Enhancing Children's Reading and Social Emotional Skills

The Teacher Foundation proposes to train 1000 Government teachers and School Heads from a rural district of Karnataka, India to improve Foundational Literacy (Reading) Skills and Social Emotional Skills of Children.

It is urgent and important to focus on improving the basic reading skills of children. Reading is a foundational literacy skill that opens up learners to a world of knowledge and lifelong learning. Reading, like Listening is a receptive language skill in that it builds a learner's internal personal repository of ideas, thoughts, awareness. Without such a substantial repository, a learner will never be able to demonstrate their language skills – through the productive skills of speaking and writing.

The Teacher Foundation has developed a validated set of Graded Reading Lists in Kannada for assessing reading levels of primary school goers in Karnataka. The list has been thoroughly researched and carefully developed by a team of linguistic experts from the State of Karnataka in particular, the respected Kannada lexicographer, the late G Venkatasubbaiah.

The Teacher Foundation, will support schools / teachers in improving the reading skills and social emotional skills of children. Language, while being an important instrument for developing thinking, is also an instrument for social and emotional development.

Aims of the Project :

1. Assess the reading skills and Social Emotional skills of children in the age-bands 6-8 years and 9-10 years and ascertain the correlation between the two sets of skills

2.Teachers use a range of effective strategies to enhance reading levels.

3. Teachers use Jenny Mosley's Whole School Quality Circle Time model – a whole school ecosystemic approach to develop social - emotional skills of children and embed a culture of gentleness and positivity in the school. .

Result/ Output:

1000 Government teachers, heads will undergo 4 days of training; 2 rounds of School Based Support; Baseline & Endline Assessment of students on SEL and Reading.

Impact: We will aim for a 30% improvement in the SEL and reading skills in children.

Different components of the programme and the number of training days for each of them are provided below:

1. Baseline & Endline Assessment: Assessment of Children’s Social-emotional Skills (SEL) using scenario-based assessments using TTF’s age-banded Indian Social Emotional Learning Framework (ISELF) – ages 6-8 and 9-10. Baseline and Endline Assessment of Children’s Reading Skills using Graded Reading Assessments – Grades 1-5.

2. Training: Whole School Quality Circle Time – to develop social-emotional skills {1.5 days}

3. Training: on the Graded Reading Assessments – so that teachers can use the validated resource developed by TTF to periodically assess reading levels of children of Grades 1-5 in Kannada {0.5 day}

4. Training: Reading for Real – A training to teachers on strategies to develop Reading Skills amongst children. A valuable Teacher Resource of a set of 24 reading activities developed by TTF for children will be provided to all teachers to make reading an enjoyable experience {2 days}

5. School Based Support: One-on-One Support to teachers through classroom observation and feedback – 2 round