MATTERS OF THE HEART BATTLES OF LIFE by ANDREW STEVEN BOIMA from Baby Boy Media Production (Studio of Light)

 

MATTERS OF THE HEART THE BATTLES OF LIFE BY ANDREW STEVEN BOIMA

Written & Directed by Andrew Steven Boima from The light studio

 (Baby Boy Media Production)

Do you have to ask God why you are always fighting with some issues in your life? No, you don't have to. Fighting has always been part of every human. Either we are fighting for peace, love, survival, power, riches or for freedom. In life, there always seems something to fight for. But one thing has remained true of every battle. Your hands feel better when you or someone develops a strategy. It is about planning and resources, which takes a crucial part of life and its battles. I was flying in the world called love, when suddenly the pieces were apart. I was reminded that fighting is part of life and that the life we are given should never be taken for granted. Now, I'm still fighting for love. It has been 5 years today since I started this battle, but I still hold on to the many lessons I've learnt and it experienced.

I find it amazing that of the many battles we engage in today be it money, control or matters of love, very few of us can fight the right way or understands who we're really fighting against. To win any battle you've got to have the right strategy and resources, because victory Doesn't come by accident. I've finally realized with my own battle, was a divine fulfilment, and it victory which am still believing God I see. There are battles we're in today relating to decisions we took periods back. It’s true that if we can't wait for God and His will for us, we are walking in our own will. The consequence is that grace will be granted yet still you suffer the decision you've made. For His grace is sufficient for us till eternity Amen! All the battles we engage in today come from our decisions or someone else, a friend, relative or parent. But one thing to know, you can influence a chance of change both spiritual and physical only if you are a catalyst.

You've been hurt before, you made it and now so you can too. The matters of life you are battling with show how strong you are and your real personality. I believe you know what you are fighting for. Wait a minute, is the battle worth your fighting? Are you sure you really want it back? If yes, why and does it impact you? Many hearts have been broken, stolen and missed, what have you? Is it love or wealth? Whatever the issue is, just believe in time. Sometimes we make choices that we can't get away with especially in matters of the heart.

Men say all women are alike, while women say all men are the same. Notwithstanding the above, I believe am a different man. Your thoughts and acts make you become like all men or women. Sometimes my colleagues will say that ''Boys will always be boys'' You can decide to be a cheat in a relationship or a fake. Just know that you are a very wicked being. No wait, I can't blame you anyways. It's the people like us who can't wait upon God. He alone knows what is best for us, and if we can only wait for a few seconds He shall grant us our heart's desire. How selfish are we that we can't wait on God just for a second?  These all come from our physical desires.

Love, Love, oh love!!! Why have you been so wicked to humanity? You let people trust in a relationship for years with hope, and only one day a heart is wickedly broken to pieces, leading the victim to frustration or mental madness. How do you feel when you trust somebody in a relationship for decades, only one morning when you wake up and find out they've betrayed your trust, your hope, your happiness and love? They've been cheating on you, pretending you own that special key to their heart. Isn't that a wickedness or witchcraft act? Oh yes, it is. What will you do if it was your heart that was broken or you find someone you trust so much wholeheartedly cheating on you? Just think for a moment how would you feel, how would you be or breathe? You must be in silent pain a very serious one I mean.

Think, think and think!!! again that this is just how your partner or someone who has learned to trust you for years feels when you betray them. Don't you know it is difficult nowadays to find someone you can trust or to trust you? Oh wicked hearts, may God reward your actions on Earth and for eternity, because you are such an evil and wicked being. Do you think the word Love is just a mare word? Oh no! That's why God Himself sent His beloved Son to die on the cross all in the name of Love. He also went further to say be faithful and multiply hmm...!!. My heart pumps faster with veins transferring blood to my brain. Honestly don't you think that your act or action might kill somebody or is even killing someone out there? You are moving on with great joy and waves of laughter, forgetting somebody is in their room of pain crying because of you.

They are thinking about your day and night not because they still love you, but thinking that the one they trusted could have such a mind to betray them, cheating on them with sweet lies. I wonder and imagine where this world is taking us to. I pray to God the souls of the brokenhearted heal, keep and mend, we have no strength of ours, we a full of fears and pains within. No one sees, no one knows, and no one feels the pain we breathe and live in silently every day, but God knows, He sees and feels with us. The irony is this, with all the pains if we still can't hold on and wait for God to fight our battle. He is the right strategy for our battles and His words are our resources. With Him, we can gain victory in every battle of life and He will replace our pains, disappointment, and fear with our heart's desire for definite joy. So shall it be Amen....!!!

LET'S MOVE ON, THIS IS OUR STORY...

OUR GOD REIGNS <Psalms 97>

YOU KEEP RUNNING AND HE KEEPS FIGHTING.....

