Integration of 21st-Century Skills in Curriculum, Pedagogy, and Assessment-A Case Study of Tanzania Mainland and Zanzibar

• In Event: Equipping Learners for a Dynamic Digital Future: Insights from Integrating 21st Century Skills in East Africa’s Education Systems

Proposal

Contemporary reforms in education curricula are moving from content-based to competency-based to ensure learners graduate with relevant knowledge, skills, and attitudes to respond to various societal and global demands and challenges. Since 2009, Tanzania has been implementing a competency-based curriculum, but with little success in improving the quality of learning. Examining the problem revealed a lack of precise levels of progression in the skills prioritized in the curriculum. Determining levels of progression is necessary to help teachers identify targeted interventions to nurture the skills in the classroom, and also allow the assessment body to diagnose learning gaps in the proficiencies and those responsible for teacher education to design targeted training to enhance teacher capacities to fill the said gaps. This then allows for a strengthened alignment across curriculum, assessment, and pedagogy.
An innovative East African initiative is helping to contribute to a better understanding of how this alignment can be strengthened. In 2021, the initiative conducted a contextualized household-based life skills and values assessment in problem-solving, self-awareness, collaboration, and the value of respect to adolescents aged 13 to 17 across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Over 45,000 adolescents were assessed, producing robust data to illustrate the overall proficiency levels of these adolescents in the specified skills. The experience of using scenario-based assessments allowed the initiative to not only capture overall proficiencies of the adolescents in their real context, it also helped to reveal the levels of proficiency across a progression. Using the understanding of the different levels provides an opportunity for targeted instruction or interventions. The data also revealed that the more the adolescent is in school, the older they are and the more literate they are, the more proficient they are in life skills and values. This data has underscored the potential opportunity school and the alignment across the system has on the development of life skills and values.
The initiative has used these findings to engage with curriculum and examination experts in efforts to integrate 21st century skills in the education systems in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Each of the countries have recently or are in the process of reviewing their competency-based curricula to improve the impact and strengthen acquisition of intended competencies continually. The new curricula in Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar has both explicitly and implicitly mentioned key 21st century skills to be nurtured through the curriculum both at the primary and secondary levels. Skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, problem solving and communication have been mentioned throughout the curriculum framework and subsequent supporting curricular materials. Our initiative is working with both the curriculum, assessment and teacher training bodies in both Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar to help achieve an alignment that will strengthen the integration of these skills in the newly revised curricula.
This paper shares our initiative approach to strengthening alignment between curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. The paper will also highlight lessons from Initiative’s unique process of integrating 21st century skills in Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar, detailing both the challenges and opportunities presented through the process.

Authors

• Ramadhani Ally Matimbwa, Milele Zanzibar Foundation

• Devotha Festo Mlay, Daring Girls

• Khadija A Shariff, Milele Zanzibar Foundation

• Samson John Sitta, Milele Zanzibar Foundation