We at UMEED EDUCATION would like to extend our deepest gratitude on behalf of the children whose education you have supported, and update you regarding all the ventures we were able to accomplish
with your contributions.
It would be an honor if you could spare your time to give your input and advice so we can fine tune our efforts further.
What we do: As you know, UMEED EDUCATION is an effort to bridge the Poor-Rich divide which affects hundreds of thousands of less privileged school children, both in our villages as well as the slums of our cities.
We provide pre-literacy experiences and scaffold the learning process so that the learners develop a keen, questioning mind and have the life-skills to compete and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their more privileged contemporaries.
Background: Our work started in 2003 in a small school in Lahore which spread to two more schools, then expanded with the collaboration of WASIL TRUST to the rural areas of District Bahawalnagar in the south of Punjab, and since September, 2016 we have commenced a pilot for the primary government school children in Lahore City and Gujranwala City.
The idea is to share our research and development as far and wide as possible within our limited means to benefit more children .
To make their lives and education ‘worth it’.
THE STORY OF THE LAST 8 MONTHS:-
In September, 2016, Wasil Trust was able to start Umeed Enrichment Programs in Four schools in Lahore, and in March, 2017 in Four schools in Gujranwala. With the support we received from our donors we were able to train the personnel, provide teaching aids and materials, motivate the school administrations and support many infrastructure developments crucial for those schools.
Govt. Schools Adopted by Wasil Trust in Lahore in Sept. 2016
A BREATH OF FRESH AIR
Transforming a dilapidated Rooftop into a safe play area in the government school in
Video lessons covering the science and social studies topics of the Classes 3,4 and 5 are shown regularly and assessed with short tests.
World over, the impact of the Headstart program was not sustained for too long as the effects of the training wore off in primary classes. A follow through program brings continuity to the headstart program and diminishes dropouts. Interventions have been designed to augment student learning and critical thinking that were introduced in the preschool to follow through in their primary classes.
One such aid is the bilingual video lessons and the connected formative assessment worksheets in both Urdu and English. Prepared for Urdu Medium as well as English Medium Primary classes these lessons aid the students’ learning and critical thinking. The commentary is bilingual to help the Urdu Medium learner also pick up the English Medium terminology. This will ultimately help bridge the gap between the two mediums.
At a pilot phase, Video lessons covering the science and social studies topics of the Classes 3,4 and 5 are shown regularly and assessed with short tests. The topics are as follows:
Maps
Living things
Changes in living things
Needs of living things
Classification of living things
Agricultural topics
Food and health
Heat
Matter
Our land, people, and climate
Properties of light
Some video lessons deal with General Knowledge and Civic sense and citizenship which are crucial aspects in the education of these less privileged children.
Living Things
Road Safety
Solar System
Animals – Our friends
Plants – Our friends
Good Habits
My Body
Our Environment
Rotation and Revolution
Water
The few samples uploaded to our website will show you the types of lessons and the related worksheets and activities
Maps and Living Things Part 1 are introductory lessons related to Class 3 and Class 4 syllabi of the National Curriculum and its prescribed Punjab Text Book Board books.
Solar System is a general knowledge video which augments the learning of the topic in the Class 5 Science book.
The Worksheets and related activities have been prepared in Urdu and translated into English and vice versa so that the children can develop their language skills in both.
A collection of story books and general knowledge books are provided to the schools. The books are categorized into three reading levels. To monitor the library time, the coordinators make a weekly note of which books the children have read.
The children are regularly shown jan cartoon videos which help them improve their urdu language skills along with learning important human values and relationships.
Nursery rhymes and songs are played to the children to help develop important speech and musical skills.
All the three aspects of the preschool program are fitted into the school timetable so that they are covered daily.
The Lab Schools in Lahore are the teacher training centres as well. All three lab schools enable newly inducted teachers/facilitators to get hands on training and knowhow to enable them to facilitate the Umeed Enrichment Programs.
The Umeed Teacher’s Guide provides knowledge and structure to the two main aspects of Skill development and Concept development. All teaching and facilitation training is given using this manual.
