Quality Assurance

Outcome Evaluation to Assure Quality in Our Citizenship Education

We place substantial emphasis on the impact of our programmes and interventions in order to

• measure progress towards our vision
• know if we are socially accountable
• enable better design of our intervention, training, curriculum, and methodology
• identify areas of capacity building towards enhanced efficacy of educators

The results are used to feed and improve the programmes and the curriculum. The results highlight topics and methodology that were both successfully and unsuccessfully delivered. We see that the topics on which students have done well can be correlated to good teaching and good content, and vice versa.

This analysis is conducted by the curriculum development team, after which corrective steps are taken. This analysis is communicated to the educators and volunteers who deliver the programmes. Again, corrective measures are taken where needed. Secondly, we share school scores with the educators and volunteers. This analysis is done by the programme management teams with their volunteers, and improves the efficacy of the educators.

Reporting on Teaching, Field Trips and Campaigns 

We follow a rigorous process of reporting in order to keep track of the progress of our programmes, and provide feedback to the curriculum development team. The following are the types of reports used, and their purposes.

• Weekly reports – A weekly report is sent by every educator to the programme management team at the end of every session. This is used to track progress, obtain feedback on the session and the school, and identify problem areas.
• Campaign reports – Tracking the progress of campaigns helps us design future campaigns based on the school’s requirement, and also feeds into curriculum development.
• Collecting acts of active citizenship – Recording acts of active citizenship by CMCA students is a way of recording impact, and is also a motivational tool for volunteers and student members.
• Field trip report – Reports on the field trips taken by CMCA Clubs feed into curriculum development, by telling us what works and what doesn’t in terms of the field trips.
• Reports to our schools – A mid-year and a year-end report are presented to each school hosting CMCA Clubs, highlighting the impacts and progress of the clubs and the students.
• Focus group discussions – Focus group discussions with Alumni help to understand the experiences of students of the programmes.

Training and Mentoring Educators to Provide Better Citizenship Education

It is mandatory for all educators to undergo curriculum and classroom management training. These training sessions are conducted prior to the start of the programme and again mid-year. Our in-house trainers conduct these trainings, with the aim of ensuring that all volunteer educators are teaching at the high standards set by CMCA. By training our educators, we are ensuring a uniformly good standard of instruction for all our young citizens, so that each child has the opportunity to spark change as an informed, thinking, active citizen. There is also an end-of-year review session for all volunteer educators.

Mentoring educators is an ongoing process that is conducted by the programme management teams, curriculum development team, and the training team. Through the mentoring process, we help the educator to work on areas of focus such as fairness, conduct, content, and engagement with students.

Building the capacity of educators to impart important lessons to children and youth on Citizenship and Life Skills is an important objective for CMCA. The more educators there are who can convey these crucial values to young people, the more young people can benefit from this vital sphere of education.

Educator Feedback

CMCA is deeply committed to embracing new ideas and innovative alternatives – we have always evolved and grown because of this. There are 3 platforms provided on Google Forms to ensure that feedback given will be recorded by the Curriculum Development Team. This feedback is routinely checked and incorporated wherever appropriate. Some of the things we ask educators to make special note of are below:

• Experiences during the year that are positive or difficult will help them understand their classroom situation better
• Flagging frequently asked questions during the year helps us answer these questions and share both question and answer with all CMCA educators
• Curriculum feedback is done at the end of the year to understand the ease and effectiveness of the sessions