Kualida, Albania
Luigj Gurakuqi secondary school in Albania represents a very different context.
There is no heating in the school, even in mid-winter when snow covers the Skandenburg mountains. 15 and 16-year-olds wear two, sometimes three, threadbare coats. Today's lesson is French and English. We observed this class who were examining the contrast between the works of Moliere and Shakespeare.
Their teachers are participating in the Kualida (or Quality) programme. This is a programme that's been running for six years now. The original, technological stimulus was television.
It's difficult to conceive how the totalitarian regime, for nearly 50 years, insisted on a highly censored curriculum with regulated role learning as the main means of instruction.
For the Kualida programme new active pedagogic approaches were filmed in Albanian classrooms and then shown on peak-time Albanian TV. The programmes fuelled national debate about hitherto little used teaching approaches such as problem solving, brainstorming and critical thinking more generally.
In our evaluations and interviews with teachers a key observation, and a key ingredient in the successful take-up of the programme was the way in which teachers felt 'they owned the discourse' and that was true also of the South African teachers.
