What are the best practices to help build strong foundational skills and better educational systems?

Join educational researcher Nina Alonso for this podcast series as she shares powerful stories from teachers around the world, talking in their own words about their own experiences. 

Good school practices are the key to helping build better educational systems, says Renaud Comba, research manager at UNICEF, but detecting exemplary school practices is easier said than done:

“For the first time we are paying attention to the already created, contextualized, cost effective local solutions that local stakeholders have created through practice and through understanding where they live and their context to really address global education challenges.”

On this episode, we also hear from three teachers trying to develop good creative practices in their daily work with children. First we meet Andrea from Montevideo in Uruguay who teaches strong basic numeracy skills through play and experiential learning:

“In the pedagogy of our school it is very important to guide the learning development with lived experiences that include a body and sensorial experience….In the multiplication table, every scale is represented by an animal”

Next we hear from hear from Suzie in Wyoming who explains the different dimensions of foundational skills when teaching visually impaired children: 

“All things that people know by seeing not by doing we have to give [visually impaired] kids the experiences too and then from there we can learn the literacy piece because it will then be more meaningful and motivating.”

We also meet Manda, a traveling teacher working in various schools in California, who shares how she supports the development of foundational skills with visually impaired children:

“So many of these skills that are taught in school are taught visually… sighted children are surrounded by letters…they also have access to social skills through seeing, like body language and visual expressions.”

And finally we hear from Francis Bizoza, a teacher trainer from Uganda, who stresses the need for teachers to motivate reluctant young people:

“When helping them understand it is important for you to be able to read, it is important for you to write well showing them that in their day to day life these are things we do daily, we read, we comprehend and we listen.”