During this time when Research Roundtable is on hiatus, I’ve enjoyed looking back at this video with Dr. Anne Smiley. Anne was an Associate Director of Research and Evaluation for our education team at FHI 360 before leaving recently to join the International Rescue Committee – our loss, their gain! The coauthored paper we talk about in this video is research conducted on a mother tongue education program the team implemented in Northeast Nigeria. As Anne says in the video, this work “stems from mounting evidence that foundational literacy skills should be taught in the mother tongue, especially in early grades.”
The education program developed materials in the local Hausa language and trained teachers how to use them. At first the program’s directive coaching model used experts from outside the school system to train the teachers but realized this use of external experts wasn’t sustainable in the long term. So Anne and the team began to also use internal experts (school inspectors) to provide teacher coaching alongside the external actors. Since their program was also collecting data on student learning outcomes, the researchers used the dual coaching approach as an opportunity to measure which method was more successful – external experts or experts already working with the school system.
In the video, Anne and I discuss the main findings from the study’s qualitative analysis and review what impact the work has had across Nigeria.
Remember that you can view all Research Roundtable videos in this YouTube playlist.
