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  • 30.08.2021

Supporting teachers in back-to-school efforts: A toolkit for school leaders

Many schools in the northern hemisphere will resume in-person classes in the coming weeks after over a year of intermittent closures - despite the continued presence and uncertain evolution of the COVID-19 virus. Other schools will opt for hybrid teaching and learning. Whichever modality they choose, the reopening of schools that had been closed because of COVID-19 continues to raise many questions for school leaders. They need to put the school community’s safety and health first. At the same time, they have to ensure that schools’ front-line workers – teachers and education support staff – have the help, protection and tools they need to resume work.  Teachers have played a key role during school closures by ensuring that learning can continue and by keeping in touch with students and their families. Their role during school reopening will be just as important.

Last year, UNESCO, the Teacher Task Force and the International Labour Organization released a toolkit to help school leaders support and protect teachers and education support staff in the return to school. The toolkit complements the joint Framework for Reopening Schools and the Task Force's policy guidance. It breaks down the seven dimensions in the policy guidance into a series of actionable guiding questions and tips. While many education systems have already been closed and reopened several times over the past year, the dimensions on supporting and protecting teachers and students remain relevant. These include how to support teachers’ health, safety and well-being, how to foster dialogue with teachers and the community, and how to ensure learning resumes.

Download the Toolkit in English, French, Spanish and Arabic.

Seven dimensions to support teachers and staff as schools reopen:

Figure 1. Seven dimensions to support teachers and staff as schools reopen

The toolkit recognizes the importance of local context. In many countries the pandemic is still evolving daily. Local decisions about when to reopen schools will be determined by a broad range of considerations; what is right for one school may not be right for another. In all contexts, school leaders will need to set priorities  and recognize that  trade-offs may be needed.

The toolkit shows us that school leaders will need to think about key issues in relation to teachers and education support staff as they adapt national directives to plan to reopen their schools.

  • The importance of consultation and communication

Teachers, school staff and their representative organizations should be actively involved in setting out policies and plans for school reopening, including occupational safety and health measures to protect personnel. Communication with teachers, learners and education support staff about reopening can ensure clarity about expectations  and highlight their role in the success  of safe, inclusive return-to-school efforts, including overall well-being, and the teaching and learning recovery process.

As decisions to reopen schools are made by central authorities, it will be important to communicate early, clearly and regularly with parents and school communities to understand their concerns and build support for plans to reopen. Parents will want to know what safeguards have been put in place to minimize health risks. They will also need to hear about the school’s ongoing commitment to key educational principles and goals. As teachers are often the first point of contact with parents, they will need to be prepared to ensure everyone is informed continually.

  • Reassuring teachers and school staff about their health, safety and rights

Concern for the well-being of teachers, support staff and students is at the heart of decision-making. It is important to balance the desire to return to school with consideration of the risks to (and needs of) teachers, support staff and learners, so that the needs of the most vulnerable members of the school community are met.

School-level responses may include ongoing psychological and socio-emotional assessment, and support for teachers and learners. School leaders and teachers should be free to address their own needs, exercise self-care and manage their own stress. School leaders can help teachers develop stress management skills and coping mechanisms, so they can teach effectively and provide much-needed psychosocial support to learners. It is also critical to understand that schools are a workplace and that it is more vital than ever to respect the rights and conditions of the people who work there.

 “Before schools reopened, the teachers were worried about resuming work and contracting the virus, as were the parents. We had no WASH facilities, no masks and large classes. Discussions with health staff would have helped us a lot. It would also have been reassuring to have psychologists in schools for psychosocial care. In the end, we were able to obtain sufficient sanitation and masks from an international NGO, and only one grade returned to school to prepare for exams. The classes were split in two", stated a Primary school principal from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

  • Using teachers’ expertise in the new classroom environment

In most contexts, when children return to classrooms it will not be business as usual. In some cases, only some students will be present, or there will be double shifts. Lesson plans, assessment and overall curricula will be adapted, and remedial lessons will need to be developed and deployed.

School leaders need to ensure teachers are empowered to make decisions about teaching and learning. They can work with teachers to adjust curricula and assessment based on revised school calendars and instructions from central authorities. School leaders should also support teachers to reorganize classrooms to allow for accelerated learning and remedial responses, while adhering to regulations on physical distancing.

