Page 59 - EducationWorld March 2023

out of education and public life.
Meanwhile, several Iranian universities across the bor-
der have offered to host Afghan women. Combined with an
already established Afghan diaspora in the country, the of-
fer of free higher education is “likely” to increase the flow of
Afghan refugees into Iran, says Arshin Adib-Moghaddam,
professor in global thought and comparative philosophies,
at SOAS University of London and author of What Is Iran
(2021).

NIGERIA
NewGlobe pedagogy revolution

“GOOD JOB YOU!” SHOUTS PAULINE BIKA, AS
a group of schoolchildren completes the hokey- Primary school children in Edo state: huge gains
cokey. “Good job me!” choruses her class. Bika
runs a small government primary school in Edo state, in private schools have ever been able to reach.
southern Nigeria. It is reached by a mud track that starts Although it seems able to find plenty of clients, the com-
not far outside Benin city, the state capital. Her school has pany provokes ferocious arguments among educators. Its
140 pupils, but only three teachers. private schools have long faced energetic opposition from
For all that it lacks, Ms Bika’s school has one advantage. trade unions and some international NGOs, many of whom
At the start of last year, the Edo state education ministry hate the idea of profit-seeking companies playing any role
gave all her teachers a small (digital) tablet with a black- in education.
and-white touch screen. Every two weeks, they use it to Dennis Sinyolo of Education International, a global
download detailed scripts that guide every lesson they de- group of teachers’ unions, says scripted lessons “undermine
liver. These scripts tell the teachers what to say, what to teaching” and encourage “rote learning and exam drilling”.
write on the blackboard, and even when to walk around the He says good lesson plans are written to match local con-
classroom. Ms Bika says this new way of working is saving texts, and the needs of individual students. The freedom to
teachers time that they used to spend scribbling their own change tack mid-lesson is invaluable if a lesson plan is not
lesson plans — and her pupils are reading better, too. working. “There’s no one-size-fits-all in teaching,” he says.
The reforms in Edo began in 2018. Godwin Obaseki, the Back in Edo, Governor Obaseki’s transformation still has
State governor, says poor schools are one reason young- plenty to prove. An analysis published in 2019 by the state
sters leave the state for greener pastures (some fall victim to government and NewGlobe claims that during the first year
people-traffickers promising better lives in Europe). Since of the reforms, children learned as much in a single term as
then, the government has provided tablets and training to they were previously learning in one year. But the project
over 15,000 teachers. They in turn have given the new les- has yet to undergo a rigorous independent evaluation.
sons to more than 300,000 children, most of them in pri- Whether strict scripting is necessary remains a topic
mary school. On any given day, pupils throughout the state of debate. (The World Bank panel, for instance, argued
receive identical lessons, as dictated by the tablet. that word-for-word scripts are less effective than simpler
The training and technology are provided by NewGlobe, guides.) In 2018, RTI, an American non-profit group, anal-
an education company founded in 2007 by three Americans. ysed 19 school-reform efforts it had been involved in across
NewGlobe developed its approach while running a chain of 13 countries, including Ethiopia and Uganda. It concluded
low-cost private schools, mostly in Kenya, under the brand that programmes with slightly less prescriptive guides — a
Bridge International Academies. A study by academics page of notes per day, say, rather than a full-on script —
including Michael Kremer, a development economist produced better results.
at the University of Chicago, found that, over two years, Yet Edo’s approach appears to have persuaded most lo-
children who attended NewGlobe’s primary schools made cal teachers of its worth. Obaseki says school staff had long
gains equivalent to almost a whole year of extra schooling, felt ignored and unappreciated; he says that providing more
compared with their peers in other schools. training and equipment has brought fresh motivation. He
Though Edo was the first state in Nigeria to strike a deal insists that support for the project among unions was cru-
with the firm, NewGlobe’s pedagogy has since also been ap- cial to his re-election, in 2020. It has, he says, been “one of
plied in Lagos, the country’s biggest city. The firm is start- my best investments”.
ing work in Manipur, a state in north-eastern India, and
in Rwanda. Around a million children are now studying in (Excerpted and adapted from Times Higher Education
classrooms that use NewGlobe’s model -- far more than its and The Economist)

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