Be part of the volunteer force that will light up Ajegunle Apapa, Lagos as Greenhive Concepts partners with Passion House to hold “Project Clean and Recycle” on 14th December 2013.
Meeting point: L.A. Primary School, Ago-Hausa, Ajegunle, Lagos.
Time: 8am
Invite your friends as it promises to be engaging and fun.
To improve the state of education in our schools, here are my suggestions;
To add more details, please carefully study the insert below: (culled from http://www.edutopia.org/big-ideas-better-schools)
Students
1. Engage: Project-Based Learning
Students go beyond the textbook to study complex topics based on real-world issues, such as the water quality in their communities or the history of their town, analyzing information from multiple sources, including the Internet and interviews with experts. Project-based classwork is more demanding than traditional book-based instruction, where students may just memorize facts from a single source. Instead, students utilize original documents and data, mastering principles covered in traditional courses but learning them in more meaningful ways. Projects can last weeks; multiple projects can cover entire courses. Student work is presented to audiences beyond the teacher, including parents and community groups.
Reality Check: At the Clear View Charter School, in Chula Vista, California, fourth- and fifth-grade students collected insect specimens, studied them under an electron microscope via a fiber-optic link to a nearby university, used Internet resources for their reports, and discussed their findings with university entomologists.
2. Connect: Integrated Studies
Studies should enable students to reach across traditional disciplines and explore their relationships, like James Burke described in his book Connections. History, literature, and art can be interwoven and studied together. Integrated studies enable subjects to be investigated using many forms of knowledge and expression, as literacy skills are expanded beyond the traditional focus on words and numbers to include graphics, color, music, and motion.
Reality Check: Through a national project called Nature Mapping, fourth-grade students in rural Washington learn reading, writing, mathematics, science, and technology use while searching for rare lizards.
3. Share: Cooperative Learning
Working together on project teams and guided by trained teachers, students learn the skills of collaborating, managing emotions, and resolving conflicts in groups. Each member of the team is responsible for learning the subject matter as well as helping teammates to learn. Cooperative learning develops social and emotional skills, providing a valuable foundation for their lives as workers, family members, and citizens.
Reality Check: In Eeva Reeder’s tenth-grade geometry class at Mountlake Terrace High School, near Seattle, student teams design “schools of the future” while mentoring with local architects. They manage deadlines and resolve differences to produce models, budgets, and reports far beyond what an individual student could accomplish.
4. Expand: Comprehensive Assessment
Assessment should be expanded beyond simple test scores to instead provide a detailed, continuous profile of student strengths and weaknesses. Teachers, parents, and individual students can closely monitor academic progress and use the assessment to focus on areas that need improvement. Tests should be an opportunity for students to learn from their mistakes, retake the test, and improve their scores.
Reality Check: At the Key Learning Community, in Indianapolis, teachers employ written rubrics to assess students’ strengths and weaknesses using categories based on Howard Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences, including spatial, musical, and interpersonal skills.
Teachers
5. Coach: Intellectual and Emotional Guide
The most important role for teachers is to coach and guide students through the learning process, giving special attention to nurturing a student’s interests and self-confidence. As technology provides more curricula, teachers can spend less time lecturing entire classes and more time mentoring students as individuals and tutoring them in areas in which they need help or seek additional challenges.
Reality Check: Brooklyn fifth-grade teacher Sarah Button uses exercises and simulations from the Resolving Conflict Creatively Program with her students, helping them learn empathy, cooperation, positive expression of feelings, and appreciation of diversity.
6. Learn: Teaching as Apprenticeship
Preparation for a teaching career should follow the model of apprenticeships, in which novices learn from experienced masters. Student teachers should spend less time in lecture halls learning educational theory and more time in classrooms, working directly with students and master teachers. Teaching skills should be continually sharpened, with time to take courses, attend conferences, and share lessons and tips with other teachers, online and in person.
