Prelims

Half Title Page

LESSONS IN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT FROM SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Series Editors Page

EMERALD PROFESSIONAL LEARNING NETWORK SERIES

Series Editors: Chris Brown, Durham University, UK and Cindy Poortman, University of Twente, The Netherlands

In the current international policy environment, teachers are viewed as learning-oriented adaptive experts. Required to be able to teach increasingly diverse sets of learners, teachers must be competent in complex academic content, skilful in the craft of teaching and able to respond to fast changing economic and policy imperatives. The knowledge, skills and attitudes needed for this complex profession requires teachers to engage in collaborative and networked career-long learning. The types of learning networks emerging to meet this need comprise a variety of collaborative arrangements including inter-school engagement, as well as collaborations with learning partners, such as universities or policy-makers. More understanding is required, however, on how learning networks can deliver maximum benefit for both teachers and students.

Emerald Professional Learning Network Series aims to expand current understanding of professional learning networks and the impact of harnessing effective networked collaboration.

Published in this series:

• Formalise, Prioritise and Mobilise: How School Leaders Secure the Benefits of Professional Learning Networks

  Chris Brown and Jane Flood

• School Improvement Networks and Collaborative Inquiry: Fostering Systemic Change in Challenging Contexts

  Mauricio Pino Yancovic, Alvaro González Torres and Luis Ahumada Figueroa

• Professional Learning Networks: Facilitating Transformation in Diverse Contexts with Equity-seeking Communities

  Leyton Schnellert

Forthcoming:

• Professional Learning Networks in Design-based Research Interventions

  Mei Kuin Lai and Stuart McNaughton

Title Page

LESSONS IN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT FROM SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Developing Professional Learning Networks and School Communities

BY

MIRIAM MASON

EducAid, Sierra Leone

and

DAVID GALLOWAY

Durham University, UK

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2022

Copyright © 2022 Miriam Mason and David Galloway.

Published under exclusive license by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Author or the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80117-505-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-502-9 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80117-504-3 (Epub)

Dedication Page

Dedicated to the teachers and children of EducAid, and to their ongoing commitment to the transformation of education in Sierra Leone and beyond: one teacher at a time, one child at a time.

“Since wars begin in the minds of men (and women), it is in the minds of men (and women) that the defences of peace must be constructed.” No defences are more secure than public attitudes grounded in tolerance, mutual respect and commitment to dialogue. These attitudes should be actively cultivated every day in every classroom across the world. Using schools to vehicle bigotry, chauvinism and disrespect for other people is not just a route to bad education but also a pathway to violence. (Bokova, 2011, p. iii.)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Abbreviations

Author biographies

Miriam Mason was educated in the UK and trained as a teacher before moving to Sierra Leone in 2000 to run EducAid. Her brother and a friend had started EducAid Sierra Leone as a sponsorship programme but finding the available quality of schooling insufficient to change children’s lives they decided to start their own school. The first EducAid school started with 20 children on the veranda of a rented house but was the forerunner to a network of schools which now runs at the heart of a school improvement programme working to support change across the education ecosystem in Sierra Leone.

David Galloway developed his lifelong interest in the effect of schools on their pupils’ behaviour and psychosocial development while working as an educational psychologist in Sheffield, UK. After appointments in Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand and Cardiff and Lancaster Universities, UK, he joined Durham University where he was Professor of Primary Education, and Head of the School of Education. Since retirement from his full time post, he has run workshops on school improvement in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, China and Hong Kong.

Foreword

The delivery of free, quality education for all children and young people has been my priority as the Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education in Sierra Leone. Most recently, my team and I institutionalised an agenda for radical inclusion as part of the country’s vision for human capital development. In doing so, I outlined a promise to provide equitable learning opportunities to the most marginalised and excluded in society. This book provides an important and timely message on the need to build learning communities to fulfil this promise.

In this book, Mason and Galloway provide grounded and critical insights on the challenges that the education sector currently faces. In particular, the book disentangles the historic roots of systemic barriers to school improvement, elaborates the impact of successive national crises on teachers and unpacks the limited success of previous education interventions. This analysis sets up a platform for a research-based approach to address these issues.

Drawing on EducAid’s decades of experience of providing quality education to the most vulnerable in Sierra Leone, Mason and Galloway highlight the importance of using evidence to promote school improvement centred around pedagogy and teaching. The book draws attention to the critical role of professional learning networks in fostering a dialogic and respectful climate in which principals and teachers share and reflect on their experiences to ‘lever up’ learning. This close-up analysis shows the significant, positive impact of professional learning networks on the attendance and learning of students.

The accompanying practitioner’s manual provides a step-by-step guide for those looking to build the capacity of teachers and school leaders to lead school-level change. The guide can help education leaders to implement and adapt lessons from this research to deliver continuing professional development and learning to support children to succeed academically and socially.

These comprehensive resources present a pathway for promoting sustainable school improvement to enable the next generation of Sierra Leoneans — as well as subsequent generations — to live up to their potential. The core themes of community, equity and impact will continue to echo as we strive towards radical inclusion and free, quality education.

Dr David Moinina Sengeh

Honourable Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and Chief Innovation Officer for the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation for the Government of Sierra Leone.

July 2021.

Note on Practitioners’ Manual

This book describes a structured approach to school improvement through continuing professional development and learning (CPDL) for teachers. The focus is on the context, (a low income country in Africa,) the reasons for selecting a structured and potentially replicable approach to CPDL, the methodology and the results. The book does not describe the programme itself in detail. To do so it would have been necessary to describe each of the literacy and numeracy activities that the CPDL team used with primary teachers in the course of ten days intensive work and follow-up over the subsequent year. That would have seriously interrupted the flow of the book. Yet knowing that a project is successful – or encountered problems – is of little or no practical use without knowing details of the project itself. For this reason, Emerald agreed to make the Practitioners Manual available online with purchase of the book, without further cost. This can be accessed on Emerald's Bookstore (books.emeraldinsight.com).

Acknowledgements

This project could not have been completed without the generous funding support of the Smarter Hospital and the Lion Heart Foundation and specifically without the dedicated attention of Dr Erdi Huizenga who regularly visited the schools despite her heavy schedule and commitments at the hospital. We also acknowledge the kind attention and support of the Ministry of Education officials who helped identify appropriate control schools and negotiate the schools’ participation in the data collection. While the identity of the participating schools and their teachers remain confidential, we acknowledge the vital role that they played. Without their commitment to school improvement, the research could not have taken place. We also recognise the generous and wise support of early years and literacy expert, Jean Weiss, who helped us develop the phonics programme in the literacy component of the project.

The EducAid team who delivered the CPDL and collected data for the evaluation deserve credit for their enthusiasm and relentless determination to improve their own practice. They were:

• Abdul Wahid Sesay

• Alice H Kamara

• Amadu Kamara

• Ezekiel Nonie

• Joseph M Kai

• Kabiru I Mansaray

• Mohamed Alim Conteh

• Juldeh Barrie

• Sattia Kanu

• Umu Kamara

We are also immensely grateful to staff at Emerald and the Editors of this series for their cogent and constructive criticisms of our early drafts. The copy editors and production team were also extremely helpful in improving the text. Whatever faults remain are ours. Our sincere thanks to all those, named and unnamed, who contributed to the success of the project.