Georgia Primary Education Project Monthly Report August 1-31, 2016

The project began in 2015 and is implemented by Chemonics International Inc. in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Science of Georgia. The project's primary goal is to enhance the quality of primary education in Georgia, with a focus on teacher professional development, instructional resources, and parental engagement. One of the key components of the project is the G-PriEd Portal, a online platform that provides teachers and school administrators with access to training materials, instructional resources, and a forum for discussion and collaboration. In August 2016, the portal recorded 2,260 users, with the highest number of users in a single day being 153. The portal also features a Facebook page with 3,781 likes and 56,718 viewers in August. The project's quality control team received and processed questionnaires from 340 schools regarding their parental engagement activities. The team also conducted school visits and classroom observations, which informed the development of new training materials and instructional resources. The project's training delivery team revised the application form and program description for the 2016-2017 academic year and invited all pilot and expansion schools to participate. The project's training materials team continued to develop training content for school principals, reading, and math. The team also procured and began reviewing materials for teacher training content in 2016-17, including books on differentiation by student interest and learning profile in math. The team started translation of methodological materials on differentiation by student interest and learning profile in math and began developing the Book Club framework and related facilitator's manual. The project's instructional resources team sent the final set of supplementary GL and GSL leveled readers to the Ministry of Education and Science for review and approval. The team also completed and uploaded six multimedia versions of supplementary readers onto the portal and uploaded 10 sample lesson plans in reading onto the portal. The team consolidated and printed 20 copies of Math E-Course Readers Compilation, featuring instruction strategies and methodologies. The project's parental engagement team started to design a new package of parental engagement activities to be proposed to G-PriEd schools during the 2016-2017 academic year. The team also finalized the list of BSPE pilot schools willing to continue engagement in the business skills programs and invited all other G-PriEd target schools to submit an application for enrolling into the business skills program expansion phase. The project's cooperation with higher education institutions team conducted workshops for the pedagogical faculty of Abkhazeti and Gori State Universities. The team also submitted letters of commitment alongside their requests to USAID for technical assistance from G-PriEd. The team provided access to kargiskola.ge portal resources and delivered a set of reading and math teacher resource books to all four universities. The project's cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Science team met with the MES First Deputy Minister and Deputy Minister to discuss areas for potential G-PriEd engagement at the policy level. The team also met with the Deputy Head of TPDC to discuss G-PriEd's coaching model in relation to the revisions to be made to the current Teacher Professional Development Scheme.