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UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD EVULATION

September 18, 2016

First year evaluation results show promise

Paul Skidmore 

 Results

Feedback is central to teaching and learning at Rising Academies. Students and teachers learn to give and receive feedback using techniques like Two Stars and a Wish or What Went Well...Even Better If. The Rising Academy Creed reminds us that "Our first draft is never our final draft." Given that, it would be pretty strange if Rising as an organisation didn't also embrace feedback on how well we are doing at enabling more children to access quality learning.

That's why, even as a new organisation, we've made rigorous, transparent monitoring and evaluation a priority from the outset. Internally, we've invested in our assessment systems and data. But my focus here is on external evaluation, because I'm excited to report that we have just received the first annual report from our external evaluators. If you want to understand the background to the study and our reactions to the first annual report, read on. If you're impatient and want to jump straight into the report itself, it's here.

BACKGROUND

Last year, we commissioned a team led by Dr David Johnson from the Department of Education at Oxford University to conduct an independent impact evaluation of our schools in Sierra Leone.
The evaluation covers three academic years:

• (The abridged) School Year 2016 (January-July)
• School Year 2016-17 (September-July)
• School Year 2017-18 (September-July)

The evaluation will track a sample of Rising students over those three years, and compare their progress both to a comparison group of students drawn from other private schools and government schools.
The overall evaluation will be based on a range of outcome measures, including standardised tests of reading and maths, a measure of writing skills, and a mixed-methods analysis of students' academic self-confidence and other learning dispositions.

The evaluation is based on what is known as a 'quasi-experimental' design rather than a randomised controlled trial (unlike our schools in Liberia, where we are part of a much larger RCT). But by matching the schools (on things like geography, fee level, and primary school exam scores), randomly selecting students within schools, and collecting appropriate student-level control variables (such as family background and socio-economic status) the idea is that it will ultimately be possible to develop an estimate of our impact over these 3 years that is relatively free of selection bias.

Figure 1: How the evaluation defines impact

BASELINE

To make sure any estimate of learning gains is capturing the true impact of our schools, one of the most important control variables to capture is students' ability levels at baseline (i.e. at the start of the three-year evaluation period). This allows for an estimate of the 'value-added' by the student's school, controlling for differences in cognitive ability among students when they enrolled. Baselining for the evaluation took place in January and February 2016. The baseline report is available here. It showed:

• That on average both Rising students (the treatment group) and students in the other schools (the comparison group) began their junior secondary school careers with similar ability levels in reading and maths. The two groups were, in other words, well matched;
• That these averages were extremely low - for both reading and maths, approximately five grades below where they would be expected to be given students' chronological age.

YEAR ONE PROGRESS REPORT: RESULTS

The Year One Progress Report covers Academic Year 2016. The Ebola Crisis of 2014-15 disrupted the academic calendar in Sierra Leone. Students missed two full terms of schooling. The Government of Sierra Leone therefore introduced a temporary academic calendar, with the school year cut from three terms to two in 2015 (April-December) and again in 2016 (January-July). The normal (September-July) school year will resume in September 2016.
The Progress Report therefore covers a relatively short period - essentially 4.5 months from late January when baselining was undertaken to late June when the follow-up assessments took place. It would be unrealistic to see major impacts in such a short period, and any impacts that were identified would need to be followed-up over the next two academic years to ensure they were actually sustained. As the authors note, "it is a good principle to see annual progress reports as just that – reports that monitor progress and that treat gains as initial rather than conclusive. A more complete understanding of the extent to which learning in the Rising Academy Network has improved is to be gained towards the end of the study."
Nevertheless, this report represents an important check-in point and an opportunity for us to see whether things looking to be heading in the right direction.
Our reading of the Year One report is that, broadly speaking, they are. To summarise the key findings:

• The report finds that Rising students made statistically significant gains in both reading and maths, even in this short period. Average scaled scores rose 35 points in reading (from 196 to 231) and 36 points in maths (from 480 to 516). To put these numbers in context, this change in reading scores corresponds to 4 months' worth of progress (based on the UK student population on which these tests are normed) in 4.5 months of instruction.
• These gains were higher than for students in comparison schools. The differences were both statistically significant and practically important: in both reading and maths, Rising students gained more than twice as much as their peers in other private schools (35 points versus 13 points in reading, and 36 points versus 4 points in maths). Students in government schools made no discernible progress at all in either reading or maths. (For the more statistically inclined, this represents an effect size of 0.39 for reading and 0.38 for maths relative to government schools, or 0.23 for reading and 0.29 for maths relative to private schools, which is pretty good in such a short timespan.) 
• The gains were also equitably distributed, in that the students who gained most were the students who started out lowest, and there were no significant differences between boys and girls.
• Finally, there are early indications that students' experience of school is quite different at Rising compared to other schools. Rising students were more likely to report spending time working together and supporting each others' learning, and more likely to report getting praise, feedback and help when they get stuck from their teachers.

