News
Rural Teachers and Principals Gathered within Final Event of the Project on Promoting Teachers’ Leadership in Rural Schools
The final event was organized by UNESCO Regional Office in Almaty with a focus on “Transformation of Rural Schools: Development of Professional Communities of Teachers in Kazakhstan.” The event is part of the pilot phase of the RARS project aimed at supporting rural schools and developing professional communities through non-positional teachers’ leadership. It was designed for teachers, school principals, education experts and representatives of regional education departments, as well as governmental, non-governmental and international organisations. Participants enthusiastically discussed the key results of the project, successful practices of rural education transformation and prospects for further development of the professional communities of teachers in Kazakhstan.
The project has been run with the support of the UNESCO Regional Office in Almaty and the National Commission for UNESCO and ICESCO of the Republic of Kazakhstan, and with the participation of various partners such as the professional network (Cambridge, UK), the (QyzPU) and the independent platform known as . The project partners such as HertsCam network and its founder Dr David Frost, who have been working on the concept of international teacher leadership for more than 30 years, provided the initial induction training as well as all the conceptual instruments for the selected school facilitators and principals in January last year, TeachersLab ensured external facilitators who constantly supported the school facilitators and teachers throughout the year and QyzPU was responsible for teacher certification based on the collected portfolios of projects. The RARS project has built driving conditions for teachers to develop educational innovations, through the creation of professional development communities that contribute to the provision of quality education to students in the rural schools. Therefore, this transformative activity within its pilot phase has targeted 11 rural schools with 11 school principals, 22 school facilitators and over 130 teachers from Almaty, Atyrau, and Mangystau Provinces.
Many different activities have been delivered over the past year, including an induction workshop from the HertsCam - an introductory training for school facilitators, who led the in-school sessions with participating teachers on discussing and supporting their selected issues that then they have carried on and collected as a project portfolio by finding different innovative solutions to them. Throughout the year, the teachers have researched and led projects that were aimed at solving various problems such as developing functional literacy of learners, instilling soft skills, improving learning outcomes, etc. For this, they have also been provided a platform for discussions and feedback from colleagues both internally at schools through the above-mentioned sessions, organized by the selected school facilitators and externally through a series of network events for schools within each region. As a result, the teachers have done a portfolio of their projects, which have been evaluated by the Link Facilitators from Teachers Lab and who have also been providing continuous support to the school facilitators and teachers throughout the project on identifying the problem, doing the action research and finding solutions as well as using the project tools correctly.
At the final conference on 28 March school teachers had a chance to present their projects through presentations and posters as well as voice their experiences, feedback and reflections on the project. They also had an opportunity to hear about the different initiatives on supporting rural schools from the Ministry of Education (MoE), whose representative highlighted that rural education is the top country priority and the RARS project is aligned with the strategic objectives of the MoE to close the existing learning gap between rural and urban schools. The RARS initial project results have also been presented based on the monitoring and evaluation conducted by TeachersLab and UNESCO, it highlighted that the participating teachers gained many skills and insights, including strengthening the pedagogical approaches and methods, and that the project’s one of the main strengths was exchanging experience with colleagues among many others. The conference concluded with the message from the key partners that the sustainability and continuation of the project, especially supporting the created professional communities of teachers at school will depend on them and on their leadership with the support of the school principals. The project partners will work on finding additional resources to expand and continue the project to create the professional communities through teacher’s leadership in rural schools.
