Tackling the Reading Comprehension Conundrum

In my last blog, The Reading Comprehension Conundrum, I wrote about factors, often not identified, that negatively impact comprehension instruction, particularly in developing countries. This blog will focus on one pivotal way to tackle the comprehension conundrum by making an alteration to the trajectory of teacher preparation.

Incomprehensible

I began a unique teacher education project last August in Maasailand, Kenya. This blog focuses on one of the complex challenges that was evident in the classrooms and a major obstacle to providing quality education in schools across the developing world. Future blogs will talk about other key issues in the quality of education crisis and what I have learned from my first hand experiences in Kenya and Ethiopia. 

Kindergarten Kimuka Primary School, Maasailand, Kenya 

Picture this. You are five or six years old. You could be living in a rural part of Kenya or in any other country in the developing world.  Your mother tells you today is the day you are going to start school. As she gives you the shirt, sweater and skirt that your older sister wore when she started school, she tells you, “You will have a teacher. You will learn. School is very, very important.”

The Way to School

You walk out into the chilly morning air with your mother and follow her as she deftly makes her way around the slippery craters created by last night’s down pour. Once at the road, your Mother points and tells you, “This is the way to go. Follow the road until you see the big house I showed you.” You do as you are told. If you are frightened you do not show it. Your pace is slow but you are serious about reaching your destination and eventually the unfamiliar shoes binding your feet carry you 8 rough kilometers (4.9 miles) to the place called “school”.

 

The way to School

Your long, throat-parching walk had been exceedingly solitary save for the grazing goats, plodding cows and the occasional motor scooter that, most days, will blanket you in a thick cloud of dust as it zooms by. However, when you arrive at the tall iron school gate you are dazzled by the sea of children on the other side, more children then you have ever seen. Waves of them are flowing towards doors where teachers are stationed outside. Swept up, you land in a bare room with walls the color of milk. The teacher starts speaking in words, many of which, you have not heard before. You take in all the clues your young mind can comprehend. The other students are squeezing their bottoms into the rows of benches. You squish in too. 

The way to school

The teacher makes white marks on the blackish wall. She points at them, speaks, points again, no one knows what to do. The teacher speaks again, points again, you can tell from her face she is waiting for the children to repeat what she says. They finally do. You and the others follow her lead and do this many times. You don’t know it but your teacher wants you to learn the names of colors although they are not the names you have heard at home and there are no colors in sight.

As I write, the vivid image of a five-year old girl is as still fresh in my mind as if it were one of the mornings when my car driver stopped his Toyota in the midst of our jaw-jarring ride to Kimuka Village Primary School in the Rift Valley. On the days that our coordinates converged, the sweater-clad, runny-nosed Kindergartener, making her way to the same destination, stops, looks and recognizes the cheerful man behind the wheel and the Mzungu (Kswahili for white-skinned person) in the backseat. She waits for the signal to climb in.

The way to school

The little girl’s solitary hike to and from school each day, looking like a speck against a vast and rugged landscape, was and still is, incomprehensible to me - the walk is extremely strenuous and rife with serious hazards. The child, so unprotected! My mind is crowded with clashing images of my own children, at that age, blithely hopping on their school bus. My concept of a five-year old comes into question. Then my thoughts lurch and I’m stunned by a bigger picture. I’ve been working with the teachers in this child’s school. I have visited her classroom everyday for weeks now and I know that the hopes of the mother and the obedience and effort of the child are invested in a young woman with an eighth-grade education, equipped to provide little more for her students than good intentions. I know the consequences of that disconnect are enormous. 

The way to school

The way to school

The education that hopes are pinned on in the developing world is the education that is leaving 2.5 million children, who do get to go to school, without being able to read a single word by the end of third grade. (There are 58 million children worldwide who are out of school.) The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is responding to this crisis that is key to a better life and stronger economies, by planning to support up to $1 billion in activities over five years. The “Advanced Basic Education: All Children Reading” contract concentrates on improving student reading for children in grades 1 - 3.

5 year old girl at classroom door

The causes for the failure in basic education are complex and numerous and correction will require some heavy lifting. Governments will have to distribute its funds equitably to all segments of society. Teachers in developing countries will have to be paid a living wage. Beginning reading books written in the many mother-tongue languages will have to be available to all school children. Infrastructures for connectivity will have to be in place. Those are just a few of the challenges. However, a correction that is at hand is providing teachers, preferably at the preparatory level, with the models for teaching students to be thoughtful, competent readers, writers and self-guided learners. College partnerships, online interactive programs, and projects such as the one I brought to Kenya are just a few viable options for connecting and educating school leaders and school teachers.

