Sila Nursery

- At Sila, we believe in the importance of integrating the roles of the parents and the educational institution to achieve the required balance for the development of the child.
We seek to create a strong community consisting of children, parents and staff to achieve a balanced development for all the members of our community.
- We believe that all children have a natural tendency towards wondering, curiosity and creativity. Hence, we aim to utilize this natural tendency to enrich our children with what we think will help them achieve psychological, social and cognitive development.
To achieve this development we use a combination of teaching tools to encourage each child to experience a unique social knowledge that the child sees from his own perspective as a respected individual in our community.
- At Sila, we believe that every child has the right to an education suitable with his individual abilities.
- At Sila, we believe in the right of the child to learn through experience, and that he has the right to make mistakes, and that it is our duty
as adults to help him know his mistake and correct it accordingly.
- In Sila, we believe in the right of the child to choose and express himself and his opinion, and to have an effective role in directing
the educational process and influence it.
- In Sila we strive to benefit from the latest scientific research in the field of early education, and we rely on the guidelines and the requirements followed in Scottish early years education curriculum as an essential reference.
- By adopting strategies such as our open door policy for parents and employing a community officer we make sure to maintain high level of communication between nursery staff and parents to ensure consistent feedback and development for both staff and parents. Our community officer regularly organizes workshops covering a wide range of topics and activities such as pedagogy, arts and crafts, nutrition and therapy.

My name is Ibrahim Salem, I am the team lead. I am the founder of Sila Nursery and its director. Currently we built a strong management team consisting of 2 educational leaders and 2 operational leader. Mostly, I oversee the management team and I personally follow up key tasks such as personal development plans for current staff members as well as recruiting new staff members.

As the nursery director, I structured my nursery in a way that does not require direct management from my part on most of the nursery's operations. As we are approaching the beginning of our sixth year in business, I have been passing on many of my responsibilities to my growing management team. Hence, I am able to give time to other research and development tasks such as staff development and community development.

Our mandatory teacher development pack aims at developing our teachers by doing research and presenting their findings to other teachers. 

The main problem we have in Egypt is lack of teacher training. When we hire new teachers with a degree in early years education we would expect them to know about contemporary learning theories of early years education. However, from my experience hiring teachers over the past 5 years, most universities in Egypt focus on the practical aspect of early years education such as how to tell a story to children or how to create an art or craft project. Unfortunately, while teachers may be good at creating nice activities for children, they do not understand the underlying principles of these activities and suspected benefits. Hence, teachers are not able to design coherent learning journeys beyond the nice unrelated activities. Moreover, some teachers focus only one the types of activities that they can do well or focus on the age group that they believe they can only work with. Other struggles we face at Sila is the high drop out rate on part of the teacher. We feel that we need to be hiring new teachers almost all year round and hence we need to be providing training all year round. Hence, we always faced a problem of providing a less optimal service to our community while our new teachers are onboarded to our approach.

The Teacher Development Pack (TDP) is a set of documents detailing our approach at Sila accompanied by personal development kit that makes it mandatory for every teacher to follow a personal development plan within a set time limit.

The TDP makes it mandatory for teachers to read about early years education theories, and encourage them to go beyond their comfort zone by trying different types of activities with different age groups in order for them to get promoted in the nursery. 

The TDP also recognize that every teacher may have a unique strength point that we can capitalize upon. for example a teacher may be excellent at the separation phase when we accept new children to the nursery. The TDP then aims at making every teacher an expert in his/her unique strength points by doing a semi academic research, taking online courses and presenting their findings to their peers through a formal presentation. 

As a teacher gets promoted to higher levels in the TDP - currently three levels - the expectations set for them is getting more complex including tasks such as training new teachers and doing more complex research. If a teacher fails to complete the tasks set for them in the early levels of the TDP within an agreed upon time with no significant excuse we expect that they don't continue to work at Sila. This ensures that there is a minimum performance level that all teachers would maintain and our service is close to optimal almost all year round.

No research yet

No research yet.

We have been experimenting with our teacher development packs for almost a year. However, we have not yet devised a plan for researching its effectiveness. We have felt its effectiveness in the confidence of new teachers who were able to quickly capture improvement in their understanding and an improved practice. However, we have not thought about measuring it yet or formally assessing its value beyond our feeling of value.

What are the impacts of the teacher's development pack on teachers' performance?

What is the effect of the teacher development pack on staff retention?

I think that as a project lead and also the nursery director, I will have the time and accessibility to take a deeper look at the impact of the TDPs. Also, I have a bachelor and master's degree in Educational studies from the University of Hertfordshire and the University of Edinburgh respectively and I am used to this type of formative research. I think that I can utilize my educational experience as well as practical experience to complete the research by the time limit. 

I would construct structured or semi structured interviews with teachers to understand how they perceive the teacher development packs. I can also design similar interviews with education leaders to understand how they see the impact of the TDPs on the actual teacher performance and morale. I think that 12 weeks time would be more than enough to complete the interviews as well as do a reasonably good literature review on the topic of teacher development packs and analyze my interview findings in light of the literature review.

As the nursery director, I will be able to accommodate the research findings to our current Teacher Development Packs and make swift changes as needed. 

I hope that the research environment that would be bestowed upon my organization during the 12 weeks of research would be refreshing for the organization and everyone of the staff members as they will feel they are part of something bigger and that their work can be of value to other people around the world as well. 

I believe that our solution would be improved based on the research outcomes and through access to experts' knowledge through being part of the LEAP project community.