Dear Readers and Partners,

As we begin a new year, I cannot remember a time of greater transformation for education in general, or for the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy (MILL) and primary school teachers in particular.  Nor, frankly, can I remember a more exciting period. A period in which our education system is posed for permanent transformation. As a nation we are getting things right.

Historically, NGOs like ours have often operated through initiatives in which we might spend three years training and supporting teachers with relevant skills for their job, or supplying them with materials to support their teaching practice.  

For the first time ever Molteno Institute has taken the lead to facilitate engagement amongst teachers: SOCIAL NETWORKING TO HELP TEACHERS BOOST LANGUAGE SKILLS

The Molteno Institute will launch in March a Facebook page designed to help primary school teachers improve their language teaching skills. This comes as schools get ready for the introduction of English as a first additional language in the foundational grades in 2012.

Teachers will post messages to the page for their colleagues to see and react. Subject Specialists will also post tips on how to teach first or and first additional languages, and teachers will be encouraged to download, or comment on them. All messages posted to the list are publicly available. Members are invited to read and write messages about topics of interest, upcoming events, questions for the field, resource sharing, research interests, or other issues that affect national and international language policy research.

What makes this period so transformative and exciting is the role the Molteno Institute is playing in facilitating dialogue among teachers. Teachers can also call to Molteno, or send an SMS to seek an answer to a problem. This is a partnership taken to higher level, and will effectively spark positive change within a school community to define its aspirations and the means to achieve them. We are essentially helping teachers help themselves and one another.

For teachers to access this Facebook page, they need to have a mobile phone with Internet. Go to www.facebook.com, in the search space type Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy, and select a topic of your choice, or download a document of your choice, better still you can choose to comment on your story of choice.

All the best!