Reality Check: Online communities such as Middle Web, the Teacher Leaders Network, and the Teachers Network bring novice and expert educators together in a Web-based professional community. The online mentorship gives novice teachers access to accomplished practitioners eager to strengthen the profession at its roots.
Schools
7. Adopt: Technology
The intelligent use of technology can transform and improve almost every aspect of school, modernizing the nature of curriculum, student assignments, parental connections, and administration. Online curricula now include lesson plans, simulations, and demonstrations for classroom use and review. With online connections, students can share their work and communicate more productively and creatively. Teachers can maintain records and assessments using software tools and stay in close touch with students and families via email and voicemail. Schools can reduce administrative costs by using technology tools, as other fields have done, and provide more funds for the classroom.
Reality Check: Students in Geoff Ruth’s high school chemistry class at Leadership High School, in San Francisco, have abandoned their textbooks. Instead, they plan, research, and implement their experiments using material gathered online from reliable chemistry resources.
8. Reorganize: Resources
Resources of time, money, and facilities must be restructured. The school day should allow for more in-depth project work beyond the 45-minute period, including block scheduling of classes two hours or longer. Schools should not close for a three-month summer vacation, but should remain open for student activities, teacher development, and community use. Through the practice of looping, elementary school teachers stay with a class for two or more years, deepening their relationships with students. More money in school districts should be directed to the classroom rather than the bureaucracy.
New school construction and renovation should emphasize school design that supports students and teachers collaborating in teams, with pervasive access to technology. Schools can be redesigned to also serve as community centers that provide health and social services for families, as well as counseling and parenting classes.
Reality Check: The school year at the Alice Carlson Applied Learning Center, in Fort Worth, Texas, consists of four blocks of about nine weeks each. Intersession workshops allow its K-5 students time for hands-on arts, science, and computer projects or sports in addition to language arts and math enrichment.
Communities
9. Involve: Parents
When schoolwork involves parents, students learn more. Parents and other caregivers are a child’s first teachers and can instill values that encourage school learning. Schools should build strong alliances with parents and welcome their active participation in the classroom. Educators should inform parents of the school’s educational goals, the importance of high expectations for each child, and ways of assisting with homework and classroom lessons.
Reality Check: In the Sacramento Unified School District, teachers make home visits to students’ families. Teachers gain a better understanding of their students’ home environment, and parents see that teachers are committed to forging closer home-school bonds. If English is not spoken in the home, translators accompany the teachers.
10. Include: Community Partners
Partnerships with a wide range of community organizations, including business, higher education, museums, and government agencies, provide critically needed materials, technology, and experiences for students and teachers. These groups expose students and teachers to the world of work through school-to-career programs and internships. Schools should enlist professionals to act as instructors and mentors for students.
Reality Check: At the Minnesota Business Academy, in St. Paul, businesses ranging from a newspaper to a stock brokerage to an engineering firm provide internships for three to four hours per day, twice each week. BestPrep, a philanthropic state business group, spearheaded an effort that renovated an old science building for school use.
Ndukwu Michael C. is an environment/community development enthusiast, the Initiator/Team Leader, Greenhive Concepts; and currently a Systems Management Scholar at Aptech Computer Centre, Lagos.
What came to your mind when you saw the title? In a biology class, a question was asked, “Mention types of systems you know”, and a young lad jumped up and said aloud, “Political system”! Quite funny, isn’t it? Of course, you must have thought of several systems like gear system, circulatory system, information system or maybe political system like the young lad. Well, Oxford Dictionary defines system as a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method. I like the definition in the same dictionary that defines system as a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or interconnecting network; a complex whole. However, permit me to switch the phrase “set of things” with the words, “group of persons”. So a new definition might be, system is a group of persons working together as parts of a mechanism or interconnecting network.
The society we find ourselves is a complex whole that comprises of persons that are supposed to be contributors to a mechanism or network. Talking about the body system, it is fashioned in such a way that the various parts are contributors to the whole, -the body system. Likewise the political system is a system designed to ensure effective governance of the people. The case of widespread hunger and poverty in the midst of plenty as experienced in countries of the world is an experience of a failed political system devoid of passion for good governance through an effective working system. As an introduction, permit me to introduce to you, “PASSION SYSTEM”.
