I have been an educator for the past 36 years. In addition to being a teacher, counselor and area administrator, I was a school principal in the Seattle School District, Seattle, Washington for over 20 years. In 1984 I began teaching part time at the University of Washington in Seattle, in the Leadership Preparation Program. Since retiring from Seattle Schools in 1997, I have worked almost full-time at the University, both in the Leadership Preparation Program and at the Center for Educational Leadership. In addition, I have provided training for practicing school principals from many parts of the world since the early '90s.
Students in a very rural and very poor school in Takeo Province lining up for the morning pledge of allegiance. Note the wood at their feet. They used to bring wood each day to fuel the fire for the breakfast program sponsored by the World Food Program, which has since stopped supporting Cambodian schools in this way.For the past four years my wife, Kathy, and I have traveled to Cambodia for a month to two months at a time to volunteer in various schools. During the month of February, 2003, I visited twenty nine public schools in Phnom Penh and Kandal, Takeo and Kampot Provinces. I interviewed school directors (principals), learning as best I could what the current realities are for the leaders of Cambodia's schools. In those interviews, and resulting dialogues, patterns emerged.
One of the most consistent was that, due to Cambodia's history over the past 30 years, few, if any, of the school directors had any formal preparation to become school directors. There are Teacher Training Centers to prepare classroom teachers, but there is no comparable School Director Training Center. In addition, most of the training opportunities for directors, once they become directors, are about administration, management and compliance.
As I listened to school directors, I discovered that for many there is a hunger to learn more about how to do better the incredibly difficult job of school leadership. They seemed eager to expand their areas of knowledge and to learn new skills. In February I submitted a proposal to the Ministry of Education in Cambodia, offering to provide leadership training for 40 directors, over a period of one year. I offered to work as a volunteer and asked that the directors be paid an extra stipend for the training days. The proposal was accepted and I begin in October, 2003.
John Morefield (fourth from right) and school director (fourth from left) in front of a school recently built in a relocated community outside of Phnom Penh after a fire destroyed the homes of thousands of very poor families. The other men are teachers and other support staff.
It is my intent to keep an online journal with New Horizons For Learning as I work with the school directors. I have never done professional development work in a developing country before. All of my experience has been with school principals and teachers in developed countries. Perhaps those of you reading this journal will have ideas to help me as the year progresses. I would appreciate any and all feedback. I hope to be as candid and transparent as possible. I hope to share all of the pain and joy of the work.
It might help to have a little background about why Kathy and I chose to be in Cambodia in the first place. It began in 1999 when we went to Southeast Asia to visit our youngest son, who was traveling around Asia. Ankhor Wat in Cambodia was an amazing site to see, but the poverty was unbelievable. It is profoundly difficult, I believe, to be a tourist in a developing country. We felt like millionaires compared to those we met. We promised ourselves that we would return, but not as tourists. We returned to Cambodia three times since then, and with each visit we've grown increasingly more aware of the poverty and suffering of its people.
This is the director of the school in Takeo province showing the author the school kitchen.
The poverty in Cambodia is largely a result of war. A war that our own country contributed to when, from 1969 to 1973, without Congressional knowledge, we dropped over a half-million tons of bombs in eastern Cambodia. The bombs killed over 150,000 people and created a million homeless refugees. Many joined the ranks of the Khmer Rouge and for four years that army, led by Pol Pot, took control of the country and waged a brutal campaign of genocide and terror.
Cambodia lost a fourth of its people during those four years to starvation, disease, forced labor, torture and murder. You've probably heard the stories. Tens of thousands of human remains – men, women and children - lie in what have come to be called the killing fields throughout Cambodia. Buddhist monks, teachers, doctors, engineers and their families were among the executed. Children were separated from their parents, husbands from wives. Temples, hospitals, universities and schools were destroyed. Books burned. Electric and water systems destroyed. Roads reduced to rubble. In less than four years, a whole civilization was gone.
The war ended in 1979 and was followed by ten years of Vietnamese occupation. Most of the roads are still rubble even in the cities. Phones and electricity do not exist in most of the country. The clean abundant water that we all take for granted is not within reach of the majority of Cambodians. Malnutrition is prevalent and twenty percent of all children die before the age of five. Health care is available only for the rich. The education system is broken. Poverty is extreme. HIV/AIDS is growing dramatically and it is estimated that over 60,000 children in that tiny country are AIDS orphans.
The war continues to kill civilians. There are an estimated four to six million land mines buried in Cambodian soil on roads, footpaths, farms and forests. Half of those who step on land mines die. The others are maimed and/or blinded. Most of them are women and children looking for food and firewood. One out of every 236 Cambodians is an amputee.
