Jump over words, learning is fun

“Jump to your left and land on the word ‘tomate,’” the teacher instructs. 

Ten-year-old Giselle laughs as she skips in front of her classmates at Saint Paul Primary School, in Bangui’s sprawling Ouango neighbourhood. 

Earlier, her teacher, Aririatou Mahaman, had placed six sheets of paper on the floor, each bearing a different word. Giselle picks up one of the sheets, holds it up for the class to see and loudly spells out the word, as her 35 classmates cheer and clap.

Aririatou shares their enthusiasm. 

She has a powerful reason to be hopeful:

One week earlier, Aririatou was at her desk evaluating all the children from her classroom, one by one, in basic reading and mathematics skills. Nine-year old Dieufera was one of them. This exercise, which was done by all the primary teachers, took five days. “This was the first step,” she explains. “Then, we placed all our students at four different levels, regardless of their age or grade. This week, we are starting with all the different groups, and the beginning is very encouraging,” she concludes. 

Dieufera has been placed at the basic level. While he quietly learns letters and words through play with his classmates, he is already dreaming big about his future—one he hopes will be brighter than the difficult past he has recently left behind.

“I walk to school every day. I like it because I learn lots of things and make lots of friends here. When I grow up, I want to study to become a doctor, so that no child loses their parents to illness, as happened to me.”

We are in the month of August, and the pupils of St Paul are still on their school holiday. But coming to the classroom was not a problem for them, nor for their teachers. Saint Paul is one of the 25 schools in the Central African Republic selected to take part in the experimental phase of a new pedagogical approach known as Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), which has shown significant impact in schools across Africa.

UNICEF, in partnership with the Ministry of Education, is taking steps to introduce the approach in Bangui, as well as in the prefectures of Ombella Mpoko, Kemo, Lobaye and Nana-Mambere, targeting 100 schools, with over 27,000 children. The TaRL sessions shall take be added as extra classes, in parallel to the regular curriculum with the regular grades. This programme is made possible thanks to a generous grant from the European Union, completed with UNICEF’s own funds. 

The first step in rolling out this programme was a 10-day training course on the TaRL method, held in Boali in mid-July for 70 district officials from the Ministry. The trainees then became trainers themselves, cascading the training to 100 teachers in their respective prefectures, who spent five days learning the basic principles of TaRL.

Aririatou was one of them, and she was immediately drawn to one of the method’s most engaging features:

The core of the TaRL approach is grouping children by their actual learning level rather than their age or grade, in order to fill the gaps in knowledge and help them progress more quickly. It focuses on building basic reading and math skills through fun, interactive activities. At the end of the evaluation week, the children in Saint Paul’s were placed in four different levels of language skills: letter, word, paragraph and story. 

The TaRL method started in in India 20 years ago, to help children who had a poor base in reading and mathematics. In 2018 it was introduced in Africa, and ever since it has spread in a dozen countries of the continent.

Thato Letsomo, from NGO Street Children, a partner with UNICEF, was the main facilitator of the initial training course. 

Born in Botswana, her eight years of experience has given her a general vision of the advantages of TaRL: “A very common problem in African countries is that teachers must deal in the same classroom with children who have very different levels. Consequently, they spend years and years seeing that many children don’t learn anything, and this lack of progress breeds a lot of frustration on teachers, children and their parents. The only solution is to group pupils at the level in which they really are and start from there.”  

Putting this method into practice in CAR is critical. UNICEF’s updated data indicate that, for those who attend school, only 1 in 10 children can read at expected levels after seven years of primary education, and fewer than 1 in 50 reach the expected level in mathematics. But implementing the TaRL will not come without come challenges, as Francoise Ngouzoumandji, one of the Ministry officials who attended the initial course, points out: “This is a great method, which demands giving a lot of individual attention to each child. The challenge for us, in CAR, is that often we have overcrowded classrooms, and teachers get overwhelmed by the high number of students they have in front of them.”

But Ariratou Mahaman, who has been a teacher of Primary 3 for four years, appears undeterred by this difficulty. “I followed the TaRL one-week training, and I came out convinced that, if we put what we learn into practice, we could do a lot of good change in our schools, because it encourages the children’s participation.” Her conviction is matched by her love for her work, which she regards as a vocation: “I love working with children. I am a mother of four and I feel proud that my first born, a girl who has just turned 19, has just completed her secondary school with good marks.”

The game of jumping over words has continued, with game Aririatou leading a song to keep everyone’s attention: “Papillon legère, bole, bole, bole…” Then, she switches to mathematics: “Mouna has 45 sweets and her mother adds 28 more sweets. How many sweets does Mouna has now?”

To help them solve the calculation, she takes out a bundle of small sticks and tells the children to start counting. The whole class calls out the numbers loudly. Some of them seem disappointed that their teacher is making them practice with sticks, and not with actual sweets.