Across Africa, teachers learn student-centered methods purely as concepts delivered in entirely teacher-centered lectures. Even with competency-based curricula, lessons are rarely, if even, contextualized or practical, and competencies are mainly academic. L3 changes this, operating presently in Ethiopia and Uganda, but soon in other countries, too. In training, teachers learn about active, student-centered learning as concepts while they acquire concrete methods and skills to practice this. They also foster growth mindsets and strategies to keep improving their understanding and practice to produce evermore effective and joyous learning with their students.
L3 links learning to pupils’ contexts, making learning practical and fostering diverse competencies, echoing the likes of Dewey and Vygotsky. It grounds the curriculum in pupils’ daily lives, drawing on their social, economic, natural, and cultural contexts. So, rather than studying Animals in Our Community from a text as uniform content to memorize regardless a locale’s native fauna, L3 engages students in groups to identify animals that they encounter in their communities, propose ways to categorize them, specify what they can and wish to learn, answer the questions for specific animals via observation and inquiry, then present what they learned in creative ways. Teachers learn to do this via training that has them experience the methods as if they are students themselves, design their own L3 lessons for peers to critique, practice the methods with their pupils, and work together and with supervisors to keep improving, including with digital inputs. In both Ethiopia and Uganda, studies show that pupils who learn this way tend to excel as they continue their formal schooling, evident in both their academic performance and their social relations and influence.
The spread of L3 has taken a few forms in the two countries. Quantitatively, L3 is the basis of Geneva Global’s Speed School program which has directly brought over 250,000 out-of-school children into mainstream schooling and influenced about 600,000 more. Geographically, new districts embrace the model each year, and new donors support its use for new populations, such as internally displaced groups, and with increasing funding. In Ethiopia, government has funded and operated over 90% of Speed School classes (over 2,400) for the past several years. Structurally, the two governments are actively engaging Geneva Global to help introduce L3 into both pre-service and in-service teacher training. Having begun as an effort to improve learning across all of primary education, both countries are now engaging Geneva Global to help lead the introduction of L3 as a model for strengthening the system’s capacity to implement their new competency-based curricula at the secondary education level, too. In Uganda, they are even doing this across higher education. Supporting the system-wide spread of L3 involves three main components: pre-service teacher education, transforming both the curriculum and how instructors deliver it; in-service teacher training and continuing professional development (CPD); and school-based supervision, support, and peer-driven CPD.
As the two education systems have embraced the L3 approach more aggressively, Geneva Global has needed to adapt the core model and methods to the particular requirements of the different formal education levels. Contextualizing and making practical students’ learning of double-digit multiplication and adjectives involve a different order of pedagogic sophistication than do the contextualization and relevance of quadratic equations and expository writing. Similarly, the training and continuing professional development of secondary school teachers demand different, though similar, approaches. The system efforts to formalize the L3 strategies has also given Geneva Global the opportunity to work more closely and purposefully with the two countries’ full group of teacher training institutions, both university faculties and colleges, and the official teacher supervision and support structures, helping to embed L3 concepts and methods into their programs and approaches. The core elements remain the same, but there is now more formality in the ways by which we support their adoption and a growing amount of documentation to use. These efforts should serve well as new education systems seek to adopt L3 as well.
To adopt L3, Geneva Global will be happy to discuss tailored training and support. The main steps are to: (1) condense the curriculum; (2) train trainers and district agents in the L3 pedagogic model and methods and the holistic training approach; (3) establish and operate pilot classes and train teachers; (4) build evidence; then (5) contextualize and institutionalize the model.
