A Model from Education Workshop to Reflect Teaching and Learning Practices: School Climate

We talked to Education Workshop Volunteer Director and Necmettin Erbakan University Faculty Member Assoc. Dr. Nilay Keskin Samancı about their work. According to the Education Workshop, the role of civil society in the field of education is to bring sustainable and realistic solutions to the problems that cause children to leave school.

One of the subfocuses of Development Workshop is education. Can you tell us a little bit about what you are doing in the Education Workshop?

Education Workshop carries out a wide spectrum of works. It is a must for our studies to be focused on child benefit, to provide realistic and feasible solutions and to be sustainable models. As Education Workshop, we provide information about the projects we have conducted in the trainings and meetings we attended in Turkey, the Middle East and in Europe and about our visits as well as sharing our experiences and talking about possible cooperations.

“We develop sustainable activities and models for the elimination of the violation of rights faced by children who cannot attend school for various reasons and help entitling them especially for the right to education.”

In many of our projects, we first analyze the current situation and identify existing problems and the points that need improvement. We develop models in line with the findings we have obtained, and we guide the determination and execution of the activities for this model by meeting with the relevant stakeholders.

What do you pay attention to while developing your projects, how do you establish collaborations?

While structuring or carrying out our projects, we establish collaborations with national and international NGOs, private sector, universities, experts and institutions. These collaborations can sometimes be in collaboration with experts / academicians who receive training in teacher education, and sometimes in the context of our physical and operational needs, it can be receiving support from relevant institutions and organizations. For example, for the “AmgenTeach: Hand in Hand for Science” study that we have been carrying out for 5 years, we execute trainings given within the scope of the project as part of the protocol we have made with METU BİLTEMM and we benefit from the experiences of our valuable academician teachers. In the Amgen Teach: Hand in Hand for Science Project, financed by the Amgen Foundation, we encourage and support teachers working at secondary and high school levels to conduct research-inquiry-based science education practices in their classrooms. In this project which is supported by the European Schoolnet, we organize face-to-face and distance education activities with teachers in the branches of physics / chemistry / biology / science across Europe.

School Well-being

Similarly, with the projects supported by Turkey’s leading foundations we continue to execute projects that Support the well-being of our schools. For example, some of our projects are “Assessment and development of school climate” and “Development of 21st century skills and design-oriented thinking skills of students in Technical Anatolian high schools”.

In vocational high schools, we are working with both students and teachers to understand the skills that would be needed more in the 21st century and to adopt the existing curriculum with those skills.

We look for ways to establish more meaningful and purposeful school-sector collaborations that will increase the skills and competencies of vocational high school students, thereby aiming to establish a widespread and sustainable vocational education model that graduate more qualified pupils.

We are also working on school models that will support the development of a school with a holistic approach. In the School Climate Model we have developed, we determine the strengths and weaknesses of a school in the context of its socio-emotional structure, organizational structure and education structure, and then we prepare action plans regarding the aspects that need to be strengthened and guide them to be implemented among schools.

What is the school climate project? How did you develop it? Can you explain it a little bit?

The project of improving school climate is one of the projects we carry out in Anatolian high schools other than vocational high schools. When we look at the definitions in both national and international literature, we see that school climate is the perception of the environment that reflects the social ties and relationships of all stakeholders inside and outside the school as well as their participation in the processes in the school, their physical and emotional safety, and the overall quality and character of the supporting practices that ensure the improvement of the physical elements in the school.

As Education Workshop, we have developed a model that reflects the experiences of the stakeholders (students, teachers, parents and other school staff) and the overall goals, values, interpersonal relationships, teaching and learning practices and organizational structure of the school by taking some dynamics that vary from school to school into account. 

In this model, we take a holistic approach to support the development of schools, identify the socio-emotional and organizational structure of the school, its strengths and weaknesses in the learning-teaching processes, and prepare action plans for the aspects that need to be strengthened and guide them to implementation. To briefly summarize these structures, when we say the organizational structure of the school, we mean the institutional structure of the school, the functions such as managing, executing and coordinating all the elements, the quality of teaching-learning processes, the academic and social success of the students, the expectations of the teachers, the participation of the students in the classroom practices, the guidance of the teachers to the students, peer interactions in learning environments, etc. 

The school’s social and emotional structure includes strategies to support all stakeholders in the school to get to know themselves and in this sense to manage their emotions correctly, to establish strong / empathetic relationships with others, and to create constructive solutions by controlling their anger in difficult processes.

Our experience in all this projects we carried out shows that children do not benefit from education which is one of the most basic human rights in every region of Turkey for different reasons Although the numbers have changed from past to present, the enrollment rates of girls, especially in secondary education are still low and there are still early marriage cases in some regions. On the other hand, boys cannot attend school because they have to leave school and work to support their family for economic reasons. In many parts of the country, boys of seasonal agricultural worker families are generally taken to work in the fields, while girls are left in tent areas to look after younger siblings, babies or the elderly when other members of the house go to work. Some of the children are forced to leave school and work in the furniture and textile sectors to provide financial support to their families.

What roles do civil society should have in the field of education in Turkey and what does it have to do?

Our role in civil society is to bring sustainable and realistic solutions to the problems that cause children to leave school. When a family of seasonal agricultural workers who live in tents with 6-7 children is told to send their children to school, they would look at you and the answer would usually be “We need the children’s wages; you can take them until they’re 6 years old but after they have to go to the fields to work with us.” In the field studies we’ve carried out especially in the tent regions in Adana, we realized that the families see their children over the age of 10 as adults, not children. This shows that in order to increase the school enrollment rates of children, it is necessary to take their living conditions into account and to make families a collaborative part of the process. In order for children to go to school, we have to realistically address the existing conditions of the families and consider this as a problem and produce solutions about it.

To summarize, when we look at the non-governmental organizations around the world, we see that every organization now adds training to its working areas. It is only going to happen with proper structured education that all these efforts would be sustainable and would exceed humanitarian aid, and with individuals build or improve their own lives by transforming their existing conditions! We always structure our works by getting encouraged by this point of view.