Let’s design creative solutions for learners
Schools remain closed in Uganda over Covid-19.
What you need to know:
- The issue: Education.
- Our view: We should not only inspect schools for compliance with SOPs but we need to evaluate learners to discover the impacts of the Covid-19 lockdown and devise solutions to correct any misalignment resulting from this long absence from school.
Some children have not been to school in more than a year, since the first school closure of March 2020 when Covid-19 first broke out in the country. Government, through the Ministry of Education, developed reading materials for some of the pupils especially those in hard-to-reach areas where children have no access to television, radio or online lessons.
This arrangement was designed to cover the first lockdown and the period that followed immediately afterwards. Months have gone by and many children, some of them of tender age, have not been anywhere near a classroom. However, we have hope that someday, learning will resume.
However, the question remains, what will these children be like when schools reopen and is our education system getting ready to deal with a new type of learner, with a completely different mindset and one who perhaps must be persuaded afresh that education is a good thing? How will this new type of learner be instructed?
It is unrealistic that with adjusted and shorter timeframes, we expect the children to go back to the old methods of instruction, not factoring in the changes that have taken place in their lives. These children are in their formative years and what we choose to teach them and how we choose to deliver that knowledge will have a lasting effect for life. This is a call to our educators that as we prepare to reopen schools, we should not only inspect schools for compliance with SOPs but we need to evaluate learners to discover the impacts of the Covid-19 lockdown and devise solutions to correct any misalignment resulting from this long absence from school.
Our findings from these investigations will inform long term solutions to address issues arising and will serve as lessons for future interventions in cases of major learning disruptions as we have experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic.
This evaluation does not have to be complicated. It could simply be an exercise of data-gathering before and at the time of schools reopening. Let us not waste this time while the learners sit at home waiting for schools to reopen. Let us make use of the school closure to learn something that we could apply to help our learners cope better when they return to school.