To read more about the learning crisis in the developing world, I recommend Lant Pritchett’s, powerful book The Rebirth of Education: educating ain’t learning. 

The “X” Factors

I’m back at home now. I returned from my travels one month ago today. As anyone who has been to Africa or any developing country would know, going through customs is not the real re-entry process. It is a period of time during which everything old feels new - driving a car, drinking water coming out of a faucet, recorded TV programs, our beds.

I spent the week before last with Joe Balog, the young man who came with me to Maasailand. He took pictures and videos in and around the work at Kimuka Village School. We culled the considerable collection and distilled 6 four-minute videos from them. A whole week out of young Joe’s life, sitting side by side with me, missing Halloween in New York City - so we could tell the story.

As we clicked and dragged the pictures and screen shots, I had a sense of malaise that I slowly recognized as a tinge of homesickness. How was it that I would miss a place that was:

• so harsh with its inhospitable rock-strewn roads, dust-filled air, starving cattle desperately licking leaf-bare thorny acacia trees;
• so worrisome with its unavoidable and potentially disease carrying water, food and mosquitos;
• so challenging with its primitive pit latrines, absence of harnessed electrons and all that they deliver, and cold showers that required something close to heroism.

No, it was not about the place. It was about the people. It was a complex relationship we forged. That is a story in itself but what held up through the challenges we had was a strong appreciation and affection for each other. I was captivated by our workmates richness of spirit evident in their good humor and expressed aspirations in the context of extreme scarcity.

Those qualities came through early on. When we were just about to start the full week of workshops, the last week of June, we interviewed each person working on the project. I asked them to speak about what they hoped they would get out of the inservice training. I asked them what concerns they had. Those interviews were videotaped so you can listen to them too. (See video) You will not hear anyone mention or bemoan the absence of chalk, pencils, paper, crayons, or books. In one way or another, each spoke about the needs of their students and their concern over meeting those needs. 

As the days ticked by and bundled themselves into weeks, I was pricked with a sense of cognitive dissonance. The teachers and I had completed the week of workshops in which I rolled out the six-part model for daily instruction. I demonstrated, we practiced. Everything was new. The teachers were never taught about reading and writing. They were expected to read and write. Teaching reading and writing strategies was unheard of. (You can hear Chief Joseph talk about that on the video) However, everything we did was grounded in the proverb: “If a man is hungry and you give him a fish he will eat for a day. If a man is hungry and you teach him to fish, he will eat for the rest of his life.” Those words, that concept, resonated with everyone.

Only slightly tentative, each teacher took her turn in the morning, picture book in hand, to read aloud and think aloud by stopping to tell what she was wondering, tell what she thought was going to happen next or explain why she thought something in the story did happen. Each was practicing what she would do in her classroom to teach her children what good readers do. Not only would they talk about the story being read, they would teach how to read anything, anytime - teaching their students “to fish”.

What was that cognitive dissonance I was experiencing? Given the newness and strangeness of the methods, why wasn’t the work a struggle for these women? Instead of furrowed brows and awkward silence there was laughter, bright eyes and probing questions. When they finally stepped in front of their students for the reading hour everyday, each teacher unpacked what she had practiced and OMG they owned everything they had learned. Their students were right there with each of them. Start a question with the words, “What do you think...” and a sea of hands shot up on outstretched arms, fingers snapping, voices begging, “teecha, teecha, teecha”.

I did, for one brief moment, reach around and pat my back. It was the structure, the modeling, the clear explanations, the ample time to practice each day, the encouragement, the safe environment, I reasoned. But after all my years of experience working with teachers I could easily envision providing all of those things and still not lighting everyone’s fire. There was clearly something else at work - something I could not have taught for or planned for. It took some time, re-entry and some unforced reflection but I think I nailed the X factors. Needs were being met in Kimuka Village School which might not necessarily be felt so keenly back home.

There was an opportunity for these teachers in rural Kenya to fill a gap in their skills, an opportunity which they saw as a once in a lifetime opportunity. Then too, the teachers had expressed their fundamental, abiding desire to help “the little ones”. That is a powerful desire, as many of us know. And ultimately there is the joy the accompanies expansion, the inner excitement of becoming more of what you know you are meant to be.

Just as I had overlooked these forces that would be at play when I was worrying through the planning stages, others working to improve education in under-resourced communities need to realize the teachers bring their own power and potential to the table. The teachers we partner with in such places as Maasailand do not need propping up with scripted lessons, they need the opportunity to learn how to “fish.”