I define passion system as a system where components of a mechanism work with intense emotion compelling them in order to achieve set goals. Sounds new? It is said that after all said and done, not all said is done. Resolutions and counter-resolutions have formed part of our polity and the ‘grass’ suffer from the crack in the system. I attribute this to the lack of passion. Mind you this lack is not one sided. As a matter of fact, the grassroots have failed a lot in their duties. There is no functional political system without the people led. Ultimately, the power of leadership is in the hands of the people. The flourishing of a state is dependent of the desire and passion of the people. Have you taken time to look at your thumb? Have you bitten your thumb before? You should do something as it will remind you of something called, ‘voting power’. Those aside, have you taken time to think of a country of your dreams? Have you ever thought of a country free to a great extent from economic, political, environmental waste, or any kind of waste that comes to mind? Do you know that you have failed on our part in achieving this? Me?
Yes, YOU! I mean you reading this.
You wish to know how?
Join me in part 2 of this series.
Michael C. Ndukwu
Initiator, Greenhive Concepts.
From the human body to the kitchen and back, to the sewage and all that, waste generation is an everyday affair and the means of managing it also is. Like we have seen, waste comes from different sources and proper measures should be taken to manage them, else it might result in pollution or ill-health. This article is dedicated to taking a view to the Nigerian perspective on waste management.
According to Wikipedia, waste management is the collection, transport, processing or disposal, managing and monitoring of waste materials. The term usually relates to materials produced by human activity, and the process is generally undertaken to reduce their effect on health, the environment or aesthetics. Waste management is a distinct practice from resource recovery which focuses on delaying the rate of consumption of natural resources. All wastes materials, whether they are solid, liquid, gaseous or radioactive fall within the remit of waste management.
The detailed definition of waste management above gives clear information to the fact that waste management entails a lot. Wikipedia went on to say that, “Management of non-hazardous waste residential and institutional waste in metropolitan areas is usually the responsibility of local government authorities, while management for non-hazardous commercial and industrial waste is usually the responsibility of the generator subject to local, national or international controls”. This means that for effective management of waste in Nigeria, the three tiers of government should be actively involved.
So far, this does not seem to be the case with the high increase in waste and little is actually done to salvage the situation. There is just a handful of waste management sites commensurate to the amount of waste disposed. There are a lot of dump sites that are not monitored. Even more is the fact that Nigeria has issues with data generation and management especially as it relates to the subject matter. For the sake of effective waste management, this should be corrected.
As earlier stated, the local, state and federal governments have a lot of work to do in order to ensure that the effect of indiscriminate waste disposal should be brought to its barest minimum. They should have active structures in place that should be responsible for rule development, waste management policy, financial assurance compliance, and implementing waste management program. A technical assistance unit should provide support to the control structures or offices that are concerned with the permitting, compliance, and enforcement activities associated with waste facilities. These facilities can include landfills, material recovery facilities, transfer stations, composting/processing facilities, and waste tire management sites.
Practices such as these should be encouraged that will help reduce the amount of waste needed to be disposed of, such as waste prevention, recycling, and composting.
In all, there are no better ways to resolve the issue of waste than education. I mean environmental education. In Nigeria, it is only a topic for undergraduate and graduate school. For us to effective manage waste in Nigeria, our children should actually know why they should not litter, why they should not filled the gutters with filth, why they should not throw stuffs from the bus vent or window and much more. This is one of the programs I and my volunteer team, Greenhive Concepts is working on as well as other community development programs/projects.
Ndukwu Michael C. is an environment/community development enthusiast, the Initiator/Team Leader, Greenhive Concepts; and currently a Systems Management Scholar at Aptech Computer Centre, Lagos.
mcndukwu@ymail.com
Greenhive Concepts 