Module 3: Developing, Implementing and Evaluating a Rights-based School Policy Innovation

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Topic 1 Introducing the notion of a Rights’ Based School

Module 3: Developing, Implementing and Evaluating a Rights-based School Policy Innovation Unit 2 Workshops Topic 1 Introducing the notion of a Rights’ Based School

This first workshop presents techniques that can be used by teacher trainers (or teachers) during the introductory meeting. Participants will be familiarized with the right’s-based approach for the development of a school policy  and will collaboratively identify causes and effects of key issues or decisions that need to be made.

Facilitator/ Participants

Objectives
(Participants will)

Materials/Duration

Keywords

Facilitators:

Teachers

Participants:

Stakeholders (headteachers, teachers, students, parents and other stakeholders).
  • Identify the root causes of the problems hindering children’s rights, nested within school and the broader community.
  • Analyze the immediate causes.
  • Prioritize and plan actions to resolve the problems

Materials:

  • Pictures depicting children rights
  • Computer and projector
  • Post it notes/ paper sheets
  • Flip charts
  • Whiteboard
  • Two tree diagrams

Duration:

3 hours

Children’s rights, root causes of problems.
  1. Everyone gets in a circle. The facilitator starts saying “My name is (….) and I like (object that starts with the same letter as their first name).” Then the next person says the same thing with their name, then repeating the person before. This goes on, with the last person repeating everyone.
  2. The icebreaker is followed by a brief self-introduction of the participants (i.e full name, capacity, reason for participating in the workshop, expectations).
  3. The facilitator then presents the outline of the five sessions and informs participants about the aim of the workshops and their role in the process.
  1. The facilitator prepares a collection of pictures that portray various aspects of  Children’s Rights. (i.e. access to health, education, security, the right to play). Pictures should be selected to reflect the particular context where the workshop is taking place.
  2. Participants discuss each picture to identify and rank the problems/issues, propose solutions and illustrate possible consequences.
  3. The group should direct the sequence of the pictures and rearrange them to indicate priority.
  4. The final composition can be recorded with a photograph or drawing. It is expected that by the end of this activity participants will reach a working definition of Children’s Rights.
  1. Participants identify normal daily activities for a child in their locality by adding labels, pictures or symbols of these around a picture of a child.
  2. Each activity is discussed in groups. Participants need to determine the contribution of each activity towards Children’s Rights. A whole class discussion is followed to reach a conclusion.
  3. Participants, in groups, consider the daily life of a child belonging to a particular socially deprived or excluded group i.e disable, immigrant, LGBT. The picture is replaced with that of the child of the particular group, and participants in each group draw lines of different colors from the picture to each activity, to show whether they think that the child has equal opportunities, as any other child, to participate.
  4. The facilitator displays a large diagram showing concentric circles, labelled from the center outwards as Individual, Family, School, Community, Wider Society etc. The group moves their labels into the relevant circle of the diagram, to show the origin of the barrier to participation.
  5. By the end of this activity, participants will acknowledge possible barriers hindering Children’s Rights, bearing in mind equal participation rights of all children.
  1. The facilitator uses a picture of a tree. The picture is labelled as “Barriers hindering Children’s Rights”. The barriers for Children’s Rights, determined in activity 2, are labelled and drawn as the roots of the tree.
  2. Next, the effects of the problems-barriers are drawn as branches of the tree. The diagram should identify links between issues by joining branches together.
  3. Using a new diagram, each problem, cause and effect can be simply reworded into an objective that will tackle the issue. For example, ‘lack of free time’ becomes ‘improve time management’. In this way, the Problem Tree is converted into an equivalent ‘Opportunity Tree’ or ‘Objectives Tree’ – showing a strategy for tackling the issues.

Identifying the focal issue with ‘Problem Tree Analysis’ technique

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