Resources
Building Coherence in Teacher Learning: Teacher practice framework development and implementation in Lebanon
Teachers are expected to do it all: to attend to students’ academic, social, and emotional, skills while finding time to plan, grade, and develop professionally. In the wake of COVID-19 school closures, they are expected to remediate for loss of learning, target instruction to multiple skill levels, and ensure a safe learning environment. But they are currently provided with only a “patchwork of opportunities” to build such skills, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and humanitarian contexts, where teachers are especially crucial. This approach to professional development does not provide an opportunity to build expertise in the teaching practices that are required to fulfill such wide-ranging expectations.
Now more than ever: Strengthening systems for social and emotional skills and well-being assessment during the COVID-19 pandemic in Lebanon and Peru
In many countries, the outbreak of COVID-19 compounded crises vulnerable populations are facing. Children are among the most vulnerable, due to the potential for adverse impacts on emerging neurobiological, cognitive, social, emotional, and physiological developmental systems. That is why now more than ever, coherent, timely, and cost-effective policy responses are needed to support children’s remarkable capacities for resilience. But the ability to develop meaningful policy responses is predicated upon education systems’ own capacities for rapidly generating and using evidence on how children, caregivers, teachers, and principals are doing and what they are experiencing. In this brief, we share efforts NYU-TIES has taken in collaboration with government agencies in Lebanon and Peru and with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Lebanon to strengthen education systems’ capacity for assessing social and emotional skills and well-being among host-country and refugee populations.
The Impact of IRC’s Healing Classrooms Tutoring on Children’s Learning and Social-Emotional Outcomes in Niger
During school year 2016-2017, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) delivered Healing Classrooms remedial tutoring programming and additional low-cost, targeted Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) (SEL) interventions to children in Diffa, a region in Niger affected by recurrent Boko Haram attacks. We found that, after twenty-two weeks of program implementation, access to Healing Classrooms tutoring significantly improved students’ reading and math skills, and adding targeted SEL interventions to Healing Classrooms tutoring improved children’s overall school grades. However, we found little evidence of direct impacts of the additional targeted SEL strategies on children’s social-emotional outcomes.