People learned during the war to keep to themselves, that trusting others could lead to torture and death. Many were forced to "confess" and accuse neighbors and family members of treason. They used extreme measures to survive as they watched their children die of starvation and disease. Corruption, crime, alcoholism, distrust, post-traumatic stress and fear are the legacy. It will take generations to recover. Restoration in Cambodia is a slow tedious process, but there is restoration, one person at a time, one day at a time. Caring, compassionate people work hard to rebuild their society. It is a privilege to work among them.
A fourth grade class in a school outside a small town in Kampot Province.
Life in schools in Cambodia is challenging. The life of teachers and directors is daunting. The following section is taken from my journal notes as I interviewed school directors last February. It is a brief summary, through my Western eyes, of aspects of public education in the country. These comments come from my observations, research and conversations with Cambodian educators.
Current Reality of Cambodian Education
During the month of February, 2003, I interviewed and shadowed school directors from twenty nine different schools in three provinces (Takeo, Kandal and Kampot) and the city of Phnom Penh. Many of them were appointed around 1979, shortly after the time of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. They were young at the time and few of them were "qualified" to be leaders. Only a handful were even high school graduates.
School directors are political appointees in a hierarchical and politicized system. They must not only "manage" the school, but do it in a way that closely follows the complex requirements of the Ministry of Education.
Directors have no preparation to become school directors. Most newer directors were deputy directors (assistant principals) first. If they had a competent director to work with, they had the opportunity to learn good practice. If not, they simply did what was modeled and operated on their own intuition. Almost all schools have one or two deputy directors, depending on the size of the school.
Teachers work only half-time and make about $25 per month. They all must have other jobs in order to survive. If they improve their skills it is because they are personally committed to the children, not because of any external support or incentive. The Educational Quality Improvement Project (EQIP), funded by the World Bank, however, has been paying teachers $2 per day for training in three provinces since 1998.
Public education is supposedly free in Cambodia. This is true in most of the country, but a large number of teachers in Phnom Penh charge children 500 riel a day (12 cents). This results in thousands of children not being able to go to school. According to Save the Children Norway, Phnom Penh has an estimated 10-20,000 street children and children living in slums or the dump that have no opportunity to go to school.
There is significant over crowding in the schools and there are not enough schools to accommodate all of the children. The country needs a comprehensive building campaign to create more schools. In every school there is a double shift and, in some schools, triple shifts, in order to meet the need. Teachers only get paid for one shift, so there are two or three completely different sets of teachers in every school. It makes community building with staff very difficult.
Staff at an elementary school in Kampot Province. The woman is assistant director, and the man in white next to her is the director.
School directors also make $25 per month but work all shifts. Most were invited by the ministry to be directors and felt that they could not say "no". They work incredibly long hours, get little compensation and, unlike teachers, have no time to work another job to supplement their incomes. In addition they are continually being told by the Ministry (national and provincial) to do more and more "compliance" work (e.g. reports and plans and forms etc.) In almost every place I visited, directors acknowledged that this was burdensome.
Instruction, by and large, is "stand and deliver" with the children doing a large amount of repetition and chanting. There are chalkboards, some textbooks and lots of copybooks. Most children, with the exception of those in the most remote villages, go to primary school for some period of time. It is estimated that about 87% have some early schooling. However, only 52 percent of the primary schools offer all six grades. Only 18.9 percent of boys and 16.4 percent of girls have access to lower secondary school (middle school). Only about 6% of the children who begin primary school actually graduate from high school. Upon completion of the 12th grade, an examination must be passed in order to gain a diploma and one must be a high school graduate in order to get into a university. There are no community or junior colleges. It is a large sorting system with many, many gates.
Most provinces have a Teacher Training Center (the city of Phnom Penh has its own). The teachers in training must be post high school age (but not necessarily a graduate) and pass a screening exam. In three provinces (Kandal, Takeo and Kampot) the EQIP Project has influenced the professional development of practicing teachers and now wants to expand into the training programs at the Teacher Training Centers. But the rest of the provinces do not have significant work being done for teacher development.
Only a small number of directors that I interviewed made a distinction between "management" and "leadership". While each of those concepts has it's own word in Khmer, most of the directors thought they were synonymous. Since they report directly to the local Ministry of Education, compliance and control are norms seen as essential to the job. Directors are trained in management (i.e. filling out forms correctly, doing reports on time and well etc). Since that is the only form of training that they receive and since so much value is placed on "management," it is easy to see why the two concepts are viewed as the same.
