“Education is a shared commitment between dedicated teachers, motivated students and enthusiastic parents with high expectations.”
Maimoona Sahar is just seven years old but she’s already gained a reputation for being a great storyteller. Every day, her classmates and students from other grades in the Government Muktab Primary School in a remote village in Chitral, in northern Pakistan, gather to hear her narrate another tale.
Maimoona is delighted to bring characters from stories like Rapunzel alive. Her enthusiasm for storytelling was spurred when a small library was set up in her school.
“Now that we have a library in school, I regularly take books home and ask my elder sisters to help me read. I can’t wait for the next day to share the stories I read at home with my friends in school,” says Maimoona.
Maimoona is one of many children benefiting from the
School Improvement Programme (SIP) Reading for Children project. SIP is being implemented in over a 100 government schools based in eight valleys in Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan by the Aga Khan Foundation, Pakistan, in partnership with the Professional Development Centres (PDCs) of AKU’s Institute for Educational Development (IED).
It’s an all-round effort by instructors from PDCs in Chitral and GB involving the entire ‘community’: from the head teacher to the classroom teacher, from the father to parent groups. To encourage parents to actively engage in and support the school improvement efforts, IED’s instructors run small sessions that help mothers and fathers learn how to read with, and for, their children.
Teachers are guided on how on the many strategies to ignite a love for reading in young students. During the sessions, young children enjoy a ‘picture walk’, when they are asked to flip through every page without reading a word. But what about the pictures they see? ‘Reading’ pictures sparks interest as it requires the child to connect the pictures to their existing knowledge, to ask questions about the pictures which can increase their vocabulary and to mentally organise the information in the story boosting their comprehension.
Both children and their families are enthusiastic about the potential of the Reading for Children programme.
“Students tell us that reading stories has developed their habit of reading other books as well, contributing to their overall learning. The communities and students are now demanding more books on different topics,” says Dr Mola Dad Shafa, associate professor and head of IED’s Professional Development Centre, North.
Promoting a reading culture among children by involving parents and teachers is just one aspect of the SIP. The initiative aims to bring all education sector stakeholders together to transform the quality of the local educational system and ensure every child learns effectively.
Steps under SIP have led to parents and community figures joining teachers and educators on school management committees. Parents now regularly visit schools to observe lessons and teachers make evening visits to the homes of students to help parents create an environment that supports their child’s learning.
The result is that educators and communities feel jointly responsible for the quality of education in their area. In particular, parents have started realising the challenges teachers face in the classroom and teachers are noticing how parental involvement can shape a child’s love for learning.