Teacher trainers of various organizations and textbook publishers are invited to conduct workshops for the new teachers as well as the existing teaching staff.
Umeed School System Pilot Project has created assessments and pool of questions to create random assessments for classes 4 and 5 in Urdu, English, Maths and Science subjects from the recommended English Medium syllabus. These are prepared by teachers of classes 6 and 7 and provide a system of monitoring and assessment for the new teachers.
The school calendar is divided into two week loops of study. The curriculum is divided accordingly into manageable units which can be completed within the loops. A test after the loop provides the required feedback of the teacher and the student.
For village schools, and Urdu Medium govt schools, materials and videos have been dubbed into urdu or bilingual language. These are teaching aids for the teachers.
WASIL FOUNDATION (Formerly CWCD – Established in 1992)
PRESCHOOL INTERVENTION FOR UNDERPRIVILEGED CHILDREN:
A CONCEPT NOTE
Research has proven that a basic level of school readiness is required in order to settle and succeed in school. In Pakistan, the privileged children, especially in big cities, are provided such facilities in private pre-schools. However this skill is needed more in children from less privileged homes with no literary environment to help them get a head-start. Ideally, a research-based Head Start preschool program, especially designed for the less privileged children of the target area, is the preferred solution to the problem of high dropout and eventual failure of the school system. Many public schools have been adopted and have shown an improvement from where they started. Unfortunately, the local public school teachers are a product of the same archaic system, catering to the existing testing system, with very basic knowledge of today’s developments. This is a cycle and it needs to be broken. A system that is teacher friendly, and is so self explanatory that the teacher only acts as a facilitator and a tool to conduct the system, and has a minimal role, is one way out of this cycle; a method where the system has its own checks and balances and the key role of the teacher is minimized and instead, the student is empowered to learn.
Research
A doctoral research was carried out by Dr. Shireen Zafarullah (1996) with Kot Bahawalbaksh as the universe for its rural sample. Adapted Boehm Cognitive Test Battery was used to find the competencies of children aged 3+ . Less-privileged children (especially the rural sample) showed numerous handicaps in pre-literacy skills, as compared to their privileged counterparts. A ‘Compensatory Enrichment Program’ was developed, implemented and tested (as part of CHEA/QHEA twinning project) in a public school in a Lahore slum (Basti Saiden Shah, Mian Mir village, Lahore).This Enrichment Program is now further specialized as UEP Umeed Enrichment Program.
When Wasil Foundation (formerly CWCD) initially adopted the public primary schools in the southern Punjab district of Bahawalnagar, the brick and mortar uplift successfully created a very conducive environment for the improvement in enrolment and retention. However the existing teaching methodology and materials used could not attract as many students or involve the community as was initially estimated. There was a clear need of a compensatory headstart preschool program to start with, that could provide the needed school readiness to the children of the area.
The above mentioned Enrichment Program has been fine tuned over the years as Umeed Enrichment Program and has been tested in three registered free trust schools (Umeed, Herbert, Amal School) for the less privileged children in Lahore. Weekly assessments, part of the governance plan, are carried out and results show a significant impact. When Wasil Foundation/CWCD decided to adopt public school in Bahawalnagar, it was decided to implement this program there. After upgrading the physical environment of the four schools adopted in the pilot project, the program was initiated in all four but due to shortage funds for hiring of trained teachers the program was restricted to two of them. This in fact helped establish comparison of the results with the other two schools. There was a marked improvement in enrolment in Nursery class and Zero dropout at the end of the academic year, in the two schools where the intervention was carried out.
The Preschool Intervention Plan
There is no formal provision for a preschool teacher in the adopted public schools, and even if there are children that enrol at this level, they are made to sit with other classes. Therefore one teacher trained in conducting the Umeed Enrichment Program will be employed per school to cater to this critical gap. A comprehensive enrichment package will be introduced, with its follow-up assessment system, conducted by the monitoring team.
Activities (Tools and techniques): A set of workbooks and readers for skill development will be provided to each child. The teacher will teach according to the given unit wise schedule and prepare the children to be ready for regular assessments. A set of Concept Flipbooks with the required assessment levels will be provided to the teacher to introduce essential concepts to the preschoolers. For language development , the teacher will be provided a cassette player, television and dvd player, along with video and audio cds to be incorporated in the daily teaching plan.
