To further deepen its impacts, improve its processes and ensure that head teachers and teachers maintain the highest possible standards in giving their best to pupils, the Lagos State Universal Basic Education Board’s (LASUBEB) has introduced the Instructional Leadership App for the EKOEXCEL programme.
The App is part of LASUBEB’s efforts to ensure pupils benefit from its innovative methods, plug learning gaps, and improve learning outcomes.
The Instructional Leadership App, among others, allows the school leaders to monitor and respond to issues, including the percentage of lessons completed.
The App also shows every scheduled lesson on a given day and indicates if it was completed. If it wasn’t, it lets the head teachers know the reason.
With the introduction of the App, Head teachers can now see data about their school’s performance compared to the highest performing school and navigate to their own teachers’ performance details.
When queried, the App answers how much of a Lesson Plan was delivered as well as how many minutes did the teacher spend on the lesson compared to how many minutes were scheduled. Based on the answer to these two questions, the app determines whether the lesson is completed or not.
With the App, primary education in Lagos will further improve as all school administrators can assess teachers’ performance and benchmark them against that of other schools.
Commenting on the App’s benefits, LASUBEB Chairman, Honourable Wahab Alawiye-King, explained that it helps keep school leaders on their toes and makes excellence the gold standard of their activities.
He said, “School leaders see data about their school’s performance compared to the highest performing school and navigate to their own teachers’ performance details. Supervisors see data about their performance compared to the highest performing Supervisor and navigate to their assigned schools’ performance and teacher performance details. Regional Managers and Directors see data about all Supervisors and navigate to school leaders and teacher performance details.”
Alawiye-King added that the App also helps administrators know how much of the Lesson Plan was delivered. The time the teacher spent on the lesson compared to the scheduled minutes and the pace.
“Based on the answer to these two questions, the App determines whether the lesson is completed or not completed. It is also invaluable in ascertaining the pace. How much time it took a teacher to deliver the lesson compared to how much time it was expected to take. Teachers must deliver the full Lesson Plan at an appropriate pace for a lesson to be completed. Issues with pacing cause pupils not to experience the full lesson, which leads to gaps in learning.”
Parents recently lauded EKOEXCEL’s impacts, acknowledging its tangible gains at a parent-teacher conference, while a Nobel laureate, Professor Michael Kremer, also commended the methodology underpinning the program administered by technical partners, NewGlobe.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist detailed how pupils tutored with EKOEXCEL’s methodology gain almost an additional year of learning (0.89), learning in two years what their peers in traditional schools learn in nearly three.
For early childhood development (ECD), the gains were even bigger. ECD pupils using the same methodology as EKOEXCEL gained almost an additional year and half of learning (1.48), learning in two years what students in other schools learn in three and a half years.
The findings in Professor Kremer’s study put the learning gains in the top 1% of learning gains ever rigorously studied at scale in low and middle-income countries.
