Celebrating Teachers: Superstars of learning, despite the odds

Today we take the time to celebrate teachers. Every day, they’re on the frontlines, working with children despite major challenges, including the disruption caused by COVID-19. The pandemic has interrupted the education of 90% of children in the world. And while the ‘lost learning’ to children has been widely reported – due to school closures, lack of access to learning opportunities, and COVID-19 restrictions – the full scale of the impact is still largely unknown. Throughout it all teachers have enabled children to continue learning.  

Take a look at some of the superstars who have ensured that children around the world continue to have access to learning through play: 

# 1: Jessica Montgomery – South Africa / China 

Jessica is an experienced online educator, living in South Africa but teaching children in China. She is an expert in flexible online teaching and is keen to remind other teachers that every time that camera turns you are entering someone’s private space. Some students may be sharing the room with other families, while others study alone.  Jessica works hard to make any of these situations an asset, incorporating the child’s environment into the lesson – no matter if it concerns people or objects. She has found high levels of engagement when children use personal and meaningful objects as opposed to learning theoretically. Siblings often join the playful learning too!  

# 2: Idah Khan – Mozambique 

Idah is a teacher coach for the Primary Years Progamme at the Aga Khan Academy in Maputo, Mozambique. In the face of Mozambique’s lockdown, Idah and her colleagues wanted to be as flexible with the curriculum as possible. Understanding that teaching at a distance is not the same as teaching in person, Idah’s school offers STEM-like activities where children can respond to a challenge by making a physical object. This often involves parents and siblings too, so the whole family can get involved. Students then get feedback from teachers and classmates and make changes to their collaborations. The internet might be filled with ideas, but Idah is making sure activities are adapted to fit the realities in homes where ‘taken for granted’ resources might not be available. For example, rather than getting students to ‘make a drum from a can’, Idah adapted the challenge to become ‘use something at home to make a rhythm’.  

# 3: Jessica Dreyer – Denmark 

Jessica is a first-grade teacher at the International School of Billund, Denmark. Distance learning, for her involved understanding the children’s interests well, so she could create meaningful lessons. For example, the children love pizza – both pretend and real. When teaching about maths, where a learning goal is familiarity with fractions, Jessica presented a pizza-making activity where the recipe included half and quarter cups of ingredients. Jessica then encouraged the children to send in photos of fractional pieces of their finished products at home, and then to make their own videos showcasing other types of maths concepts. One example was a video about subtracting from ten, where a child even became a magician to make three cups ‘disappear’!  

# 4: Linford Molaodi – South Africa 

Linford is a lecturer at the University of Johannesburg, and facilitator of Scratch clubs, where young people got together to create using computer coding. Before the pandemic, Linford facilitated Scratch clubs physically, but when COVID hit, he had to transition to virtual support, and take steps to keep the Scratch clubs engaging while happening online. To support this, he provided his colleagues with practical tools and examples of how technology can advance learning through play. For Linford, learning is a team sport, and the groups provided content knowledge and emotional support. To maintain this social element over the pandemic, he set up a WhatsApp group where club members could help each other with coding issues, share their projects, and become equal contributors in the distanced learning process. In keeping things joyful, he embeds funny audio recordings in every project!  

# 5 – Ntombifuthi Chiloane – South Africa 

Ntombifuthi is a Grade 4, natural sciences teacher in Pretoria. With more than 150 students, most of the children do not have a reliable connection to the internet. To overcome this, and connect with students, Ntombifuthi has created a WhatsApp group for her students and their parents, where she shares explanations of the activities in the textbook and encourages parents and children to ask questions and make comments. Ntombifuthi has found it’s important to keep messages and communications as short and concise as possible, to make explaining concepts simpler – photos are often a great help. Making learning playful has always been a priority for Ntombifuthi, who makes sure the activities she wants her students to engage in are context-specific and relevant to their lives. For example, when learning about the different states of matter, Ntombifuthi advises the parents to put some water in the fridge to freeze, to then take it out in the sun to melt and boil it again in a kettle.  

In celebration of World Teacher’s Day on the 5th of October the LEGO Foundation has supported the launch of a new whitepaper that will unpick innovative pedagogical approaches which provide security for the children who struggle to access learning. The whitepaper highlights the central role of teachers and examines the opportunities for integrating play-based learning into teacher professional development approaches in refugee and host communities in East Africa specifically. 

The pandemic has highlighted even more the importance of teachers, who have stood up to COVID-19 on the frontlines, and maximised efforts to continue providing quality education. At the LEGO Foundation we believe in the power of learning through play to help children reach their full potential, and teachers make this happen.  We work to support them in any way we can, because we know that by working together great things can happen.