Profile: Dawn Quist, education expert

“It is a battle of changing minds,” says education expert Dawn Quist, “showing how you can make changes relatively easily and without spending vast quantities of money.”

Ms Quist has just returned from Belize, where she led a week-long workshop for head teachers, lecturers and government officials about multi-grade teaching – an educational practice which she says has been “neglected” by governments and teacher training institutions for many years.

Thousands of children around the world are taught in multi-grade schools – including in around half the primary schools in Belize. The practice sits in stark contrast to ‘mono-grade’ education, prevalent in densely populated areas and developed countries, where teachers look after a single grade.

“In more densely populated countries, like Kenya or Tanzania, most schools are mono-grade,” says Ms Quist. “But, even there in remote, mountainous or sparsely populated areas, the chances are that there will be some multi-grade schools.”

For a small village community, the advantages of multi-grade teaching are many, she says. Grouping children of different grades together, with a single teacher, means it is possible to fund a small school where otherwise it would have been impractical. Children, who might otherwise be unable to travel to distant schools, are then given the opportunity of an education.

Lack of understanding

Yet despite their prevalence, understanding of multi-grade education among government officials, parents and teachers is often lacking.

“If you are teaching ten or twelve children crossing three grades, the perception is that the child in grade two is only going to get a third of the time of the teacher,” says Ms Quist. “The assumption is that the teacher teaches each of the grades separately. But that is not what multi-grade teaching is about.

“Sometimes teachers have to teach each grade separately, but this approach should not be used all the time – they could teach the same topic, ‘soils’ for example, across the grades and use differentiated activities within the lesson that suit each grade group.”

Ms Quist explains that traditional training programmes rarely equip teachers with the skills required for teaching in multi-grade classrooms. “Even if they have an element of multi-grade teaching within the training programme, the experience they need through teaching practice is almost impossible to arrange because of the remoteness of multi-grade schools.”

Improving teacher training

The Ministry of Education in Belize, recognising this, asked the Commonwealth Secretariat to organise a week-long workshop run by Ms Quist for around 50 principals, teachers and education officials from across the country to help improve teaching methods.

The Belize project was just one prong of a wider Secretariat strategy to widen understanding of multi-grade education among not just teachers but also policy-makers to help improve both teaching methods and government support. The hope is that those present at Ms Quist’s workshops, in Belize and elsewhere, will not only learn about useful methods, but will also pass the knowledge on to their colleagues.

“One of the aims of this programme has been to raise awareness within ministries so they develop a clear policy in support of multi-grade education,” says Ms Quist.

For Dawn Quist and her Commonwealth colleague, there was scant opportunity on their flying visit to Belize to see much of the country. The working week was packed full of presentations, discussions and group activities in order to cram as much as possible into the short space of a five-day week. “It’s literally non-stop,” she says. “We go straight to the workshop, start work at 9, finish at 5 and then go back to our hotel to prepare for next day.”

Creating syllabuses and action plans

Participants learned how to manage multi-grade classrooms and how to develop multi-grade syllabuses and action plans. “What we actually do on the training is give participants a plan to improve a specific area such as lesson planning, which is really important in their school. The curriculum officers learned how to develop material showing teachers how to work with their own national curriculum.”

Some of the participants, arriving from remote regions like Toledo or Cayo, had to travel six hours or more to get to Belize City, where the workshop took place. Their time is precious - some are both principal and teacher in their local school - so the workshop could only be held in their free time during the Easter holidays.

With so little time and so much to learn, those attending the workshop had high expectations. Fortunately, Ms Quist has a deep well of experience to draw upon. After completing her first degree and post-graduate certificate of education, she moved to Ghana in 1961 where she spent 20 years teaching at both secondary and primary level before becoming director of four charity-run schools in 1981.

In 1991, she returned to the UK to take up further study and, in 1994, found herself devising training materials for the Commonwealth Secretariat. Since then Ms Quist has been working as a consultant for the Secretariat, bringing her own brand of informative and practical training to some 27 countries across Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

Unrivalled enthusiasm

A career spent travelling to all corners of the world, meeting hard-stretched teachers and visiting under-resourced schools can be gruelling, but Dawn Quist takes it all in her stride. “I am never disheartened - otherwise I couldn’t do this work.”

Fortunately the rewards outweigh the rigour of it all. Searching around on her computer, she digs out a series of emails sent to a colleague at the Secretariat following the Belize workshop – each message reveals a delighted individual. “This is just amazing,” remarks Ms Quist, obviously elated at the feedback. “Neither one of us has had quite this enthusiasm before.”

Annette Pech, a teacher from the district of Belize, who attended the session in Belize, was one who emailed. “I have already modified my lesson planning to utilise the examples in the modules,” she wrote. “We will also be meeting next week to discuss our action plans amongst the teaching principals who attended.”

“The printed material/modules are priceless,” added Nadine Tun, a lecturer at the University of Belize’s Faculty of Education and Arts. And so continued a half-dozen such emails.

But the most important reward of all, says Ms Quist - especially for the teachers themselves - comes when pupils prosper in exams and go on to further study. “It is always nice to see children getting on with their work, showing you what they have done and getting good results when they take that final examination,” she says.

“If they’ve got a good training at primary level, they will get a place in secondary school. That improves their career opportunities, and their life chances.”

Secretariat Links:

• Education
• Country Profile: Belize