Getting on top of your project requires a positive attitude throughout the project cycle. The initializing stage demands an open mind as brainstorming takes place. A lot of patience and sensitivity to project uncertainties, complexities and risks must be exhibited in the planning stage as tasks and risk ownership are assigned to the project team. In the execution stage the project manager needs to exercise good leadership as the team members execute the various project activities. He must ensure that he has a highly motivated team and he must display competent communication skills to avoid uncertainty or "unknown-knowns" on the project resulting from information gaps or blurry information flow. He must ensure that the project activities fall within budget, scope and schedule. The project manager needs to make clever trade-offs as he will often be faced with adjustments to the budget or the project scope. In the controlling and monitoring stage, a clever project manager will ensure project activities strategically aligned to the business goals and objectives do not go off tangent through the use of a rigorous monitoring and evaluation mechanism. And finally he closes off the project by ensuring a highly competent integrative process between project closure and the operational process prior to handover to the client.
Among the educational thematic areas of Early Childhood Care, Development and Education (ECCDE), Universal Primary Education (with special emphasis for the children with special education needs (CSEN) and the orphans and vulnerable children), Life Skills and Tertiary Education, Adult Education and Literacy (AEL) and finally Gender and Equity, a number of activities have been run and funded to help deliver the tangible and intangible products (goods and services) aimed at achieving the main objectives or goals driving these educational themes.
To effectively deliver these products, governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), Faith Based Organisations and the international development agencies used and are still using a plethora of projects to help achieve their strategic aims in contributing to the attainment of the general and overall aims of these educational objectives as spelt out in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and Education For All (EFA) goals. As we draw towards the 2015 MDGs deadline, it would be important to know how far these educational objectives have been achieved. It is important to know the successes and failures as well as lessons learned from the execution and implementation or delivery of the projects that were tasked to help achieve these important goals. It is important here to stress that whoever is entrusted to run these education focused projects or programmes must do so with the critical project success factors in mind if effective and successful delivery of these important goals is to be achieved. We know that all projects are constrained by budget, time and scope. It is this triple constraint or the ‘iron triangle’ that makes many project managers so fixated as they try to make ‘trade-offs’ to avoid schedule overruns, overspending the budget and the trap of scope creep that they more often than not, fail to pay attention to other project risks and uncertainties, effective stakeholder engagement, human resources management and most importantly, quality delivery of the project product. And we know that once the quality has been compromised, the project is a failure because it would have delivered a service or product that falls below client expectation or standard. And this critical client or stakeholder is the boy or girl who wakes up every morning either without access to education, or attending an education system that does not deliver. David K. Sitondo Executive Director Baruthi ECS Network www.baruthinetwork.org Effective teaching and learning needs to take place in order for schools to perform to the nation’s expectation. Grant-aided and private schools pay particular attention to what happens in the classroom. Teaching and learning resources are a priority for any meaningful education to take place in the classroom. Teachers need the teaching aids required to effectively and
successfully deliver their lessons. Pupils need the necessary learning materials to help them engage with the lessons at hand. Effective teaching requires a manageable class size so that the teacher has ample individual attention for the learners so that he is able to assess his learners’ individual progress and challenges as the lesson is progressing. This practice, called Assessment for Learning (AfL) helps the teacher know and gauge the progress of the child on a daily basis throughout the course of learning and makes appropriate differentiated approaches in his teaching style to meet the individual learning needs of his pupils. This can only be possible in a class where the teacher-pupil ratio is small. The challenge in government schools is that large class sizes make this impossible and learning does not therefore take place. Teachers need continuous support in their job as each pupil that enters the classroom has his own individual learning style and needs. A lot of teachers are left at their own devices in most government schools with no professional mentoring from senior teachers who may either be overloaded with work or are also not up to scratch with modern teaching methods that engage pupils to learn with higher order thinking skills, creativity and curiosity. Our Zambian pupils are distracted by a lot of things in this modern era and unless the teachers’ approaches and methods are aimed at addressing the inquisitive and creative mind of today’s learners, then no learning will be taking place in the classrooms. Therefore, it is important that teachers at school level engage in professional mentoring, team teaching and bespoke professional development workshops tailored to addresses the learning and teaching needs of their individual schools. Such practices are easy to carry out in most private schools because there is no red tape when it comes to embracing and implementing change that brings positive results in the classroom. Teacher and pupil discipline is paramount in implementing successful teaching and learning practices. Grant aided and private schools have high discipline benchmarks set for both their teachers and pupils. Punctuality among teachers is never compromised. Each minute is accounted for. Professional ethics are discussed and emphasised. School managers demand high discipline and professionalism at all times. They do not relent on enforcing these. In most government schools, school managers do not seem to have the muscle to call an erring staff to order. The bureaucracy involved in disciplining the teachers makes the head teachers relent and succumb to their teachers’ impunity. This has a knock-on effect in the entire teaching-learning process and the ultimate victim of teacher indiscipline is often the learner who will never recover his or her lost time. Notwithstanding all these issues above, the government teachers do largely execute their job with zeal but are quite often encumbered with numerous challenges which their colleagues in grant aided and private schools do not face. Grant aided and private schools often select, for admission, pupils with very high marks compared to the majority of the government schools. This gives them higher numbers of high academic achievers and well motivated learners. Pupils in private schools are motivated by the fact that their parents are paying a lot of money to invest in their education and often such parents have a keen interest in their children’s performance thereby they play a key role in motivating them to learn. Teachers in government schools largely have to deal with less motivated and low achieving pupils whose scores could not see them into top-class grant aided schools. Teachers often find this challenging compounded by overcrowded classrooms, lack of textbooks and teaching aids. Consequently they get frustrated and their morale drops hence affecting the efficacy of their teaching. The most disadvantaged are teachers in rural schools living in deplorable housing conditions and with no access to facilities enjoyed by their urban counterparts. This in itself is less motivating and gradually compromises the teachers’ effectiveness at their job. Much as we talk about the introduction of local languages in our schools to boost our literacy levels and produce good results, we also need to look at other factors that promote teaching and learning. Teacher Job: Self-worth and