With the crisis of over crowding in schools, a major part of the job of most of the directors is finding the financial resources to build school buildings. It is not the function of the state to do that. Directors appeal to International Non-governmental Organizations (INGOs), local community groups, political parties, wealthy foreigners and Cambodians living in other countries, etc. Thus, in all of the schools that I visited, the director either proudly showed me the buildings (and toilets) and told me where he/she got the money from or complained that so far he/she had been unable to raise the money. What a difficult burden for directors to bear. The poorer a community, the less able it is to raise money. Some directors are quite desperate, as their buildings are literally crumbling around their children.
School directors must also work hard at community relations. Many schools are located in Wats (temples) and they must be in constant conversation and negotiations with the monks who live there. Also, village chiefs and leaders must be dealt with and, of course, parents. This highlights a true need for leadership development.
I felt in almost all directors I met with a heartfelt commitment to their work, however they define it. Several told me that it was because of the children and Cambodia's future that they did their jobs. All of the directors that I interviewed were eager to learn more. As I listened and questioned, it seemed that there are multiple areas of growth that might be useful to them.
Students in an EQIP Project school. They are using new materials developed by VSO (Volunteer Service Organization). The book is part of a new series in the Khmer language for emerging readers.
There are organizations attempting to address the need for training. One example is the World Bank EQIP Project which has been training teachers and directors for the past 4 years in some new ways of teaching. Heavy emphasis has been placed on small group work, creative materials, more challenging questioning techniques, more effective (and humane) classroom management etc. All of this is new for them and, because none of them were taught in these ways, they are learning to work in ways that are not always comfortable. As a result, most of the teachers use these practices sporadically. Also, since they only work half-time and, consequently, must have other jobs, they really have little time to do the planning that it takes to teach in a child centered way.
In the three provinces that EQIP has been training teachers in child centered practices, almost everyone agrees that the students learn better and outside evaluations support that belief. None of the directors, however, have had any training to help them understand why these practices work better. They intuitively know that the children are happier but don't necessarily know if that translates into greater learning, although many suspect it does. It would be helpful, I think, for them to have a working knowledge about learning (e.g.. how the brain works, how we access information, what increases learning capacity, what intelligence is and is not etc). Conversations about relationship and learning, learning modalities, feelings and learning, nutrition and learning could help directors engage in deeper conversations with their teachers.
Leadership, as I said, is not a word that directors readily apply to themselves. Yet some eagerly want to learn about leadership. I think important support could be offered in the areas of creating vision, clarity of values, communication, visible presence, inspiration and how inspiring others is a powerful leadership practice and more.
Students who are doing "buddy reading". This is a very innovative practice.
Training Structure and Content
The School Leadership Development Program will be a training program conducted for school directors in Kandal, Takeo and Kampot Provinces. The training sessions will be held in Angtasom, about 60 km from Phnom Penh and a point equally accessible for all directors. It will be available to 40 directors who volunteer to participate. Training sessions will be conducted twice a month (on Thursdays) for 7 hours a day, over a 4 month period (a total of 56 hours) beginning in October.
The content of the training sessions will provide an opportunity for school directors to expand their understanding of the role of school leadership, and, in particular, will include:
A. Learning - 14 hours
1. How the child's brain learns new concepts.
2. Learning modalities (e.g. auditory, visual and kinesthetic learning)
3. Intelligence: what it is and what it is not.
4. Why some teaching practices (e.g. child centered approaches) increase student learning.
5. How children learn to read.
B. Instruction - 14 hours
1. Building on the child centered approach to teaching, how directors can better supervise teachers to help them use those practices in the classroom.
2. Strategies for improving the teaching of Reading.
3. Identifying instructional practices that work for children who learn differently.
C. Motivating Teachers - 14 hours
1. How to inspire teachers to want to improve their teaching.
2. Leadership: what it is and how it works best to improve a school.
3. Creating leadership among teachers and community members.
D. Public Relations/Community Relations - 14 hours
1. Skills to better engage the multiple "publics" that directors face every day.
2. Resource development
3. Involving parents in their children's education.
In addition, between each of the training sessions I will visit the school directors at their respective schools to offer mentoring and other support that may be helpful and appropriate. Over the scope of the training, I will visit each director at his/her school at least once and perhaps twice. I may be able to visit some directors whose schools are closer to Phnom Penh more often.
Since I do not speak Khmer, I will be hiring a full-time translator who will both translate materials from English to Khmer and do spontaneous translation during the training sessions and school visits. It will require a fair amount of travel as I will be living in Phnom Penh.
The content of the trainings seem appropriate at this time, having interviewed school directors last February. I am sure, however, as the work unfolds, there will be changes. I hope to be as responsive as possible to their needs and desires. We fly to Phnom Penh on September 8th and begin preparing for the first sessions that begin in October. It is my plan to update this journal at least once a month. Twice a month may well be a possibility, but I will only know as I learn and grow.