BBOM Teacher's Training for Transformation (TTT)

Teachers' Training for Transformation: Teachers transforming Schools to Harmonious and Productive Learning Communities

Since 2010, BBOM Association in Turkey (Another School is Possible -ASIP) strives to establish and spread a new model of education. Up until 2018 seven BBOM schools have opened in different districts. In 2015 BBOM started to design and implement its own teachers’ training programs. The teachers’ training that we are organizing integrates 4 different crucial axis of life that not only the schools but all kinds of communities have to deal with. These 4 axis are:

• Keeping the Connection: How do we want to live together and preserve our individual differences while respecting community’s needs?
• Taking the Decisions: How are we going to include community members to decision making processes without hampering the effectiveness and the speed of the actions?
• Sharing the workload: How do we organize the most effective division of labor without creating tensions within the community?
• Resolving the conflicts: How are we going to solve our problems without using classical traps of punitive and retributory methods?

The aim of BBOM’s  teachers’ training programs (TTT) is to empower teachers with new tools and methods on these four axis so that they can transform their schools to participatory learning communities. We believe concepts such as “trust”, “acceptance”, “participation”, “connection”, “inclusion”, “collaboration” are needed the most to build a productive and harmonious learning community – which should be an ideal baseline characteristic of a school.

For this reason we have developed an integrated content and application of our teachers’ training programs (TTT) on four new tools and methods: Non-violent Communication (NVC), Deep Democracy (DD), Sociocracy (SC) and Restorative Justice (RJ). The logic of the training goes as follows: With NVC we support teachers to be more in connection with their own and others feelings and needs, which paves the way to a more empathetic and safe school/class environment. With the teachings of DD we are helping teachers to learn “inclusionary decision making”, so that they can facilitate all voices to be heard without being excluded or marginalized. With SC we are showing teachers new ways of division of labor, allowing them to spread the power across in such a way that allows maximum participation and increased chances of learning by doing. With RJ we are showing to teachers a new way to conflict resolution, where punitive and retributory methods are left behind and restorative processes are applied in such a way that fosters the sense of community.  

We believe that BBOM’s TTT programs have the potential of helping out teachers anywhere in the world to transform their schools to more harmonious and productive learning communities. We are also eager to share our experiences, learnings and expertise with groups focusing on teachers’ trainings. 

What makes our solution innovative is to bringing very strong tools and methods together in such a way that it builds a solid and a new framework for teachers’ trainings. Although NVC, DD, SC and RJ are used separately in some schools around the world, our model integrates them in one framework. Our TTT framework allows to teachers to transform their classes and in fact the whole school culture to a more harmonious and productive learning community. 

Our solution is a process that uses other technologies. 

To organize more TTTs. Focusing on training trainers. 

Over the next 5 years we want expand the number of trainer teams that runs TTTs so that we can reach the capacity of 500 teachers a year. In 5 years’ time we will hopefully  have 1500 teachers trained, which corresponds to approximately 1000 schools and thus 500.000 children (%10 of all primary school children in Turkey).  Additionally, we are hoping to organize the infrastructure of online training facilities, which will exponentially increase the numbers.  

BBOM is already the only institution that works on alternative and democratic education in Turkey. For that reason especially teachers, our main beneficiaries, are following our TTTs. On average there are 2000 applications to  TTT programs throughout the year and only %10 of them can be accepted, because of our capacity limits. 

Since 2015 200 teachers have attended TTTs. Those techers are working in 50 schools and reaching around 5000 children. 

TTT goals over the next 12 months is work with 200 individual teachers across Turkey. In 3 years we will have at least 800 teachers trained. 

We are a dedicated team, most of them teachers, who have been in BBOM for the last 10 years. We have opened schools, run them and experinced all the issues that affects school life. That is why we think we have a very solid base of experience. In addtion to that as a team we have been trained on NVC, DD, SC and RJ for years and applied them in our classes and schools.  

We are running on different funders support. Yet this is not sustainable. That is why we are planning to sell our trainings to private schools in order to raise funds for our non-profit TTTs. For the expansion we are aware of the need of expanding the team. 

We believe that encounters and connections increases the likelihood of collaboration and thus learning and growing together. We believe that Solve would allow us to connect with similar movements and initiatives. And also we hope that our TTT spreads all around the world, simly because we know "it works very well".  

We have two key barriers for our solution: political environment and finance. Unfortunately Turkey is moving towards a rather authoritarian state model where tolerance to alternatives seems to decrease. That pushes us to “not to take too much attention” and thus not to expand aggressively. That also leads to the second barrier, finance. In that sense an international recognition of what we are doing would be supporting in these aspects.