The journey to Precious

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NSHUPU, Tanzania – The KLM flight out of Logan Airport is beginning its descent, over the snow-covered peaks of mountains and then down over a lush African canopy of trees, before coming in for a landing at Kilimanjaro Airport.

As we fly in, I am remembering the very first time, nine years ago, that I arrived from our home in West Tisbury on this long journey to Precious, the name of the school at the base of Mount Meru here on the equator in East Africa. It’s early January and I have left the cold of New England behind for the blast of heat that greets me as I step off the plane. I  know my friend Ibrahim will be there to greet men as well, just as he has been every year. He will take me to the guest cottage where I am staying, just a 10-minute walk from the Precious Primary and Medium School, and I will find myself back at home in the jungle of Nshupu.

Looking back now, I am realizing how much I have learned from this small school. I came here to support the teachers through workshops, but all these years later I come away realizing how much they have taught me. As their school has prospered and grown, I have learned over a half-century as an educator what may be the single most important ingredient in successful education: a sense of community. It is a lesson gathered from teaching stints in India and Brazil and as a principal right here on the Island. What perhaps links these very different and disparate places together is that all have a population with great inequity between rich and poor. In this context, developing a sense of community is all that more critical. This essay is about navigating those divides and what I have learned along the way.

Part One

NSHUPU, Tanzania – In the morning, I head off from my cottage for the 10-minute walk to the campus of the Precious School, where I am greeted by the teachers welcoming me back. After some warm words and catching up, we almost immediately start talking about the school and how it is doing. The rapid success of the school has brought with it larger class sizes — sometimes up to 50 students per class — which is challenging the administration to find the right formula of student-teacher ratios. We start talking about ways in which they are utilizing ideas we’ve developed over the past many years, breaking down the classes into small groups of five students who can then direct themselves in accomplishing the tasks they’re given that day. I feel like I am right back in it, and picking up where we left off on my trip here last year.

When I step back for a moment, it is striking how much they have all succeeded in building this school. The teachers get it, and the students get it. And I am amazed how quickly they can adapt these strategies and work together.

When this journey for me first began nine years ago, this school was in a very different place.

The invitation to come to Precious was from my good friends Gil Williams and Susie Rheault, who summer on the Vineyard each year. They had come to Tanzania for Susie’s work with the Clinton Foundation’s Health Access Initiative, which she first joined in 2007 and where she is still a senior advisor today. Susie and Gil went to Nshupu for a safari, when they came across a small village which had an orphanage called the Precious Orphans Children’s Home. They were drawn to the sounds of the children at the orphanage, and they realized a school was needed  here. They “adopted” this idea, which was led by an organization called the Precious Project, founded in 2010 by local educators William and Sarah Modest in Tanzania. It became an independent U.S. 501(c)(3) charity organization in 2014 under the direction of Rheault, a psychologist with a specialty in organization development, and is supported by a team of passionate volunteers dedicated to Precious’ cause. Susie and Gil asked me to pay a visit and see if I could help them give shape to the school, and develop a curriculum that would work. I accepted the invitation, and paid a visit in January 2016. When I arrived, I was immediately impressed by the rural, yet quite beautiful setting they had chosen to build their kindergarten to seventh grade school of learning. Most fascinating were the rising hills and mountains that grew from the western plains below us into the soaring peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru, both hovering close to 20,000 feet.

I was quickly assigned to provide professional development workshops to the 11 full-time teachers who were currently employed and practicing with approximately 100 students.

I planned on beginning by using the teaching and administrative skills I’d learned through a lifetime as an educator. For about a half-century, I have been a teacher and an administrator, beginning in Western Massachusetts after graduating from UMass Amherst with a master’s degree in education. I started off in the Greenfield school system, and my wife, Marcy Klapper, was teaching at the preschool in nearby Shelburne Falls.

As we began to build a family, and eager to expand our opportunities for both higher compensation and “adventure,” in 1986, we applied for and were hired to move to New Delhi, India, and work for three years as teachers at the American Embassy School. The experience, in short, was life-changing. We brought all three of our children, Ariana, Spencer, and Kaila, who were 1, 4, and 6 years old, and immersed ourselves into the full educational experience. We all learned so much living in India; it encouraged us to think globally about education. We saw firsthand the vast disparities that exist in many corners of the developing world, and what the American education system, as flawed as it is, could offer to countries like India, with sharp divides. We also quickly understood that we as American educators could learn a great deal from our colleagues in India and their very different styles of teaching. The lessons of India resonated with my daughters especially, and Ariana and Kaila have gone on to be educators as well, establishing and running their own home school on Martha’s Vineyard over the past decade for their children and other Island families.

