Our Approach

At Winning Teams, we believe that we have an urgent need to address the unprecedented social and economic challenges that face this generation of young learners.

Globally, we are facing a learning crisis, and the established educational and learning practices are simply not working.

We need to do MORE – and we have to take action now to help address worldwide learning poverty.

We have successfully been crafting our response for more than three decades, and we believe that we have a very important role to play in re-imagining the future of learning.

Learning Environment

An engaged learning environment increases learners’ attention and focus, promotes meaningful learning experiences, encourages higher levels of performance, and motivates students to practice higher-level critical thinking skills. We use a learner-centered approach to learning that helps create an engaged learning environment through active learning. We create a fun, motivating environment through our unique approach, which helps learners take ownership for their learning in an engaging and non-threatening way. (See UNESCO source below).

Fundamentals

Core foundations are the fundamental conditions and core skills, knowledge, and attitudes and values that are prerequisites for further learning across the entire curriculum. The core foundations provide a basis for developing knowledge and understanding of higher-level competencies. If missing, learners are ham-strung and are often not capable of taking the incremental leaps to the next levels. Our approach focuses on core fundamentals to ensure that each learner has the required skills and knowledge to proceed to the next level of learning.

Life Skills

UNICEF defines life skills as “a group of psychosocial competencies and interpersonal skills that help people make informed decisions, solve problems, think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, build healthy relationships, empathize with others, and cope with and manage their lives in a healthy and productive manner”. Our approach proactively develops life skills by offering young people the emotional, social and intellectual tools needed to achieve success in life – on a personal level, interpersonal level, and within their community and workplaces.

The most important life skill is to promote life-long learning, which helps learners take an active role in the workplace and society.

Assessment

Assessment is vital to the education process. In schools, the most visible assessments are summative. Summative assessments are used to measure what students have learnt at the end of a unit, to promote students, to ensure they have met required standards on the way to earning certification for school completion or to enter certain occupations, or as a method for selecting students for entry into further education.

The Winning Teams approach focuses on learners mastering key foundational skills through several mechanisms. If they move through the curriculum without first mastering the key foundational concepts they need, their ability to progress on to more complex topics with adequate understanding will be jeopardized. Our assessment process operates at an individual, and group level, and consists of both formal and informal methods.

Catch-Up

The World Bank together with several partners developed a policy framework (RAPID) to guide decision makers to reversing learning losses arising from the COVID pandemic. The Winning Teams approach is consistent with the RAPID framework as recently systematised. Whilst the acronym has only recently been coined, we have successfully applied these principles in practice for more than two decades. The RAPID framework is based on research over many years, and is based on evidence from numerous programmes around the world, and from many countries. Our approach relies on collaborative learning, group learning, self-directed learning and peer tutoring.

To learn more about the Winning Teams Approach, please CONTACT us.

Attribution

World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, FCDO, UNESCO, UNICEF, and USAID. 2022. Guide for Learning Recovery and Acceleration: Using the RAPID Framework to Address COVID-19 Learning Losses and Build Forward Better. Washington, DC: World Bank.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/publication/the-rapid-framework-and-a-guide-for-learning-recovery-and-acceleration

UNICEF: KNOWLEDGE BRIEF: BASIC LIFE SKILLS CURRICULUM

OECD Learning Compass (2020), available at: https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teachingand-learning/learning/learning-compass-2030/.

UNESCO: The Futures of Learning 3: what kind of pedagogies for the 21st century?, available at https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000243126.