Is it enough to call a school ZEP to lull one's conscience? Are there not ZEP students in good schools? The schools that register between 51% and a national average of 70% should also be taken into account.

This is an opportunity to render the teaching profession performance based. After a diagnostic test on the acquisition of knowledge and skills according to level, a realistic scheme of work should be expected from the teacher containing indicators of performance, success criteria and reorientation plans in cases of failure to reach identified goals. Giving total freedom to teachers as though the summer school was an extension of schoolwork is doomed to end up in failure. Weaker pupils present a challenge to the complacency of the bored teacher, because there is greater likelihood that the older, the more experienced the teacher selected for this project the more indifferent and the less passionate he is. We need teachers who are ready to go an extra mile without necessarily hankering after lucrative rewards. The summer school should use play as an important medium of teaching so that coming to school during holidays is not seen as painful. In fact there should be a vigilant structure that will be in charge of ensuring that the child attends summer school on all three days. The Head teacher or the Officer in charge must have a pastoral role and should not be office bound. He must be ready to meet parents and communicate with them in order to make them become coresponsible for their ward. The summer school leader must help parents to supervise their children's work at home so that what is taught in the summer class does not evaporate into oblivion. The memory, thinking faculty of the child is the product of the child's endowments and the type of environment in which he spends the most important time of the day. If he is a passive student in class and is a passive spectator at home, there is great likelihood that he will get committed to learning with greater difficulty than his counterpart who is an alert and reactive individual both in class and at home. Very often parents believe that the less the child is involved in secular tasks, and the more time he spends in studies, the faster he will learn. The student's mind should not be viewed to react to impulses differently in class.

We need a summer school that produces results. All those who will be involved in the running of the school must be obsessively interested in giving results. It does not matter if the summer school teacher is different from the class teachers as long as he is better than the teacher who is blasé with age, experience and repeated years of neglect.

The timetable should contain periods of active reading, periods of computer assisted learning, computer games, periods of football and yoga that can help to make the child enjoy his experience. Let there be outings that will make them live out-of-class experiences in a spirit of collaboration.

It is significant that the summer school is under the supervision of the Ministry of Finance. It should preserve this status and vindicate its right to be different from mainstream schooling. The terms of employment must be defined in a contract which stipulates the duties to be done, the methods to be used and the expected outcomes. This contract should be binding and must enjoy upon the recruit the conditions of employment. Here is an opportunity to include marking of copybooks, continuous assessments and their frequency. Why shouldn't these classes contain a dose of life skills programme so that children are exposed to a moral code. They should learn to be problem solvers, how to say 'No' on occasion, share, know how to preserve the environment and became sustainable consumers. They must know more about a balanced diet, anger management and avoidance of violence. Whole weeks may be devoted to a thematic umbrella during which posters, short talks, awareness raising activities are organized to highlight important moral practices. A contract implies supervision and quality assurance measures. The academic director, a specialist of the Primary sector with a post graduation in a domain relevant to educational management, must himself or herself present a project for the selection exercise.

The sad thing is that reality is not made up of this rhetoric of wishful thinking that pleases the educationist in me. The reality will be a watered down version of some bureaucratic plan like the Enhancement Programme.