Abdirizak Hashi Nuurre, PhD.
Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana, United States
Ali Abdi Farah, PhD
Walden University, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
Omar Mohamed Warsame, PhD
The Holy Quran and Islamic Science, Khartoum, Sudan
Abstract
Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore what nine high school principals did to outperform other schools in the South and Central regions of Somalia. The study highlighted the high school principals’ perception of maintaining education quality concerning curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The study focused on the admission process, teaching, and learning performances of the top nine high schools in South-central Somalia.
Design/Methodology: The methodology of this Qualitative research was descriptive phenomenology. The research design and approach were semi-structured open-ended interview protocol that comprised eight interview questions. Purposeful sampling was the sampling method. Nine principals participated in the study and provided the research data regarding the education quality of nine high schools in Somalia.
Findings: All nine principals in this study maintained their high schools’ education quality using a rigorous admission process. They utilized a government-developed official curriculum. Five principals reported that they employed specialist instructors, while six stated that their students actively participated in the learning process during class time. However, all the participants reported that smartphones hindered student learning. A slight majority of five principals (56%) stated that parental interventions were vital to schools’ overall learning achievements.
Implications for practice: Somalia’s public schools are far behind in utilizing effective educational technology. The technological literacy of the teachers is vital to effectively employ the accessible educational technology, which encouraged students to incorporate modern technologies in their learning activities successfully. Rigorous admission process, efficient curriculum, instruction, effective instructional materials, employing professional instructors, and active learning are all important components to maintain education quality.
Key words: quality of education, curriculum and instruction, assessment, active learning
Introduction
Since the collapse of the state, Somalia’s government-run education system failed. A power vacuum left from the downfall of the government in January 1991. The country split into warring factions (Bakonyi, 2009). The state-run institutions and privately owned properties were overly robbed. The education sector collapsed for the wide-scale destruction. School administrators, teachers, and students were displaced or killed (Abdinoor, 2008). Hence, Somalia’s literacy rate, which in the 1970s reached a record high of 55 percent (Abdi, 1998), sharply dropped after the regime’s fall (Anagnoste, Agoston, & Draghici, 2009). Thus, the quality of education descended to the world’s bottommost nations (African Press Organization, 2011). For the above reasons, only 26.5 percent of high school-aged youths are at high school (UNICEF, 2018). The present study explores the quality in the education of best high schools in South and Central Somalia regarding curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Background
This study explores what assisted the best nine high schools in South and Central Somalia to outpace other high schools in these regions in the 2019/20 schoolyear regarding curriculum, instruction, and assessment. The three most significant and interconnected aspects of education are curriculum, instruction, and assessment (Pellegrino, 2006). Curricula ensue from a procedure that mirrors societal agreement about what, why, and how of education, which is desirable for the society in the future (Tedesco et al., 2014). McPhail (2018) stated that bringing many subjects concurrently in teaching and learning is known by different names. The curriculum is the one that we use in this article. The curriculum encompasses the subjects’ knowledge and abilities that instructors teach, and students must learn (Pellegrino, 2006). Citing Young and Muller (2013) and Delors (1998), McPhail and Rata (2015) stated that there are two curriculum design types, which are Powerful Knowledge and 21st Century Learning.
According to previous research (Maton & Moore, 2010; Muller, 2000; Young, 2008), the Powerful Knowledge curriculum grounds on a very broadly based research program. This curriculum type follows the Durkheimian social realist method, which focuses on understanding how knowledge production and reproduction happens (McPhail & Rata, 2015). McPhail and Rata posited that 21st Century Learning states a social justice purpose, reasoning that the significance of skills and adaptable dispositions method will augment opportunities, especially for those from marginalized communities. The 21st Century model did not regard that education is sufficiently receptive to a complex, globalized world in which skills, critical thinking, adaptability, and creativity will be more significant than knowledge by itself. We are not sure of which type of curriculum design the Somali ministry of education used to prepare the 2019 curriculum. Johnson (2001), cited in Alsubaie (2016), stated that curriculum preparation could be complex; therefore, the involvement of all stakeholders, especially individuals who are directly involved in student instruction, is paramount to its successful production and reconsideration.
The curriculum development to be efficacious, and for schools to be fruitful, it is significant to involve teachers in the development process (Alsubaie, 2016). Alsubaie stated that curriculum development is a process in which fulfilling student requirements guides student learning enhancement. However, in post-civil war Somalia, researchers of this study could not identify whether teachers were involved in the curriculum development stages. Somalia ministry of education adopted in 2019 a new public-school curriculum, which is the first of its kind in three decades.
A controlling entity should check the quality of the curriculum (Shakespeare & Hutchinson, 2007). In Somalia, the controlling body can be the education ministry or an independent advisory board that provides the necessary guidance to the ministry of education. The evaluation of a curriculum’s quality must be against specific quality standards (Khan et al., 2019). Curriculum assessment is a method of collecting and analyzing data from various sources to enhance student learning in sustainable means (Wolf et al., 2006).Once the curriculum is outlined and approved, the task moves to the instruction.
Instruction is the teaching approach and the learning actions teachers use to help students grasp the content and the goals detailed in a curriculum (Pellegrino, 2006). Teachers face five tasks when implementing a curriculum: “coverage, mastery, management, positive effect, and evaluation” (Posner, 2007, p. 192). Teachers espouse better learning because they have the knowledge and experience of teaching, and society trusts them for presenting the curriculum in the classroom (Asubaie, 2016). Teachers must cover the program’s components, such as contents, skills, and objectives. They must ensure that students learn the topics at least at some minimal level of understanding. Learning is more significant if the providers structure it around concepts germane to students and the world beyond school (Boyd & Hipkins, 2012). Besides the coverage and mastery tasks, teachers need to focus on managing the classroom and the students. This task can be accomplished by engaging students positively toward the subject matter in the class. Along with quality curriculum and instruction, assessment is the third most significant aspect of education.
The last task for teachers to achieve is to evaluate students’ progress and what kinds of topics students must be held accountable for learning (Posner, 2004). The assessment refers to how teachers use it to ensure that students understood the curriculum’s contents (Pellegrino, 2006). In Somalia, teachers assess secondary school students’ level of educational performance for the first three years. However, assessment comes from the education ministry as a centralized exam that all Somali students must pass to achieve a secondary school leaving certificate at the end of the fourth year. Pellegrino (2006) stated that out-of-date theories base the curriculum, instruction, and assessment and not inline the modern educational system. There must be an alignment of the three education aspects discussed earlier, which means that they must be directed towards the same goal and enforce each other instead of aiming at different purposes (Pellegrino, 2006).
Read more: Education Quality of Best Public High Schools in South and Central Somalia
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