When her son was five years old, Faiza started noticing that things were not quite right with him at school. He couldn’t identify alphabets that he had been learning for a year or more. While many of his peers were connecting letters and sounds to form two- or three-letter words, he was struggling to identify any alphabet sounds at all.
“I asked his teachers but they said they hadn’t noticed anything,” Faiza says. “When I pushed the matter, I was told to relax.”
Frustrated by what she saw as a failure on the part of her son’s teachers to identify the problem, she turned for help outside the school. She soon discovered that she was not alone in doing so.
More and more parents are turning to after-school reading programmes to improve their children’s reading abilities
A growing cohort of mothers in Karachi are opting for after-school reading programmes for their children, many of them kindergarten to grade 1 students from some of the best English-medium schools in the city. In most cases, the intent is to teach the child to read in English, from scratch.
Given that imparting literacy and numeracy skills ought to be the core function and responsibility of any school, this is a trend that merits some attention. Is there a fault-line in the school system or are parents panicking without just cause?
The rise of after-school curricular support programmes is a global trend. Unlike tuitions, which are purely remedial teaching, after-school curricular programmes are usually meant to ensure that your child stays ahead of the curve: to scaffold the building right from the start so there is a solid foundation for future learning.
Reading Lab, a library and reading instruction centre for children, located in the Clifton area, has emerged as one of Karachi’s most popular go-to places for early reading instruction in English. The staff is confident about its ability to enable any child on its roster to read — its months-long waiting lists indicate that parents believe this too.
In terms of demographic, the centre is actually at a disadvantage to schools. The average child being enrolled there will not be the star reader of her class; if anything, she will be there because of perceived issues with her ability to read. The question that arises is: what is Reading Lab doing for these children that their schools apparently are not?
Founders Seema Ahmed and Sadia Chaudhry say the answer is simple: their teachers are trained to implement a good phonics-based reading programme from start to finish.
In their desire to be current, schools tend to put together a medley of popular methods (phonics, reading aloud, independent reading) sourced from different models and programmes. The Reading Lab founders believe that when it comes to the actual business of teaching a child how to read, a standardised programme for kindergarten to grade 2 is all that is required. Some children get through the curriculum faster, others slower; but all of them complete the same material from start to finish — no exceptions.
Ahmed says the majority of children who enroll with her are “those 60 percent to 80 percent of average students in any class who only needed exact reading instructions.” It is true that students go for after-school classes only twice a week at Reading Lab, and that the curriculum is not accelerated in any way. Nor do the teachers put undue pressure on students. And yet the success rate is admirable.
Sameera, another mother who sent her daughter for the pre-reading module, affirms this. “I was glad they didn’t force her, and she did end up learning.”
The key factor in eliciting results from a reading programme is expertise. Phonics is the base for reading instruction in most schools now, but Ahmed and Chaudhry assert that it is being used erroneously: sounds are not being taught in a way that develops genuine phonological awareness in children. In fact, there is so much focus on singing and action that most children do not even remember the sounds afterwards.
“The kind of understanding that you bring to the teachers is critical,” says Maria Haque, Director of Academics at Haque Academy, one of Karachi’s reputed English-medium schools. “If there’s no system in place, and the teachers are just doing something ad hoc, then you’re going to have a mess.”
There are no hard answers to the question of whether it is good for after-school reading support programmes to be increasing in popularity as they are in Karachi. Between inflationary trends in education, pedagogical innovation outstripping teacher training, changing family life, and the influx of new media — the situation is complicated, at best.
Haque leads a weekly in-service training programme for her teachers, but that is not the norm in institutions across Karachi. In many schools, sporadic teacher training that aims to induct teachers into entirely new paradigms of teaching practice leads to confusion rather than successful reading instruction. There is usually conceptual merit in pedagogical innovation, but one can also understand the teachers’ frustration and uncertainty when new-fangled methods are introduced with no clear indication of the results that they should achieve.
“We had trainers from abroad,” shares a teacher from another prestigious English-medium school. “They told us not to make the students read aloud in class. They said our aim should be to make children into readers, not newscasters.”
At Reading Lab, each child reads aloud for their teacher for 15 minutes per class. Teachers there understand the direct-instruction approach and are not overburdened by training that exceeds their capacities. Children are clear on what is expected of them, and proceed methodically through a graded curriculum that allows them to demonstrate their progress in every session. It’s old school, but it works.
“Every time a teacher told me to relax, I felt worse,” Faiza recalls. “The idea that my child may have a learning impediment was immediately dismissed. I was the problem.”
One of the first things that the Reading Lab team tells parents who approach them is that they’re not doing something abnormal or terrible by seeking out an after-school programme. After all, they are only looking out for their child’s wellbeing, skill set and sense of self-belief. However, it is also important for parents to understand why teachers may be telling them to relax.
According to Ahmed, children have become the first casualties in a massive inflationary trend in education, triggered by changing social demographics and rising competition in university admissions and the job market.
Over the last 35 years, it has become a school’s job to not only teach language, math, science, history and geography, but to also build a child’s character, bring out her individuality and creativity, help discover her extracurricular talents and leadership potential, and to deliver academic results that rank her among the world’s best. Consequently, curricula start expanding, school hours increase, and parents are called upon more often to play a supporting role in their child’s education.
It is this culture of ramping things up that has worked its way down into grade school, putting children and teachers under enormous pressure and causing parents to panic about whether their five-year-old is lagging behind. Social media further exacerbates the problem: everyone knows what everyone else’s child is doing, and they want in on the action too.
“It’s not healthy for children,” Haque says. “They start feeling they’re not adequate, when they are perfectly adequate.”
To keep parents on board and invested, Haque Academy has an annual orientation where school staff talks to them about the reading programme, and especially the importance of reading to children — a relatively simple activity that few people seem to have the time for anymore.
Research shows that for children to develop reading skills, one of the most important things you can do is to read aloud to them, which also means spending more time together. Children pick up on their parents’ reading behaviours and skills. This simple activity alone can potentially do more than any teacher or any phonics instruction to ensure a child’s reading success in grade school.
But these days, Ahmed notes, “too many kids are raised in absentia by maids because the parents are either busy or on their phones.” Similarly Haque, in her 20 years as an educationist, has witnessed how changes in family lifestyles and priorities impact children’s success in the classroom. As screen time goes up and family time goes down, children are becoming more and more anxious. Aside from completing the curriculum, teachers now spend more time in early speech development and basic behavioural training — also known as parenting.
There are no hard answers to the question of whether it is good for after-school reading support programmes to be increasing in popularity as they are in Karachi. Between inflationary trends in education, pedagogical innovation outstripping teacher training, changing family life, and the influx of new media — the situation is complicated, at best.
What could help is if schools and institutions like Reading Lab started communicating with each other. Methodological insights could help schools introduce more efficiency in their systems. There could even be worthwhile opportunities for long-term collaboration, such as training programmes for teachers and parents.
Parents cannot be faulted for wanting the best for their children’s future, but enrolment in a reading programme cannot be a way of outsourcing their role either. They must ask themselves when their desire for their child’s academic success exceeds the limits of concerned parenting, and becomes an exercise in personal ego. A powerful quote by American writer and academic David W. Orr would suffice here:
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
The writer is the former programme coordinator at Developments in Literacy and holds an MPhil in education from the University of Cambridge
Published in Dawn, EOS, September 17th, 2017