That's the good news. What about the bad news? The most obvious point is that in absolute terms our students' reading and maths skills are still very low. They are starting from such a low base that one-off improvements in learning levels are not good enough. To catch-up, we need to sustain and accelerate these gains over the next few years.
That's why, for example, we've recently been partnering with Results for Development to prototype and test new ways to improve the literacy skills of our most struggling readers, including a peer-to-peer reading club.
So what are my two stars and a wish?

• My first star is that our students are making much more rapid progress in our schools than they did in their previous schools, or than that their peers are making in other schools they might have chosen to attend;
• My second star is that these gains are not concentrated in a single subset of higher ability students but widely and equitably shared across our intake;
• My wish is that we find ways to sustain these gains next year (particularly as we grow, with 5 new schools joining our network in September 2016) and accelerate them through innovations like our reading club. If we can do that, and with the benefit of 50% more instructional time (as the school year returns to its normal length), we can start to be more confident we are truly having the impact we're aiming for.

Take a look at the report yourself, and let us know what you think. Tweet me @pjskids or send me an email.

Tagged: Evaluation, Learning outcomes

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News from Rising Academies: 10 new schools launched in Sierra Leone and Liberia

ANDREW STEVEN BOIMA

ADMINISTRATOR

RISING ACADEMY NETWORK

News from Rising Academies: 10 new schools launched in Sierra Leone and Liberia View this email in your browser Headlines ·         Super September! ·         New schools for Salone ·         Liberia launch ·         First evaluation results ·         Scholarship campaign Keep In Touch Super September! 1 new country. 10 new schools. 1800 new students (and counting). Talk about a Super September! Two years ago, our plans to open the first Rising Academy lay in tatters when the Ebola epidemic forced all schools in Sierra Leone to close. But thanks to a brave group of teachers we were able to launch our Ebola Crisis Home Outreach programme. Then, 18 months ago, we could finally open that first school. 9 months ago, we opened a second and third. Today, we are a network of 13 schools, 150 staff, and nearly 2200 students across 2 countries.  Thanks to all of you who have supported us on that incredible journey. 5 new Rising Academies open in Sierra Leone Rising has expanded its network of Junior Secondary Schools in Sierra Leone. 5 new Rising Academies - Adonkia, Babadorie, Grafton, Juba Hill and Waterloo - opened their doors on September 13th. With these additions our network in Sierra Leone grows to 8 schools, with close to 1200 students enrolled so far, and more expected to join in the coming weeks. In another first for Rising, two of the sites (at Grafton and Waterloo) are brand new schools constructed for us this year. As this map shows, we remain focused on Freetown and the Western Area. This is to make sure we can continue to provide intensive oversight and supervision of the schools even as we grow. Rising Academies comes to Liberia September 5th marked the start of the new academic year in Liberia, and with it the official launch of Rising Academy Partnership Schools in the country. As part of the Government of Liberia's Partnership Schools for Liberia initiative, Rising will be managing 5 public primary and pre-primary schools in Bomi and Montserrado counties.   Intensive preparations for the launch have been under way since July when Rising was chosen by the Government as one of eight operators to be part of the programme. Read all about how we used those precious few weeks to get ready for launch. The programme, which is being rigorously evaluated through a 'gold standard' randomised controlled trial, will run for 3 years and we're honoured to be part of it. Evaluation finds encouraging progress in Year 1 Our independent evaluation partners at Oxford University have just released their first annual progress report on our work in Sierra Leone, and the results are pretty encouraging. Although it's early days (this report just covers the abridged school year January-July 2016), the team find that Rising students are already making statistically significant gains relative to their peers in other schools in both reading and maths. You can read the report and my reflections on it on our blog here. Scholarship match-funding campaign kicks off With Rising's enrollment growing rapidly, it's vital that our scholarship support grows too so that we can continue to provide access to quality schooling for the most disadvantaged families. That's why we're delighted to once again be partnering with The Solon Foundation UK and GlobalGivingUK to launch our Scholarship 50% Match Funding Campaign. For the next month and until matching funds last, donations to the Solon Foundation Scholarship Fund via GlobalGivingUK will receive a 50% matching contribution from GlobalGivingUK, helping your support go further. There's a total of £4,000 in matching funds up for grabs, so to make it count we are aiming to raise £8,000 in new donations. If you'd like to help, head over to our page on GlobalGivingUK site or click the button below. And spread the word about the campaign: feel free to forward this message to friends, family and colleagues! Donate now Copyright © 2016 Rising Academy Network, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have previously said you wanted to receive updates from the Rising Academy Network. Our mailing address is:  Rising Academy Network 56b Main Motor Road Freetown,  Sierra Leone Add us to your address book unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences

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