A few years after returning to the U.S., we left Western Mass. and moved to Martha’s Vineyard, where my in-laws had a home. I was hired as principal of the Oak Bluffs School, pre-K through eighth grade. It was 1996, and it was a time when the year-round population on the Island was growing; a surge of Brazilian immigration was in many ways reshaping the island, and particularly the schools. We felt the strong desire to understand the local Brazilian culture, and we began reaching out to parents and students, and immersing ourselves in their culture.

It enabled us to better serve the significant Brazilian immigrant community, which we were connected to through the Brazilian students in our classrooms. Within a few years, we decided to take the idea farther by observing the Brazilian school system. So we began to study Portuguese, and decided to go to the interior of Brazil and the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo, north of São Paulo, which we learned is the region the vast majority of the Island’s Brazilian population call home. There, we observed both public and private school education systems to bring home a deeper understanding of how the Island schools could better serve the Brazilian community.

What we learned over four months was that Brazil essentially had two educational systems. There was a private school system for those who could afford to pay, where there were appropriately sized classrooms, well-trained and effective teachers, and adequate resources. The other was the public school system, which was characterized by classes of more than 40 or 45 students with inadequately trained teachers, and it was clear to us these schools fell way short of what we felt was even close to adequate for children’s learning. It was a version of the haves and the have-nots, and that was one more big lesson in our understanding of the global context of education. I brought these lessons home and shared them with the teachers and administrators on the Island to help them understand where the Brazilian students and their families were coming from.

For the next 10 years, I worked in the Island school systems as an administrator. My style of leadership was shaped in profound ways by my experiences in India and Brazil, particularly as our Island was becoming increasingly diverse.

In 2010, I somewhat hastily decided that my time as the Oak Bluffs School principal was coming to an end, and at the end of the school year, I resigned my position and officially retired from the Oak Bluffs School system. Over the next five years, I would serve in several interim capacities at the Charter School up-Island.

Then in 2016, realizing it was just way too early for full retirement, I agreed to finally make that visit to Tanzania, and I am so glad I did. It truly changed my life.

Part Two

Over the past nine years, my annual journey to Precious has been focused on workshops for the teachers, which are held every January over four days prior to the students’ arrival for the start of the school year. In these workshops, we cover several instructional themes and models, most importantly showing them the differences and value of models using cooperative learning, which stands in contrast to a lecture model for the basic model for classroom instruction. Cooperative learning is a powerful instructional model that was first developed in the mid-1960s in American schools, and has been embraced as a standard in most public and private school systems and institutions of higher education. In its essence, it shifts the planning and execution of instruction from teacher lecture to a student-led, small-group, problem-solving model, in which groups of four to five students spend the bulk of classroom instructional time solving the problems the teacher deems important, each group tackling a different task, and then being responsible for sharing their work with the rest of the class.

This change to an instructional model served as a benchmark success, as student participation and contributions ballooned, while the classroom teacher was then freed up to observe each group’s work, offering suggestions and ideas to each.

I realized over the years that here in Tanzania, just as in India and Brazil, the divide between the rich and poor played a central role in education. And this educational approach proved to be transformative, even in under-resourced schools.

The Precious School is set amid rising hills and lush green valleys that extend eastward toward the foothills of Mount Meru. Despite the magical presence it projects, there’s a less than subtle contrast with the reality of the poverty the surrounding families live in. Walking the dirt paths that wind like dry riverbeds through the foothills of the community, what strikes me is how most everyone responds to my “Habiri” (“Good day”) greeting in Swahili with cheerful questions. Even though I have no idea what they are asking, they continue to engage, simply because they feel an obligation to make you feel welcome and safe. And with a nod of the head or a shrug of the shoulders, I always answer with one word: “Asante!” It is the Swahili word that translates as “thank you,” but which seems to carry a deeper meaning of gratitude, and a spirit of being grateful.

I have always been impressed by the resolute, friendly, and spirited attitudes the local population exhibit day in and day out, without fail. They are incredibly hard-working individuals who refuse to let any issue, setback, or financial impediment influence their positivity. I stand in awe of how quickly they have built the school with new buildings and classrooms, and all of them up and running with great efficiency.

