LEADNOW digital teacher training and coaching platform in delivery of foundational literacy and numeracy in Kenya

• In Event: Envisioning foundational literacy and numeracy in the 21st century

Proposal

The world bank report on the state of global learning poverty in 2022 stated that COVID-19-related school closures and other disruptions have sharply increased learning poverty, a measure of children unable to read and understand a simple passage by age 10. Kenya is and remains one of the countries that faced the effects of the pandemic. There have been record low levels of learning poverty more so in the foundational years as seen across the Kenyan education space. These low levels of uptake have drastically affected how and when early years learner’s uptake literacy and numeracy lessons in Kenya. The Kenyan teacher has constantly been affected by lack of continuous professional development skills and all these have impacted the uptake of foundational literacy and numeracy skills.

However, in an expected way, the COVID 19 pandemic in almost 360 degrees, took the world on a learning curve on the transformative power of the digital space. The education niche in Kenya, like many other countries, ripe for the Edtech interventions, woke to this change and Dignitas, being a unique thought leader in teacher professional development and training also rose to this opportune challenge.

LEADNOW application, designed for low-tech and low-resource environments, came in as a training and coaching tool to equip teachers with the new competencies and mindsets they need to support learner achievement and uptake of FLN interventions as well as other modules. The application which was designed to self-pace teacher professional development, offers an easy and simple way of improving the integration and delivery of foundational literacy and numeracy pieces in the classroom. LEADNOW is designed with practical in-built scenarios that teachers can use in lesson delivery and with specific examples on how to design FLN pieces for their learners. The application also offers self-reflective modules which give teachers opportunity to reflect on their delivery and incorporate clear prompts as the next steps to practice on for improvement.

Additionally, the application helps improve School Leadership teams’ access to training – either mini professional development modules and toolkits through Dignitas’ Chatbot or full modules through the learning management system. LEADNOW boasts of –both online and offline capability making it easy for the Kenyan teacher to access it anywhere.

The largest pioneer cohort of teachers who used LEADNOW learning platform in the year 2023 under the Ongoza school cohort, in Dignitas - A cohort of teachers drawn from Nairobi’s marginalized communities, demonstrated emboldened facilitator centred practices in the delivery of foundational literacy and numeracy under the competency-based curriculum through the specific modules that they accessed individually and learnt over the course period.


Key words: LEADNOW, Competency based curriculum, Ed Tech, Foundational literacy and numeracy.

Authors

• Mercy S Munialo, DIGNITAS LIMITED

• Simon Steven Mukwambo, Dignitas Limited