Promoting active teaching and learning is a key challenge in Vietnam's early childhood education system. Teaching practice in ECE remains mostly teacher-centered and many ECE teachers fail to actively and meaningfully engage their learners, leading to low learning outcomes. School leaders and education officials are not equipped to provide adequate professional trajectories for teachers.
Process-Oriented Child Monitoring (POM) (Laevers et. al., 2012), is a formative assessment system used by VVOB in professional development programs for ECE teachers in Vietnam. Using two 5-point scales, ECE teachers systematically observe and assess all learners 'Wellbeing' (WB) and 'Involvement' (INV), using a simple paper-based or app-based tool. Based on this assessment, teachers identify children at risk of not learning, reflect on their own teaching practice, and on what withholds children from learning and meaningful participation. Teachers reflect individually and as a team and are supported by their school leaders and education officials. Using 8 action points based on experiential learning, teachers facilitate changes in teaching to increase children's WB & INV. Evidence from 3 provinces in Vietnam shows that using POM leads to increases in a range of child development outcomes, including health behavior and socio-emotional development (Lenaerts et.al, 2021).
POM was developed at the Center for Experiential Education at Leuven University, Belgium and has been used by VVOB in Vietnam since 2016. Following a successful pilot in 2016, POM was initially implemented at scale in 3 provinces of Vietnam as part of VVOB's 2017-2021 BaMi program, reaching 2,879 ECE teachers, 47,267 children. Recently, POM implementation in BaMi has been expanded to 6 additional provinces of Vietnam, reaching 104 teachers, 3,120 children.
From 2022, POM will be the starting point of VVOB's 5-year TALK program, targeting another 3 provinces of Vietnam, reaching another 2,184 teachers, 48,353 children. The TALK Programme will investigate how POM can be tailored in order to strengthen language and emergent literacy skills of ethnic minority children in Vietnam.
As a fairly simple but highly effective formative assessment tool, POM is easily transferable to other contexts. While the use of the WB and INV scales is relatively easy to learn, teachers need to be supported by school leadership and the education system on reflective practices and with concrete action points for changes to classroom practice. For more information: hans.degreve@vvob.org.
