Curriculum as an education disruptor: the experience of Speed School in Ethiopia and Uganda

• In Event: Accelerated Education as an Instrument of Disruption

Proposal

The recent COVID pandemic and associated school closures and other education perturbations have drawn renewed attention to the many years of experience with accelerated education that international organizations have accumulated working mostly in emergency and other highly marginalized settings. Using a variety of approaches, accelerated education models allow children to acquire fundamental literacy and numeracy along with other core knowledge more quickly than in conventional school classrooms. Some such initiatives use their own curriculum, usually aiming to ready learners for life and livelihood. Others use a condensed version of the official curriculum, readying learners who are usually overaged to transition to conventional schooling upon completing the accelerated course.
This last is the approach that Geneva Global has used with civil society and government partners in Ethiopia since 2011 and Uganda since 2016, implementing the Speed School model pioneered by Strømme Foundation in West Africa. Similar to Strømme’s experience, Geneva Global has found that Speed School equips formerly out-of-school overaged children not only to transition to conventional classrooms but to persist and excel there, thriving academically and socio-emotionally.
Fundamental to the model’s success is the use of a condensed curriculum. Highlighting the core learning outcomes for each subject, developers scrub from the full official version content that is outdated, redundant, overly generic, or pertinent to only a narrow swath of students. This creates space for teachers to make learning relevant by inserting content and practical applications drawn from the local context. It frees up time for truly formative continuous assessment, with feedback and remediation, and genuinely learner-centered instruction that purposefully fosters students’ personal competencies, such as critical thinking, creativity, inquiry, and collaboration. All of this makes learning better, quicker, and more durable.
Certainly, capitalizing fully on these advantages requires more of the teacher, who can no longer remain shackled to the blackboard repeating or copying content from the textbook for students to mimic or transcribe in their notebooks. Rather, s/he now has simultaneously the opportunity and the obligation to design and deliver lessons that draw heavily on the local context, engage students in applying their core competencies practically, and require students to foster personal competencies.
As teachers become competent and confident in using the condensed curriculum, they are transforming students from learning vessels into active agents in their families and communities. They are not, for example, learning about children’s rights and responsibilities as information to repeat on a test but as phenomena lived in and beyond the classroom that they can influence. At the same time, teaching the condensed curriculum transforms teachers, unleashing their agency in creating lessons that are more compelling to their students and to them, educating explicitly for life and livelihood, not simply to pass a test.
This presentation will explore the experience of the delivering a condensed curriculum in the two countries, illustrating what it looks like in practice as content, teaching, and learning. It will also share steps taken to build from the Speed School experience to influence teaching and learning in conventional primary classrooms.

Author

• Joshua A Muskin, Geneva Global