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Changing the education system of a whole country
Picture courtesy of John Rider, Teacher at NIS Nur-Sultan.
Changing the education system of a whole country
Geoffrey Neuss reports on setting up a curriculum in Kazakhstan
Kazakhstan became an independent country in 1991 following the dissolution of the USSR. By the beginning of the twenty first century it was clear that the Kazakh secondary education system based on the old Soviet model required radical change. Their Certificate of Secondary Education was not accepted as an entry qualification to any university outside of Kazakhstan, and students leaving secondary school were unable to demonstrate an ability to think critically. In 2010 the Kazakh Government planned to establish twenty new trilingual (Russian, Kazakh and English) secondary schools around the country to pilot a new public education system, These were to be known as the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools (NIS).
I was invited by the European Commission to travel to Astana (now Nur-Sultan) in 2010 to advise NIS on devising and setting up a new curriculum. My brief was to compare the Kazakh system with recognised international systems for science education and to make recommendations for changes. Before arriving in Nur-Sultan I asked to be sent the current syllabuses so that I could compare them with the A Level, Pre-U, IB Diploma, AP and European Baccalaureate syllabuses. The Kazakh syllabus was much more factually based than international syllabuses and included some material that would normally not be covered until university. However it lacked any real structure, with no clear aims or objectives. No distinction was made between the recall of
Picture courtesy of John Rider, Teacher at NIS Nur-Sultan.
factual information, the ability to apply this knowledge in straightforward situations, and higher order cognitive skills such as the ability to evaluate, comment, discuss, explain and apply knowledge to unfamiliar situations. It was fascinating to look at a programme which had been put together by scientists dominated by the former USSR culture. Much of the actual science was the same, but its cultural context was different. For example, who in the West has heard of Mikhaĭlovich Butlerov? Yet in Kazakhstan he is known as ‘The creator of the theory of chemical structure’. It is as if many former USSR scientists have been airbrushed out of western culture – perhaps as a result of the ‘cold war’?
Before working with a panel of education experts from Kazakhstan I asked to visit a school to see the current syllabus being taught. During my visit they asked if I could demonstrate the difference between the western and Kazakh ways of teaching – not easy to do in 40 minutes with a class of sixteen students in a hall, being watched by teachers and administrators and being filmed for national television! Before starting I put the students in groups of 4 and talked to them to make sure they could understand my English, and then began the lesson by asking what they knew about ionic bonding. They all immediately turned to the one text book (in Russian) they used in Kazakhstan. Closing all their books I then guided them to think critically about what they already knew, to get them to conclude that the information in the book was wrong. I had hoped that the teachers observing could appreciate this, but for them the most important difference was something that I hadn’t even thought about – the fact that I talked to all the students before I’d even started. In Kazakhstan teachers generally did not interact with students in that way. Later, after visiting classes, I realised that students were often encouraged to answer questions but only the answer expected by the teacher was accepted. Teachers rarely smiled during the lessons and students were not encouraged to ask questions.
I spent ten days working with teachers, administrators and pedagogues guiding them through the differences in the various systems, showing them examples of how knowledge can be applied to solve problems in unfamiliar situations, and getting them to work on the aims and objectives for their new programme. The problems they faced were huge. Apart from those who taught English as a foreign language, almost none of the teachers could speak English. The older the teacher the more they were entrenched in the Soviet paradigm of didactic learning, and some opposition was also expressed by parents. However the enthusiasm and professionalism of the Chair of NIS, Kulyash Shamshidinova and her Vice-Chair, Nazipa Ayubayeva, was extremely infectious – they are two people who can make the impossible become possible. My final report contained more than 50 recommendations as to how NIS should proceed. One of these recommendations was to establish one school which would seek validation to follow the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. Because the IBDP is externally assessed and recognised by almost all countries as a university entrance qualification, it would provide the standard for the new national Kazakh programme.
My recommendations were accepted, and I was asked by NIS to work as their external consultant to help them set up the future IB school and to organise the training for the teachers in all subjects for all the NIS schools. Cambridge International Education was contracted to help with assessing the new National Curriculum following a similar format to the IB for the other pilot schools. In early 2011 NIS established what would become the IB school in an existing building. We wanted a principal who was not ingrained in the old system and so appointed a 25 year old Kazakh, Anuar Zhangozin. Anuar is a maths graduate who is fluent in Russian, Kazakh and English. He was not then a teacher, but clearly demonstrated the vision and leadership qualities to meet the challenge. We changed the school day, shortened the contact hours and completely changed the way in which students were assessed. I arranged for many of the Kazakh teachers to shadow subject teachers at well-established IB schools around Europe. I brought in some of the best IB workshop leaders to train the teachers not only in their subject matter but also in the Theory Knowledge, in order to provide them with concrete examples as to how critical thinking can be facilitated in all their day to day teaching. We also trained them in how to encourage students to take responsibility for their own learning. In addition we hired good international teachers to work full-time alongside the mainly young local teachers in the classroom.
The rest as they say is history. The school received IB World School status in 2013 and moved into a new purpose-built building in 2015, the same year that the first IB Diploma students graduated. In 2016 the IB Middle Years Programme was also fully authorised. The school now has some 160 students taking the IB Diploma each year and many of the students go on to study at prestigious universities worldwide. The other 19 schools are all up and running throughout the country, and the leaving certificate is now accepted as an entry qualification by universities in other countries. Anuar has gone on to become the Assistant Director of Education for the whole of Nur-Sultan, to continue the process of extending the new curriculum to all schools in Kazakhstan.
