Jordan Times
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
ERfKE hits the books
Educational strategy starts to take root in country's classrooms
By Francesca Sawalha
AMMAN — After 12 years of teaching, English
teacher Amal Toukan started this school year feeling she can finally give her
students “all she's got.”
The reason? Her classes at Jabal Luweibdeh's Princess Alia School are now more
interactive and “exciting” thanks to a new curriculum.
Work on the intranet transformed what used to be a one-page lesson on Qasr Al
Amra into an exploration of all the Kingdom's Desert Castles and an
investigation into the state of affairs of the tourism sector. This learning
experience was unheard of last year.
Public school students who entered first, fourth, eighth and tenth grade this
year found brand-new curricula, textbooks, and evaluation methods for all 11
subjects.
“So far, they love it,” says Hana' Zeina, another teacher at Princess Alia
School. The new maths curriculum Zeina is teaching makes her 10-graders “more
comfortable,” repeats some units from the ninth grade curriculum, entails a lot
of team work and is mostly taught in the computer lab.
Under a new evaluation system, students are no longer graded according to the
results of quiz-like tests, but on the basis of a “portfolio” — a collection of
samples from their work, which they themselves agree upon with the teachers and
update regularly.
“This new evaluation mechanism encourages students to assess themselves,” says
Zeina. But it could also lend itself to a few injustices, as some students could
take advantage of work done by others in the same work-group, she adds.
Though class-work and homework might have remained the same in volume, shifting
to a new, e-learning-based approach is hard on both teachers and students.
“My eight-graders are facing something completely new, new types of assignments,
I fear they feel lost,” says maths teacher Fadwa Hashash.
Another major problem is that, in a big school with 500 students such as
Princess Alia, there are still only two labs equipped with computers.
Ian McLellan, executive director of the development coordination unit at the
Ministry of Education (MoE), sums up the changes introduced with the new
curricula: “We are no longer telling students: `This is what you have to
memorise and remember.' We are telling them: `This is what you have to think
about'.”
Training all public schoolteachers on relevant ICT skills and on the new
curricula has been a demanding but successful effort.
Ahmad Ayasara, director of training at the MoE, tells The Jordan Times that
60,000 teachers have already been trained on computer skills and that, between
the spring and summer, all 50,000 first, fourth, eighth and tenth grade teachers
received five days of training on the new curricula and student assessment
methods.
The teachers at Princess Alia School agree that the training was good, but they
also complain it was brief.
The introduction of new curricula and textbooks in four grades in all 3,000
public schools across the country is the most tangible achievement to date of
the $410 million, two-year-old Educational Reform for a Knowledge Economy (ERfKE)
strategy.
MoE Secretary General for Educational and Technical Affairs Tayseer Alnoaimi is
confident new curricula for the second, fifth, ninth and eleventh grades will be
ready in time to be introduced as of next year.
By 2008 — ERfKE's deadline — all curricula for all 12 grades will have been
changed, Alnoaimi assures.
For the second most concrete result of ERfKE, Jordan's 1.6 million public school
students and their 70,000 teachers will have to wait until the end of the year,
when a first batch of 40 brand-new school buildings is expected to be handed
over.
According to Alnoaimi, some 190 new school buildings will be completed by 2008
under ERfKE. This will come in addition to some 650 computer labs and 350
science labs in already existing schools.
But it is in the area of early childhood education that MoE officials believe
ERfKE is really treading virgin territory.
Before ERfKE's launch, in July 2003, the number of public kindergartens in the
country was negligible, there was no real KG curriculum to speak of, and early
learning centres did not exist.
Ever since, a new curriculum was drafted and is now in use, new licensing
standards were adopted, rehabilitation and building works are under way for 300
KGs, 20 learning centres were opened, hundreds of KG teachers are being trained.
“We are concentrating especially in rural and poor areas, where there is no
private investment in early childhood learning,” explains Alnoaimi.
ERfKE's unprecedented educational reform effort requires unprecedented capital
expenditures.
Out of ERfKE's $410 million budget, $120 million are being provided in soft
loans by the World Bank, $45 million by the European Investment Bank, $40
million by Kuwait's Arab Fund, $33 million by Saudi Arabia's Islamic Development
Bank, and around $10 million by Germany's development bank KfW.
Grants have come from USAID — $35 million — and the Canadian International
Development Agency — around $15 million.
The UK and Japan have also contributed with small grants.
The rest of the tab — more than $110 million — is being picked up by the
government, which is, however, financing it mainly through the Socio-Economic
Transformation Plan, which is made up for the greatest majority of foreign
grants.
Education officials agree that the plan is ambitious and that MoE resources are
being stretched to the maximum.
But they also proudly stress that all projects are on track and eagerly await a
midterm review expected to be conducted by year-end under World Bank supervision
and to be published in January.
“ERfKE is a large-scale system-wide project,” sums up Alnoaimi.
“The heart of this reform programme is the transformation of learning and
teaching practices. The needs of the country and of the world have changed. Our
education system needs to change with them, from a teacher-centred to a learner-centred
approach.”