Self-motivation A lot of philosophical and academic questions have been asked about teaching: whether it is a profession or not; whether it is a thankless job or not and whether it is a noble job or not. Depending on who is answering and what they focus on as they answer, the effects of those answers have been very encouraging and positive or very discouraging and negative. As a teacher and your response or reactions to these answers depend on what your values are, both as a person and as a teacher. Self esteem or self worth starts with you. No one can hold you in high esteem if you do not hold yourself in that regard. No one can value your job if you do not value it yourself. No one can respect your job if you do not respect it yourself. Your job will be perceived by others based on how you feel about it. If you are not a proud teacher and you go round showing that you are not proud of your job and what you are trained to do then you are selling yourself to the outsiders as a dissatisfied and misplaced employee who chose to waste time studying for a career that does not satisfy you and which you do not believe in. This attitude translates itself into negative attitude towards work, frequent criticisms of anything about your job or your supervisors, mounting frustrations towards your pupils and colleagues and finally lack of motivation for anything professional. Once you are in this stage described above, we say you are“stuck in a rut”. This is not a good state of being for any professional especially if you do not have alternative escape routes. And before you realise it, you would have been a dissatisfied and grumbling teacher for ten years without any progress! How does one get out of this rut? Firstly you need a positive mindset. Love your job and love what you do. It may have been your first choice career or you have found yourself doing it by accident. But what will make you vibrant, innovative and motivated is first to love what you are doing and give it your best shot! This will boost your ability to exploit all the abilities and talents God has given you. You will adequately sharpen and develop your interpersonal skills as you interact with colleagues, pupils, employers and parents. You will sharpen and develop your management skills as you do your best to manage time, resources, people and programmes entrusted to you. You will sharpen and develop your planning, monitoring and evaluation skills as you run your day to day teaching programme with assessments and evaluations of the best practices and lessons learnt from the previous experiences. You will sharpen and develop your communication skills as you continue developing ways and strategies of formulating questions that provoke thinking and creativity, as you master the art of questioning techniques that produce desired answers and goals, as you effectively communicate new concepts and ideas with impeccable clarity with a goal of transmitting new knowledge to your clients. The mastery of these skills not only helps build you into a formidable and competent professional, they also transform you into a self-developed individual that has the drive to excel at any task thrown into your face because you are already a highly motivated person. You have driven yourself to that level! It is such self-motivation and drive that will make you stand out among many colleagues. It is such a personal drive that will later see you fully equipped to take on huge challenges later in life. A lot of great leaders heading various national and international organisations have passed through this career as teachers themselves, but because they were highly motivated teachers during their time, their personal and professional development has also rewarded them by taking the career further to very high levels as leaders in senior roles of responsibilities. So teachers, self motivation and passion for whatever you are doing, is the only way you can achieve satisfaction and growth in your career regardless of whether you are in a rural or urban set up. It is undeniable that education is vital
in developing the human capital of any society or nation. An educated citizenry will be better placed to actively participate in the economic, health and democratic institutions of its own society or nation. An educated citizenry is a powerful reservoir of skills and knowledge that can propel economic development and poverty reduction when appropriately placed in relevant sectors of the economy. It is therefore important that the business community must view education as a critical component in their corporate social responsibility programmes. Educated citizens provide the much sort after expertise for productivity, sales and management required in businesses in order for them to remain vibrant. The business communities are indispensable partners in education development. They need to take up the opportunity to partner with education agencies and help them deliver quality education. A big number of international corporations and local business entities have done this for decades, but the need for more support is still there. For a very long time girl child
empowerment has been synonymous with getting the girl child enrolled into school or giving financial support in form of scholarship to enable the girl child complete school. Other measures have been the re-entry policy where a girl child who drops out of school due to pregnancy is allowed back to continue school after giving birth. However as focus shifts towards quality education, the question still remains whether putting the girl child in school is in itself enough empowerment. Most girls leave secondary schools still ill-equipped in numeracy, literacy, critical thinking skills and other social skills that equip them for their roles outside school. They still grapple with finding their position in society as empowered girls because very little has been done to develop their skills, values, attitudes and knowledge. Many leave school still trapped in their cultural beliefs and traditions that the girl child’s place is in the kitchen. They still believe that marriage gives them social status hence many are not bothered with continuing with tertiary education. Many still accept violence against them because of their beliefs in being subservient to the men thus allowing gender based violence to go unabated. The girl child still leaves school with a mindset that she has to depend on a man for economic survival. When girls leave school as adolescents with such mindsets, then it cannot be argued that they have been empowered. Their personal, social and economic skills have to be well developed in order for them to find their place in society as empowered girls. |