Teachers’ key role in recognizing learning gaps and formulating pedagogical responses remains critical. This is especially true for vulnerable groups, including low-income families, girls, those with special needs or disabilities, ethnic or cultural minorities and those living in remote rural areas with no access to distance education.

To manage the return to school, it is important for teachers and education support staff to receive adequate professional preparation to assume their responsibilities and meet expectations. Training, peer-to-peer learning and collaboration with other teachers, both within the school and more broadly, will be critical. Such support is particularly important where additional strain may be placed on teachers’ time if they are required to conduct both face-to-face and distance education.

Education recovery will require investments to ensure that a generation of learners is not lost. Which is why the Teacher Task Force is urgently calling for greater investment in teachers and teaching. Read the Call for Greater Investment

Download the Toolkit in English, French, Spanish and Arabic.

See also the Guidelines for national authorities in Arabic, English, French and Spanish.

Photo credit: MIA Studio/Shutterstock.com

Event
  • 15.07.2021

Strengthening Support for Teachers in Crisis Contexts: Promising and Innovative Practices in Teacher Professional Development

The Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE), The LEGO FoundationEducation InternationalOxfamUNESCO, and the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 would like to invite you to the launch of Teachers in Crisis Contexts (TiCC) Event Series 2021-2022 titled, "Strengthening Support for Teachers in Crisis Contexts: Promising Practices in Teacher Professional Development" to coincide with the Global Education Summit convened by the Global Partnership for Education.

During this event, teachers with relevant experiences working in crisis contexts will join us, education in emergency actors will share promising practices and the latest research on quality professional development, and we will discuss how to work together to strengthen support to teachers where it's needed most by endorsing the emerging Call to Action for Transforming Sector-wide Support for Teachers in Crisis Contexts.

Registration Link: https://bit.ly/3hRoxFn

Event website: https://inee.org/ticc-event-series

For inquiries, please contact eventseries@inee.org 

Event
  • 07.06.2021

Ensuring inclusive teaching and learning for educational recovery: practical ways forward

The webinar will focus on what needs to be done to improve teaching and learning in an inclusive way, and on the contributions of teachers as schools reopen following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it will focus on the practice of teaching staff and how it can be supported to find ways of ensuring that marginalized and vulnerable learners are included in schools, and to adapt content, pedagogies and assessment to be truly inclusive.


For this, examples of promising innovations from different regions of the world will be presented by practitioners.


The event will take place through the Zoom platform. For more information and registration, visit the event website: Ensuring inclusive teaching and learning for educational recovery : practical ways forward.

Event
  • 02.06.2021

Launch of Teach ECE: New Tool to Measure Quality of Teaching Practices for early childhood education

Despite the recent expansion of access to early childhood education (ECE) in every region of the world, quality of ECE remains extremely low, especially in LMICs. Thus, the continued scaling up of ECE globally presents both an opportunity and challenge in ensuring children are reaping the benefits and the promise of the early years.

The quality of teacher-child interactions in the classroom – otherwise known as process quality – is a critical aspect of ECE quality. The biggest bottleneck to improving process quality is the low capacity of the ECE workforce. Entry and training requirements for ECE teachers are often the lowest in education systems, opportunities for training are very limited, and ECE teachers receive little support to implement developmentally-appropriate pedagogical practices in the classroom. Measuring what currently occurs in the ECE classroom is an important first step towards better supporting ECE teachers.

The BBL will discuss the centrality of the ECE workforce in efforts to ensure access to ECE is scaled with an accompanying focus on quality. There will be an emphasis on the value of collecting data on teaching practices to drive policy dialogue in this area and inform interventions focused on improving professional development opportunities for ECE teachers. It will include a presentation on the World Bank’s new Teach ECE tool, a classroom observation tool aimed at measuring the quality of teacher-child interactions in ECE settings. The presentation will cover what the tool captures, available resources to support implementation, and initial data from pilot applications. The panel discussion will focus on best practices around measuring and supporting effective teaching in the ECE classroom, drawing on perspectives from the field, research, and policy.

Join via WebEx