Pakistani primary school materials—description, orientation and use
Description
The basic competency materials for Pakistan primary education in Northwest Frontier Province were designed, developed, and tested between 1990 and 1994 under the USAID-supported Pakistan Development Program (PED) to address conditions of government schooling in the province. These conditions included a range of geographical locations, remote schools, poorly qualified teachers, ineffective training, sporadic or non-existent supervision, and an exam system oriented to testing rote learning and not academic skills. In NWFP a critical issue was a resistant bureaucracy that had to be convinced of the efficacy of the program.
Pakistani educators in the Instructional Materials Development (IMDC) cell of the NWFP government’s Directorate of Primary Education addressed these conditions by developing “self-evident” textbooks that required few of the usual supports. Under the supervision of an international consultant, the Pakistani writers designed workbooks and teachers’ guides with the following characteristics:
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Every lesson focused on a specific learning objective or competency from the comprehensive primary-level curriculum mandated at the Federal level.
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Every lesson followed the same format with simple instructions for teachers
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Training required only a short orientation in the use of the lesson format
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Competency-based tests (not displayed in these files) if successfully completed would lead to equivalency credit for class level and subject.
Orientation (plan developed by the IMDC developers)
The orientation in the use of the materials was designed to take only a half day if one teacher was involved, and somewhat longer if more teachers were trained at the same time. The supervisor from the District Education Office was asked to:
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Describe the program and show how all the parts were linked to one another from learning objectives to lesson steps to final testing. The teacher trainees were told that as long as they followed the lesson steps most students would learn the skills and subsequently pass exams.
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Demonstrate the way a teacher would follow the steps in the lesson format.
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Have each trainee demonstrate a lesson to show understanding of the format.
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Summarize the information above at the end of the training
Use of the basic competency materials
There were two ways to use the materials, 1) as basic learning materials in the core subjects of math and language arts, or 2) as supplementary materials to reinforce and extend the basic skills learned in the classroom.
The steps for using them as core instructional materials include the following (all steps included in the lesson formats):
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Write the lesson topic/ learning objective on the blackboard
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Read the objective with the students and make sure they understand it
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Introduce the information about the objective/skill found in the “presentation box”, using locally available resources as needed to clarify
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Guide student practice of the skill using exercises in the “guided practice” section. Students do the exercises not the teacher (e.g. on the blackboard) but she makes sure they do them correctly before moving to the next step
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Students work the problems in the “application” section independently without the help of the teacher.
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The teacher checks their work or asks them to check one another’s work. They can also use the answer keys to check their work.
Teachers are encouraged to group students in pairs or in small groups of varying ability and discuss how they came to the answers. The teacher begins the next day’s lesson by reviewing the previous lesson. Every few lessons she gives them a test to ensure they have learned the objectives.
The materials were introduced experimentally in 700 classrooms before USAID halted PED in 1994 for political reasons.
The process for introducing the materials was 1) for the textbook developers to train district supervisors in the use of the materials; 2) for the supervisor then to provide materials and orientation for the teachers in his/her area; 3) for the supervisor to return every 6 weeks with simple tests of the competencies to ensure the children were learning them.
If children were not learning the competencies the supervisor could either retrain the teacher in the lesson format or if there were sufficient teachers whose students were not meeting the developers’ standards (e.g. later teachers’ lack of content knowledge at higher primary grades proved problematic) the supervisor could develop in-service training courses to address teachers’ problems. In trials of the materials however most children met the standards and retraining was not necessary.
Primary Education Support 