Implementing at Distance: Top 10 reflections from Amal Alliance’s Colors of Kindness team

by Danielle de la Fuente, CEO of Amal Alliance

A group activity at Bakurchar Government Primary School in Bangladesh.

September 10th was a momentous day in the history of our organization. Amal Alliance successfully conducted its first ever virtual training, with participants spread across three different countries and time zones. Some people had just started their day, while others had just finished evening prayer. Everyone was eager to learn about Colors of Kindness and its social emotional pedagogical approach, which normally would be taught in person.

But how do you teach about human behaviour and interaction through a digital platform?

Even though the COVID pandemic has forced us to be physically distant, we have never been more virtually connected. Technology has bridged distance and time, bringing our offices, partnerships, and friendships into our homes. Even though this accessibility has indeed made it more difficult to disconnect from work and blurred the lines between personal and professional, it has enabled us to interact with colleagues across the globe without the necessity of travel and the expenses associated with it.

Tight turn-around and virtual partnership building

We were selected as one of the Humanitarian Education Accelerator finalists on August 6th, giving us approximately 5 weeks until our scheduled implementation date. New programme creation typically takes several months, or even years, so a 5-week turnaround time was ambitious in itself.

Not only did we first need to identify and organise the planning and coordination process itself, but we needed to find a trustworthy local partner that shared our values and vision. While never having met in person, we were fortunate to cement a strong partnership with Friendship NGO in Bangladesh through our Global Dignity partners. During UNHCR’s virtual bootcamp, we also met Ustad Mobile, our virtual colleagues behind the technological component of our programme. Forging new partnerships is something we normally would have done in person, or at the very least after having met in person. However, the travel restrictions forced us to develop these relationships entirely on WhatsApp and Zoom; showcasing that relationships can indeed be cultivated at a distance.

Key Factors to Consider

Learners participate in an activity from Episode 10 of Colors of Kindness in Learning Centre in Camp 7, Cox Bazar, Bangladesh

Launching a new programme is never an easy feat, but launching one 7870 miles away with a 14 hour time difference is an entirely different story. Our three person team was spread across the world — in Kyrgyzstan, NYC, and Washington DC, making internal communication slightly more tricky. Add to that, our technological partner was based in Dubai. Working closely with our Bangladeshi colleagues, we spent countless hours understanding the local context, getting a frame of reference as to what could possibly be done given the new COVID restrictions, and learning more about the challenges we could face in the Rohingya camps.

Developing a programme can best be described like putting together a puzzle. Each piece possesses certain angles and edges that connect precisely with another. If the pieces don’t align perfectly, it makes it very difficult to form the whole. When working with children, especially those from displaced populations that have endured tremendous trauma, ensuring these pieces are placed in a thoughtful and meaningful manner becomes even more important. Language considerations, local infrastructure and customs, building trust with the teachers, and more practical monitoring and evaluating protocol all comes into play. For example, when working within social emotional learning, literal translations of complex terminology lose the nuances of the concepts themselves. Therefore, it is critical to find strong translation partners that not only understand the content, but can descriptively bring it to life in another language. Since the Rohingya dialect does not have a written script, we first had to translate the English into Bangla, which in turn would be recorded into Rohingya audio files. Multiple translations posed a stronger threat of concept dilution, and thus required numerous cross checks. In addition, the numerous COVID precautions required that we role play the games and activities to ensure that social distancing could be maintained.

Lessons Learned

1. Implementing at a distance requires a higher level of patience than what is needed in person.
2. Communication is key, but vocalising your needs becomes even more integral when non-verbal cues can’t be seen. Furthermore, communicating with team members, colleagues, and partners across numerous timezones in various countries requires extra planning and coordination. It can often lead to meetings at odd hours of the early morning or late evening, bypassing traditional office hours.
3. Flexibility and being accommodating make for a more pleasant work experience.
4. Zoom etiquette varies from country to country. While having your video off can at times be awkward, poor connectivity requires many locations to transition to audio only.
5. Forging relationships with partners overseas over Zoom and WhatsApp is possible, but does require additional effort and more articulate and clear communication.
6. Training teachers online proved effective but needs to involve an additional component that allows teachers and trainers to have direct and constant communication for additional support. This additional component can most practically be described as being “on call” to troubleshoot at distance.
7. Delivering social emotional content requires teacher training. This factor ensures the familiarity of the concepts can be optimally conveyed.
8. Fancy and verbose language has no place in the classroom. Practical and simple instruction makes implementing the programme easier for teachers, and easily understood by the students.
9. Technology can be fickle, so always have a back up plan for any unforeseen technical bugs.
10. While monitoring and evaluation is critical to understanding the success of the programme, it is important to keep it simple and straightforward. Take time to understand what you want to measure, how you plan to capture the data, and what the simplest way to do this could be.

Final thoughts

While numerous hurdles challenged us, they provided us with valuable lessons. Our M&E framework and the input of teachers provided us with a continuous feedback loop that kept us cognisant of what aspects of the programming best worked.

Teachers were very happy to introduce such novel content to the children and found the SEL programming to be engaging, timely, and extremely beneficial to both the Rohingya and Bangladeshi children. Both the teachers and the children expressed that they wished this programme had started much earlier during the COVID pandemic.

Every week, the children take their emotional temperature and note where they find themselves on our Emotions Thermometer. As we see the children’s emotions move into a higher realm of happiness, and see smiling faces eager to return to class, we find ourselves filled with gratitude for the privilege of being able to pilot this programme from the other side of the world.