Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA)

Reviews of the education system in Malawi have done little to improve content quality, and have fallen short of creating teaching processes, that help learners develop high order thinking skills.

This project stems from the introduction of the Critical Thinking teaching methodologies, during a workshop held with the technical and financial support from the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) in 2010, which provided a policy level platform for discussions on how the concept could be integrated into the Malawian education system.

In July 2011, a four day practical training workshop of education technocrats was held. This project will continue with the training.

The Malawi state education system has seen many changes. While some changes have increased access to education, a lack of high order thinking skills remains one of the major gaps in the education system, attributed to teaching practices that do little to promote independent application of thought.

This project will address this gap by training a core team of curriculum developers, teacher trainers, policy makers and departments responsible for assessment, in Critical Thinking methodologies.

By training teacher trainers, it is hoped that graduating teachers will practice Critical Thinking teaching in their classrooms. Training assessment developers will help them to come up with more reasoning than recall questions in assessment, while training curriculum developers will lead to the development of curriculum that promotes the application of high order thinking.

As such, this project aims to improve education outcomes by building the capacity of education professionals to integrate Critical Thinking learning approaches in the education system in Malawi.

To achieve this goal, this project will create a team of core teacher trainers who will incorporate Critical Thinking methodologies in the teacher training courses. It will also promote the use of Critical Thinking concepts in the curriculum, examinations and assessment system. Finally, this project aims to develop a training manual, specifically for Malawi, to be used after the project interventions.