Activating the Home

lakay

Parent Empowerment Programs

Parents are a child’s first teachers. At the GC-DWC, we recognize the importance of the role that parents and caregivers play in their children’s overall development and well-being, and strive to empower parents with science-based innovations and practices to support their children’s growth inside and outside of the classroom. To activate the home (lakay), the GC-DWC has developed and implemented parent workshops and empowerment programs, where parents and caregivers learn about positive parenting, nutrition, and child development.

Our Haiti Parent and Caregiver workshops, hosted in collaboration with local parish communities, unpack the importance and science of positive parenting, social care, alternatives to harsh discipline, and school readiness through a seven to ten-week long course. Session themes include the importance of the parent-child relationship; consistent and responsive care; social emotional and cognitive development connection; self-regulation, discipline, and corporal punishment; wellbeing and self-care; and nutrition. The parents and caregivers leave these workshops with tips and tricks to effectively embed positive parenting into their daily routine.

In 2024, we launched parent workshops specifically formatted for fathers and male caregivers, as well as workshops designed for young parents and young potential parents. This ensures that all workshop sessions contain appropriate objectives for all kinds of parents and caretakers, establishing the best possible outcomes for children and their respective households.

Parent Empowerment Programs and QuIP

Rapid Evaluation, Assessment, and Learning Methodology (REALM) supports the GC-DWC’s refinement and iteration of programming in the home, school, and church, but was not designed to measure whether the L3 ecosystem of the home, school, and church was being activated to support Whole Child Development (WCD) for young children. To measure whether the L3 system was being activated, in 2022 the GC-DWC undertook a holistic, system-wide evaluation (Qualitative Impact Protocol).

The Qualitative Impact Protocol (QuIP) assesses the impact of interventions by collecting narrative statements from program participants. Through the use of open-ended and exploratory questions about changes in expected program outcomes, the QuIP aims to disentangle possible sources of influence by avoiding questions that are specific to the programs being evaluated. According to the QuIP assessments, parent empowerment programs seem to be producing the most effective results.

A majority of parents and teachers identified L3 workshops and support as changing their behaviors to be more supportive of WCD for young children. Many parents reported that they stopped beating their child after the parent empowerment program, and attributed improved overall family well-being to the workshops. Others indicated that they began feeding their children more nutritious food at home.

Resources

Positive Parenting | Video
Eat the Rainbow - Manje Lakansyèl | Video
Success Starts at Home: Positive Discipline | Sikse kòmanse lakay- disiplin pozitif | Video
Success Starts at Home: Activities that will Build a Solid Foundation | Sikse kòmanse lakay - Aktivite ki pou bati yon fondasyon solid | Video
Experience Builds Brain Architecture | Eksperyans yon timoun fè kontribye nan konstwi chapant sèvo li | Video

L3 Systems Activation: Activating School

Activating the School

lekol

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

L3 Systems Activation: Activating Church

Activating the Church

lakay

Sermons and Baptisms

Recognizing that each Catholic parish in Haiti runs a school and is deeply embedded in local culture and home life, GC-DWC Haiti activates parish networks and the church (legliz) system by implementing innovative interventions, such as facilitating training for parish priests to learn how to integrate childhood development messaging into their sermons, and offering baptismal preparation courses to parents, godparents, and other family members that empower them to raise healthy, intelligent, and spiritually alive children—connecting science and theology in how we raise God’s beloved children entrusted to our care.

Community Learning Centers

Activating the church and community surrounding Haitian children has also included partnering with communities in Haiti to establish Community Lesource Centers (CLCs) that provide a space for learning outside of the classroom environment. CLCs are housed within reoutfitted, solar-powered shipping containers which allows for a resilient education system regardless of the limited infrastructure resources, political unrest, and environmental factors that increase Haiti’s vulnerability to school closures. These learning centers are community owned and managed, providing a continuous opportunity for learning and development, and create a space for parents and children to engage in learning together.

CRC

Haitian children need an adaptable education system that includes comprehensive distance learning programs in the event of school closures, as well as year round access to hybrid learning programs that leverage effective practices such as literacy-based curricula, play-based learning, and ed-tech—these learning centers provide that. Also open to out-of-school youth, older students, and adults, the CLCs allow for community wide inclusion and further bolster the GC-DWC’s mission to improve learning outcomes for Haitian children and create sustainable change.

Radio Distance Learning

When COVID-19 necessitated school closures in Haiti in March of 2020, educators and actors had to work quickly to maintain student learning during the crisis. Haiti’s current distance learning program is primarily online; however, only 40% of Haitian households have access to a power source, let alone a reliable internet connection (USAID 2018), that would enable them to use the program.

Recognizing radio as the most democratic and effective means of disseminating learning materials in Haiti during COVID-19, radio programming and a partnership with parish and community radio stations was implemented to aid distance education, and radios were distributed to teachers, parents, and facilitators. The GC-DWC, in collaboration with Catholic Relief Services Haiti (CRS) and the Episcopal Commission for Catholic Education (CEEC), created four radio programs—a literacy program supplemented with a reading hour program, a pre-K social and emotional learning (SEL) and parent engagement program, and another pre-K program that complements the current, school-based early childhood development (ECD) curriculum—as part of a comprehensive approach to distance learning in a low-tech environment. Radio distance learning has aided in additional disaster response through the Systems Activation in Emergencies program, funded by the LEGO Foundation Values Grant, implemented by the GC-DWC following the August 2021 earthquake in Haiti.