Global voices Malaysia: A global effort for educational equity

Through the Teach For All network, education advocates from around the world are recruiting and training teachers and leaders to help address their country’s education challenges.

How do we provide an excellent education for all students? Public school educators around the world have been asking this question for decades. As cofounder and managing director of Teach For Malaysia, I believe that educational inequity is a global issue. From Nepal to New Zealand, Austria to Argentina, people are grappling with how to give all students, regardless of background, equal access to a high-quality education.

If the problem is global, so are solutions. Every country has dedicated educators finding ways to help more children reach their full potential. If we can find ways to share and adapt those solutions across borders, then we can come closer to the day when educational opportunity is equitable for all.

Through Teach For Malaysia, I have seen one way this can work. We are one of over 30 partner organizations on five continents in the Teach For All network. Founded in 2012, Teach For Malaysia supports 112 first- and second-year teachers working in more than 40 schools in some of our country’s most impoverished communities.

Like all Teach For All’s partner organizations, Teach For Malaysia is independently run, as every nation’s educational needs are highly contextual. But we all share the common vision that one day all children — no matter their circumstances — will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.

Sharing ideas and solutions

Brett Wigdortz and Wendy Kopp, founders of Teach First and Teach For America, founded Teach For All in response to inquiries from educators around the world who wanted to establish similar programs in their home countries. Teach For All supports educational entrepreneurs to recruit and train promising college graduates and professionals from a range of academic disciplines to teach for an initial two years in the highest-needs schools. Inspired by their experience, these fellows, as many partner organizations call them, ideally will go on to serve as leaders for educational equity — inside and outside the education system. Teach For All constantly creates opportunities for partner leaders and staff to share best practices from one country to another to ensure that our teachers and alumni are growing and increasing their effect.

If we can find ways to share and adapt solutions across borders, then we can come closer to the day when educational opportunity is equitable for all.

I encountered Teach First as a student at Imperial College in London. I had gone abroad for school, and I was keenly aware of the education issues facing my fellow Malaysians. For example, three out of five heads of poor households in our country have only a primary school education or less. When I learned about Teach For All’s mission, the idea of working toward educational equity as a career was planted in my mind. I returned to Malaysia and began talking with a colleague, Keeran Sivarajah, about what we could do to address the inequities in our country’s education system. We thought that if we could establish a similar program drawing on Teach For All’s core values in Malaysia, we might be able to help address some of those issues.

From the beginning, we worked to adapt the Teach For All approach to the Malaysian context. For example, Sivarajah and I started out thinking primarily that Malaysians who speak proficient English have far more opportunities available to them at home and abroad. We had both experienced this, having studied abroad and achieved fluency in English, and we wanted to help more children access those same opportunities. So we thought that we would train teachers to help students achieve stronger English proficiency. However, when we got deeper into the work we found that English proficiency was only a superficial part of the problem — and over-reported in the media and national discourse. There was a greater achievement gap: Students were several years behind in Bahasa Malaysia, our national language.

Malaysia’s unique challenges

In Malaysia, our primary schools are divided by students’ native language, so that students may attend schools where they are taught in Malay, Tamil, or Mandarin. In secondary school, all of these students are brought together and taught in Malay. We found that students from Malay primary schools were struggling with basic literacy in Malay, and students from Tamil or Mandarin schools had the added challenge of adjusting to a new language. So we decided to focus our teacher training on improving literacy in both English and Malay. By making that adjustment, we were able to better address the unique needs of our Malay-, Tamil-, and Mandarin-speaking students while preserving the overall approach of Teach For All.

Regardless of the literacy curriculum, no educational system or organization can survive without strong leadership. Teach For All helped me realize the power of cultivating leadership in ourselves and others, as well as encouraging us to learn from peers across our network.

For example, as a new CEO, I visited Bulgaria in 2012 with several other Teach For All leaders to discuss how to build a mission-driven organization. I was able to observe the founder of Teach For Bulgaria, Evgenia Peeva, who became a Teach For All leader in 2010 after working in business consulting. I was amazed at how she created a strong vision and culture for her organization in just two years.
Peeva’s team works together exceptionally well because she is committed to empowering every single member of the Teach For Bulgaria community to be active participants. Thus, her staff members are given thorough preparation to support the teachers (called fellows) who then carry those lessons throughout their careers. The student results show that Peeva’s approach works. Currently there are 88 teaching fellows in 44 schools in Bulgaria. In the 2012-13 school year, average student achievement scores on assessment tests improved by over 20 percentage points.

Having learned so much from Peeva and others, I’ve realized that experiencing great leadership is crucial for developing strong education programs. So here in Malaysia, we decided to bring that into the classroom. We adopted the idea of Teach For America Week, where leaders and community members can come into the classroom and help lead activities with students. We then decided to try a Teach For Malaysia: Flipped Week, where students visit the workplaces of the community leaders who they met earlier in the year. Flipped Week has now been tried in other countries, like the Philippines.

Global collaboration

This work isn’t just about sharing practices to take back to our own countries. It’s about global collaboration. For example, many Teach For All partners realized that we were facing similar challenges in helping teachers teach students with learning differences, like dyslexia, autism, or attention disorders. In order to take on this challenge together, in 2014 Teach For All launched a Learning Differences Fellowship with an inaugural summit in Nepal. Teach For Malaysia sent one of our teacher coaches to the summit in Kathmandu to begin a two-year process of working with other coaches to develop best practices for teaching students with learning differences. We will be able to take these lessons back to our classrooms in Malaysia, and our partners will be able to do the same in their own countries.

These are just some examples of how we are coming together to fight educational inequity around the world. Teach For All is modeling how to share solutions for this global problem. We need much more work like this to happen all over the world.

I firmly believe that the global problem of educational inequity is solvable. We will need to work collaboratively across borders and find out which solutions can have the greatest effect worldwide. After all, if we want students to be the best learners, we must first and foremost model learning from each other as educators.