Street Child Afghanistan wins Solve MIT & Jacobs Foundation Challenge
We're excited to announce that Siddharth Pillai, Street Child's Education Program Advisor, has won the opportunity to be a Project Host with Solve - MIT and Jacobs Foundation! Over the next few months, Sid and Street Child Afghanistan will work with LEAP Fellows to strengthen the impact of our education solution, which uses tablets to improve literacy and strengthen the quality of teaching in remote locations in #Afghanistan.
The program is an early-grade reading intervention currently being delivered in Street Child’s 1,600 community-based education centers in hard-to-reach districts in Zabul, Uruzgan and Baghlan Provinces. These centers cater for more than 50,000 children aged 6-9 who are out of public school (50% girls).
Given the lack of well-trained and experienced teachers in these communities, novice teachers are often recruited on a ‘best available’ principle, so the quality of education can be low.
Given the remoteness of these locations and budgetary constraints, Street Child uses a combination of the following to improve teaching practices at scale with a focus on improving Oral Reading Fluency among Grade 1 children:
Structured Teacher Guides to support teachers with proven teaching practices, which aid in Pashto/Dari language development among children.
Social workers / teacher coaches visit 10-15 classes assigned to them once a month for coaching purposes.
A tablet-based offline Ed-Tech intervention which assists social workers:
To make structured classroom observations on the teachers’ teaching practices and provide automatic tailored feedback (praise and tips to improve) to the teachers.
To demonstrate effective teaching practices to teachers at school with the help of model videos showcasing specific teaching practices.
Data is collated and analyzed monthly and a Safe, In School and Learning Report is generated; this is then shared with the provincial team to provide a snapshot of where student and teachers are with respect to targets, and suggested areas for improvement.