Your impact in 2021
In 2021, your support has had an amazing impact! Thankfully, schools remained open from February and since then our project has continued to support children’s education with incredible results.
Our pilot programme which retrained teachers had a significant impact on over 4,000 primary school children across 10 state primary schools. Using evidence-based, child-centred teaching and learning methods, we accelerated children’s foundational literacy by over 433% in just one year! Over the last year, your support has:
Provided mentoring and support for previously trained teachers
Your support has enabled us to continue supporting 40 recently qualified teachers who were retrained with CharChar’s literacy specialism. We continue to provide coaching and mentoring support, teaching and learning resources and psycho-social support during the ongoing pandemic.
Developed teacher training
Your support has meant we can continue working with Emmanuel University, who began to train new cohorts of primary student-teachers earlier this year. The CharChar-Emmmanuel University Working Group has identified practical ways in which we can support the university to overcome the challenges they face.
Lecturers are implementing some new practices directly in their classrooms and have received positive feedback from student teachers. They will be able to integrate more next semester. We have also had the opportunity to train lecturers in new methods of providing feedback to their students. Our expert professional adult trainer has successfully trained the Technical Working Group in providing analysis of teaching with positive feedback, following current neuro-linguistic programming approaches. The focus of these sessions is on developing and reinforcing best practice and professional growth. This approach has already been adopted by the lecturing staff and successfully implemented in the University.
Lecturers are excited by the introduction of new methodologies, particularly as they have experienced the positive impacts for themselves and on their students. Mr Punziroh Mphwina, Head of English, has appreciated the creative aspect of phonics teaching using a wide variety of resources, including simple and low-cost ideas from the local environment, and making learning fun for the learners.
Elton Sapala, Head of Mathematics at Emmanuel University, explains: “We discussed the assessment of learners in large classes. I shared some the approaches with my students particularly using symbols to record observations. The students will try to apply this next semester. We look forward to learning more from CharChar.”
Enabled working with the Ministry of Education to create lasting change
Your support has helped us to engage the Ministry of Education this year. Although there have been challenges, with changes being made in the Ministry who have also been getting to grips with the impact of the pandemic, we have held meetings to update and seek guidance from the Director of Teacher Education and Development. We’re also in close contact with USAID and the FCDO, which work in the primary education sector, to ensure that our work is joined up to other initiatives.
Will you help us with our vital next step this Christmas?
For lecturers and student teachers to see the new practices’ impacts for themselves, we urgently need to develop two demonstration schools near the University.
The development of two demonstration schools will also enable us to showcase evidence-based, high quality teaching practices in inclusive accelerated learning, whilst allowing student teachers and lecturers to be connected with the reality of primary school teaching in Malawi. These two schools are also planned to serve as a live demonstration to the wider primary education sector – since the practices are not on view elsewhere.
To get the schools up and running, we need to raise £50,000 as quickly as possible. £40 could provide one teacher with teaching and learning resources for five months. Will you please donate this Christmas to help us reach the target?
