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Activating the School

lekol

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L3 Systems Activation:
The Home, School and Church

By activating the Haitian child’s most central networks, engaging key stakeholders, and leveraging culturally-relevant and engaging programming, the GC-DWC promotes a whole child approach to development that values the cultural richness of Haitian communities and will create a ripple effect throughout the country.

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Literacy and SEL programs

To activate the school (lekòl), the GC-DWC has established a literacy program that combines a robust teacher training and coaching program with a high-quality, scripted curriculum for first and second grades. To ensure that incoming students were prepared to receive this in-school intervention and were appropriately primed in foundational academic skills as well as crucial social emotional learning (SEL) skills, GC-DWC Haiti began integrating early child development (ECD) intervention packages for children ages 0-5 through the Strong Beginnings program, that works to ensure that children grow up in safe, stimulating home environments and receive a strong foundation in language development, early literacy, and math before they enter formal school. SEL programming is a crucial element of this intervention, as this allows children to thrive throughout this transition into formal school and have the foundational capacity to benefit from the curriculum. 

Additionally, alongside partners at Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and the Episcopal Commission for Catholic Education (CEEC), the Continuity of Learning (CoL) program is designed to improve Haitian students’ foundational skills in reading, literacy and social emotional learning by building and strengthening the capacity of teachers, schools and communities. Through this programming, children in first through fourth grades benefit from a resilient education system that delivers uninterrupted access to a safe, quality education.

 

ECD summer camp

ECD Summer Camps

Recognizing that the first years of a child’s life are formative for their future success, the GC-DWC has implemented early childhood development (ECD) summer camps, aiming to create engaged learners even before they enter kindergarten and formal schooling.  The summer camps demonstrate what high-quality pre-school learning can look like in the Haitian context, focusing on learning through play by offering joyful, actively engaging, meaningful, iterative and socially interactive forms of learning which lead to deeper understanding, connecting factual knowledge with real-world experiences. When a child plays, they are not just enjoying the moment, but also strengthening their cognitive, social, and emotional skills—including self-esteem. The ECD summer camps utilize play as a way to improve the educational outcomes for children in Haiti at the pre-k level in a way which will help set them up for success in later life. These camps also provide a safe and nurturing environment where children can develop essential foundational skills before entering formal education. By fostering curiosity and creativity, the camp empowers young learners to build a strong academic and social-emotional foundation that will benefit them throughout their educational journey.

Training of Trainers

The teacher training and coaching program integrated within this system plays a critical role in improving teacher capacity in Haiti, given the challenging circumstances and limited resources impacting learning and development for children in the Haitian context. Teacher trainers, through Training of Trainers workshops, learn how to train peers in surrounding communities on a play-based preK curriculum.

 

Trainers

Participants are trained on facilitation and training techniques such as implementation of training routines and active participation strategies in addition to the core components of the pre-K curriculum. These different themes promote opportunities for advanced learning, professional development, and the sharing of pedagogical practices. Those in attendance leave the training with a toolkit of knowledge to transfer to other teachers and educational professionals, promoting the sustainability of the GC-DWC’s pedagogical interventions in Haiti.

Coaching visits by these trained professionals at the preschool level play a critical role in ensuring the quality of education provided to Haitian students, helping teachers create a positive and safe learning environment that promotes children's social, emotional, and cognitive development. Through classroom observations, teachers are able to get specific and supportive feedback from trained coaches. Professional development and support is difficult to access in Haiti, particularly for preschool teachers. The GC-DWC is working to find pathways for sustained teacher education and empowerment through local education networks. 


 

Enhancing the Model School Network (MSN)

The GC-DWC has distinguished itself as the leading research partner in The Model School Network (MSN), established in 2013 by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Composed of a coalition of education organizations working in Haiti, the MSN works to improve outcomes for children in Haiti’s Central Plateau through sustainable, multi-layered, data driven, and effective governmental and civil society partnerships. The MSN strategy is to leverage the coalition of partnerships to deliver strategic interventions in a set of school networks in the Central Department to demonstrate key components of an effective system. 

Aiming to enhance the MSN and further activate the school system that surrounds Haitian children, we have built a learning system to enable directors and teachers to make informed decisions on how they can better support student learning, developing a school-based information system (SBIS) framework to meet the needs of the MSN and provide data to respond to the specific Key Performance Indicators. The Framework focused on the demographic data of students and staff, schools’ daily operations, attendance, year-end academic results and GPS. Additionally, they reinforced the Longitudinal Benchmarking & Evaluation Systems (LBES) Database to incorporate SBIS and other data sources. With multiple partners’ data inputs, we are in the process of creating a more user-friendly dashboard backed by a data warehouse that can provide regular information for network, director, teacher and general public queries. The dashboard will be able to show data from various sources in one location.


Resources