All the learning material is already prepared keeping in mind a very basic level of teacher training, so that even untrained teachers can understand and conduct the lesson plan.
Further details of planned activities
A complete full days’ timetable. Daily lessons based on the prescribed UEP workbooks in English, Urdu, and Mathematics. Reading and Writing, Slate and Copy work, and Phonics
Follow the concept flipbooks daily for half an hour along with its planned activities.
Story time using reading, audio or video material
At the end of the day the teacher reviews the day’s lessons to reinforce the learning outcomes of weekly unseen assessment and let the children complete their unfinished work.
Assessments take place once a week
Parents meeting with a Concept Development program is held once a month
Monitoring and Evaluation
Assessment is an intrinsic part of the UEP is followed to the letter and spirit in the Lahore schools, on a weekly basis. However, due to logistical constraints, the schedule of assessments was modified for the village pilot project and is conducted on a monthly basis. The tests are designed and printed by experienced teachers in the Lahore based Umeed Teacher Training Institute and then transported and conducted by the coordination team.
This system of designing assessments, conducting the tests, tabulating the response and results, and updating the designs as needed is a very essential and part of the whole program. With enhanced resources, as budgeted in the plan, the village monitoring tests can be taken and analyzed on a weekly basis as is envisaged in the original plan.
Sustainability & Scalability
The UEP is a complete program, requiring very little training for teachers, and a reasonably priced teaching material. Its assessments are already in place.
The direct beneficiaries will initially be the preschool to class 1 entrants to school along with the parents who will be given concept training once a month at the PTA. Once school enrolment and retention improve, the community starts getting mobilized and aware of the need for quality education. This is the indirect benefit of the program.
There is a follow up program for the primary level children. This can be followed with a similarly tested program piloted in a Lahore partner school – the Umeed Empowered Learning program for primary classes. This can be implemented in the next phase. Its structure is also in place and ready for implementation in the government school environment.
This school was opened with the sponsorship of Ms Lily Herbert, in memory of her late parents, in the year 2006. The running expenses like staff and teachers’ salaries are provided by her husband Dr. Farhan Younis, a doctor in USA. The present strength is 250 from Nursery to Class 4 plus 15 children in an adult literacy ‘inclusive’ class. This is totally free and is providing a great opportunity to the deprived children of the area.
The Principal, Ms Neelam Ali, is a strict disciplinarian, and a thorough administrator. She has developed many sound administrative procedures which all three schools utilize.
This is a non-profit school. A custom built campus, built in 2005, by the sponsorship of Mr. Salman Chima provides an ideal learning environment. A nominal fee is charged but many deserving children are sponsored by donations. An evening shift has also been started, which is free. However, a ‘dignity fee’ is charged at Rs 30 per month, which is utilized in the purchase of books and stationery in the primary school.
The morning school now has a strength of 350 children from play group to class 10. The evening shift has 25 children from class 1 to class 3. These are less privileged children who cannot cope with the learning but after completing the Umeed Enrichment Program they are adjusted in the morning section. The senior classes have very innovative teaching techniques and technology is also incorporated at all learning levels
The Principal, Mrs Shagufta Abbas recently retired. Her international teaching experience, holding a Masters degree in Social Work, was providing a vision and direction to the school, with her leadership skills. Now Mrs Zahida Rana has adopted the role with great zeal and responsibility.”
The first school of this program opened at 5 Zaman Park, Lahore, in 2003. Today the strength is 320 children from Class Nursery to Class 10.The senior classes have very innovative teaching techniques and technology is also incorporated at all learning levels.It is a totally free school which is being funded by a renowned law firm, Chima & Ibrahim.
Teachers in this school were the first to be trained in the use of the teacher friendly materials and workbooks. They now serve as trainers for the teachers of the other schools.
The Principal, Mrs Irfana Javed, is a pioneer in this project. She has coordinated the development of the school system. She is also the co-author of most of the books and also helped develop the assessments program for all the units.
LCD screens installed to give language development lessons