Through all the years, I have tried to keep my hopes and dreams safely in front of me, making my own personal assumptions that the teaching staff is looking for new, exciting, and useful instructional models that they can learn quickly and employ in a short period of time. They have maintained a solid pace on this, and learned steadily. The rising success of the school and the way it has become the center of their community is truly an inspiration to me as an educator.

Part Three

I am back home now, after having returned from 73 incredible days at the Precious School. I am enjoying seeing my grandkids on the Island plunging into spring, and experiencing that amazing force that pulls us all toward summer at the end of another school year.

My daughter Kaila took a short break from the home school she runs with Ariana, and came along for the last leg of my time there. It was a rare and cherished opportunity to share the beautiful community of Precious with her. For years I had talked about this place that filled me with hope, joy, and inspiration, and I was finally able to witness in her what I had felt for all this time. Beyond the fact that the Precious School now ranks among the highest-achieving schools in all of Tanzania, this place and its people continue to offer a model of community that feels so crucial at this moment in time, particularly in America, where in the post-COVID era there is a feel of a more fractured life, and a deeply politically divided one. It feels like we are in a time of repairing the fraying fabric of our communities, and the biggest lesson of Precious is a sense of how effective a school can be when it is a center of a community that is truly knitted together. So, this is what a day in the life feels like:

Every morning at 7:30 am, the teachers gather for their morning meeting in the computer lab. Children are milling about outside as the sun rises, most arriving early for porridge breakfast (the school provides three meals each day for the children in the orphanage, as well as any other children in the school), many having walked from home or taken a bus for up to two hours from across the region. As Kaila and I walk into the lab on her first day, the entire school staff is already deep in song. They are standing, swaying, and singing radiant gospel songs in both Swahili and English. A different member of the school community guides the song and prayers each day, and it is only after this ritual that morning meeting takes place. Announcements are made, questions are answered, and after the custodial staff, the kitchen staff, and other nonteaching staff members depart, the teachers are given a moment to connect with their colleagues and the administration. Anything that arose the day before is addressed. It is overwhelming to observe, and to feel, the level of investment of each person there. These meetings are at the root of their practices in building community. They care personally about their work, and as they gather together each day, they reassure one another of its power and its potential.

As we shuffle outside the lab, more song is heard outside the classrooms. The children are engaged in their daily morning meeting, with a student guiding the songs, and another student playing the keyboard to accompany them. The first song is one written for the Precious School itself, and as more children arrive for the start of the day, very quickly a few hundred children are belting out their school song, swinging their arms in unison. They shift into the Tanzanian national anthem, and then a few more songs before closing out the meeting when the students are released to their classrooms.

It is not simply the songs, but the intention behind the songs that strikes me. There is a collective agreement to pause before the start of the day for a moment of connection — to God, to one another, to their work — and from there the day is built. From there, we see the community of children as they support each other in their classrooms, and the community of teachers support each other through their feedback and sharing of resources. This community, while lacking in such profound ways financially and infrastructurally, is overwhelmingly generous in spirit, in passion, and in wisdom. And they welcomed me, and Kaila, with wide-open arms and wide-open hearts.

The reality is that these nine years are not so much about what I have contributed to the growth and success of the Precious School, but rather what Precious has taught me. Community provides essential support, fostering a sense of belonging, shared values, and mutual respect, leading to stronger social bonds and a more vibrant school environment. It also offers strong social connections and networks, creates social-capital opportunities for learning, collaboration, and collective action in addressing local needs and improving overall well-being. Community allows for deep roots that allow for expansion, not in the sense that the school itself must expand, but that the community expands. There are webs stretching across oceans to this school, strengthening its support network and sharing its model with the world.

I have always embraced the understanding that as teachers, our job is to cultivate an educational quest that is sincere, worthy, full of purpose, and helpful in creating a path toward personal and communal evolution. In the cooperative learning model, students understand the purpose of their learning through group dialogue, and recognize their worth as they present material to teach to their peers. This model of education has flourished here because the foundation for community was constructed at the start. There is no knowing where it will go from here, but that is what motivates and drives me when it comes to Precious: the openness and willingness to discover more, explore more widely, while being held together through song, through shared experiences, through mutual understanding and wide-open hearts.

Each year, especially lately, I struggle with the reality of my own longevity, and the questions regarding how much longer I will continue this occasionally exceptional exercise. This last trip may indeed prove to be my last one to Precious. But I know now that regardless of whether I get back there, there is a part of Precious that is now present on our little Island, that lives on right here, and I believe we are brighter and stronger for it. I am truly grateful for the journey and all it has taught me.

Asante, Precious!