Organisations either grow or decline, but they never stand still. This was one of the first principles I ever learned as a young organisational psychologist and I was never sure whether the original quote came from someone in the Isaac Newton mould (a scientific truth) or from the Buddha himself (one of the Noble Truths). In the end it didn't matter, because it's true; all organisations MUST grow or in fact they will decline, and this is the principle we have applied to NSA from Day One in 2007. Growth is as much about intellectual development as increases in income, resources, and influence, and this is why I must often drive colleagues to the point of insanity by constantly instituting "experiments" in schools, on courses, at events, just to see what will happen and whether we can develop "a better way" or a "new/additional way" of doing something.
We currently have two such experiments underway in Kathmandu, which if successful could make educationalists really sit up in Nepal. Both are being conducted by Babita in two of our partner schools and involve the topics of Phonics and P4C. When she was in the UK recently Babita received a lot of specialist training in these two areas and we are currently running a 12 weeks pilot programme where Babita teaches these two topics for half a day in each school every day.Class 1 & 2 are receiving Phonics lessons to learn to read and speak English, and Classes 3-6 are receiving P4C sessions (renamed by us to V4C,Values For Children). We have conducted perception tests on Classes 3-6 in each school using MALS and QEQ and will retest after 3 months to see if there is any change in the child's perception of their education, the school, their teachers and so on. Separately Babita will continuously assess the children in Class 1 & 2 for progress through Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the UKs Letters & Sounds syllabus.
Will we see any difference in test scores? Will the children's English speaking ability improve? Will children's behaviour change influenced by regular values-based lessons? We certainly hope so, but this is the sort of experiment we MUST conduct before we have the right to train Nepalese teachers in any depth in these topics. We need evidence we can present to the Ministry of Education if we are to grow to our next stage of development, evidence we take for granted in the UK, but this is not acceptable if you are trying to influence a whole country to change!
We cannot leave this article without acknowledging who set us down this path, and we are very grateful to Dr Sue Palmer at The Phonics Academy for her development of our knowledge and thinking about phonics, to Lizzy Lewis at SAPERE for her encouragement to use P4C in the first place, and finally to Jason Buckley, The Philosophy Man, who patiently trained yours truly in the basics of the P4C technique. We would encourage anyone interested in these subjects to visit their respective websites:
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