The COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent school closures highlighted jarring gaps in digital literacy among public educators in Malaysia, where school leaders struggled to keep their schools running effectively during the crux of the pandemic. The PINTAR-PEMIMPIN Leadership programme for schools (PPLPS), under Yayasan Hasanah’s grant, conducted its second installation of the five-month training workshops to instill new methods and perspectives for participating school leaders and teachers to manage their schools more effectively.
The PPLPS’ initial objective is to assess learning loss amongst school-going children and its factors during the pandemic. The programme also delved into identifying learning loss amongst their students, its factors, and initiate learning recovery to ensure students receive the support required to thrive academically and socioemotionally.
The latest cohort was split into two batches of 52 teachers and school leaders from 33 schools and 75 teachers and school leaders from 54 schools between November 2021 to October 2022, over a period of five months per group. Teachers and school leaders were evaluated in four key areas of leadership namely, instructional leadership, strategic leadership, operational leadership and leading with technology.
Some of the key findings found amongst teachers is in practicing Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to improve students’ psychosocial wellbeing. The method adopted by teachers were extremely favourable, where 90.2% of the first cohort practiced SEL versus 96.4% in the second cluster. The research also showed that prioritising students’ psychosocial wellbeing saw an almost immediate result in the students’ willingness to learn which would impact on the school’s overall performance.
The second cohort of the PPLPS programme affected 192 school leaders across 84 schools in 12 states and two Federal Territories in Malaysia, potentially reaching 3,360 teachers and 42,000 students from this session, calculating from the Ministry of Education’s Basic Education Information Dashboard.
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