Who we are

“Smart Osvita” NGO was established in 2016 by members of Parental Control, a group of activists working moms who have been campaigning for education quality since 2012 to support and promote the New Ukrainian School reform of secondary education. The founding team is Ivanna Kobernyk, Zoya Zvyniatkivska, Oksana Makarenko, and Halyna Tytysh. A Memo of cooperation with the Ministry of Education and Science was signed. 

Our mission is the formation of new social norms and values ​​in children through implementing school reforms, modernization of education, and providing teachers with modern teaching methods and tools.

Our values are a partnership, innovation, proactivity, diversity, and openness to change. 

A dopamine molecule is our logo. The molecule without which a feeling of joy, happiness, and drive is impossible. And also, it is dopamine that motivates learning and helps choose and achieve goals. We work every day so that children and educators have the power to be open to new experiences that can change the world. After all, knowledge and education are the keys to the happiness of millions of people.

Around the values and goals, we form a community of people who want to change the educational sphere. On the one hand, this is the team of our NGO “Smart Osvita”; on the other — educators and, of course, parents, should be active participants in the educational process. And only through the experience of co-creation will we achieve the desired result.

So, we have our media about the reform: “New Ukrainian School” and many projects with partners for children, parents, and educators.

Over the past six years, we have implemented dozens of large educational projects.

We trained teachers to work with children with special educational needs, conducted resilience and psychological competence training, and developed methodical materials for distance learning, which the Ministry of Education of Ukraine approved. We developed a Memorandum of cooperation of participants in the educational process, in the years of integrity, a course called “Communications for educational managers,” an online course of pre-medical care, preschool pediatrics with Svitlana Roiz, a resource box for teachers, a brochure for schools on the organization of distance learning, Lessons from COVID-19, integrity lessons for younger schoolchildren, which teach children to resist “domestic corruption” from childhood. Furthermore, we also implemented a course on effective communication for educational managers, supported the implementation of inclusive education, created a crisis support course for teachers in the performance of distance learning, and created a project that taught young people the art of debate and more.

Besides, we also launched one of the largest educational media in the country – the NUS website.

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, we have been helping Ukrainian schoolchildren, parents, and teachers to remain active participants in the educational process. We implement training and psychological assistance projects with our partners for Ukrainian children and educators. Including:

1. Communication and advocacy of secondary education reform.

In mid-2017, the New Ukrainian School website was launched (more than 750k unique site visitors monthly). We also built a significant presence on social media. Our Facebook public group has over 110k followers of the New Ukrainian School. Its average monthly reach is about 250k users. We have almost 37K participants in our Viber group for teachers and 7k subscribers to the Open Online Lessons Telegram channel.

2. Psychological resilience of educators, students, and parents. 

• The program “Children and war. “Healing Techniques” about psychological trauma, post-traumatic symptoms, skills and abilities to provide psychological first aid to children by Natalia Podoliak.
• EMDR training is a one-week program for teachers to improve psychological self-help skills. It also includes group sessions on processing personal traumatic experiences using the EMDR protocol.
• Psychological help sessions for local and internally displaced children in Ivano-Frankivsk — held by psychologist Iryna Demkiv works.

We also implemented several projects in this direction together with psychologist Svitlana Roiz:

• “Resursna Skrynia Pedahoha” (“Teacher’s resource chest”) is a set of tools for the formation of emotional intelligence for kindergarten teachers, junior school teachers, and parents of pre-adolescent children.

• “Resiliency for resilient.” It is 20 short videos with practices for children and adults that will help them calm down and support themselves psychologically.
• “Strength cards” is a game and therapeutic cards for working with children up to 8 years old.
• “Breath cards” is an illustrated set of cards that will help the child calm down and take control of anxiety and manifestations of stress.
• The workshop book “Your strength” for children and teenagers contains 22 simple ideas and practices to help children restore psychological stability.
• Resilience and recovery practices ­­– 15 minutes lasted meetings that helped parents and children better cope with stress.
• “Obiimantsi” (“Hugs”) is a simple therapeutic game for children based on the practice of tactile intimacy.
• “Skrynia V Ukryttia” (“Chest for Shelter”) is a set of things that will need when they are in shelters during air raids. The chests are designed considering the characteristics of elementary, middle, and high school students. Each is designed for a simultaneous stay in the shelter of one hundred children.

3. Teacher professional development and support with educational materials.

• The online course “Basics of cybersecurity for schoolchildren” teaches children how to distinguish the truth from fakes, have safe online communication, and protect their data from fraudsters.
• Dopamine for Education Podcast — we talk with leading experts about trends and changes in education, as well as how to help children understand their goals, how to achieve them, and how to find the motivation to learn (recorded with the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation “For Freedom”).
•  “National Project: We Write Essays” is a large-scale project that aims to change approaches to teaching writing skills in Ukrainian schools. It takes place in three stages: 

– training of trainers at the national level;

– training at the international level with experts from the National Writing Project (USA);

– development of training programs by trained trainers for training and upgrading the qualifications of Ukrainian teachers.

4. Teaching and supporting kids.

• “Stay with Ukraine” — free online classes for schoolchildren temporarily abroad. The classes are held by Ukrainian teachers, who help students to master the Ukrainian studies component —  Ukrainian language, literature, and history of Ukraine.

• English-language educational online meetings are regular classes for Ukrainian children with English-speaking teachers worldwide. Children got an opportunity to communicate in English on various topics during our online lessons.
• Catch-up classes are lessons in the Ukrainian language, Mathematics, and English language, where students of grades 5-10 could make up for the educational material they missed due to the war.
• Speaking club with Olena Ryzhkova is a free English-speaking club for children aged 12-17. 
• “School without walls” is an offline learning program in which 154 children were affected by the war and could not continue their studies in their native schools. “School without walls” allowed schoolchildren to complete the 2021-2022 academic year. The schoolchildren were studying in small groups under a unique program with in-depth study of the English language.
• The Art Club in Kraków is a space for free art classes for Ukrainian children aged 6 to 14 who were forced to leave Ukraine due to the war.
• Art club in Lviv — free circles and offline classes for migrant children at 4 different locations.
• “FranKolo” — free circles and classes for children aged 4-16 in Ivano-Frankivsk.
• “VinOk” — free art and sports circles in Vinnytsia.
• “Learn by Your Ears”: the Ukrainian language, Literature, and history of Ukraine audio lessons for students of grades 8-11; it’s 120 lessons on the topics of the 2nd academic semester in the form of audio. They last 20 minutes each and are designed for people who are hard of hearing, children who are abroad and want to catch up with the Ukrainian curriculum, and those who are visually impaired but have well-developed hearing.

OUR PARTNERS

“Smart Osvita“ has an excellent track record of partnerships with international donors, including the following projects:

• Running free online edutainment lessons for kids of war-torn Ukraine, with over 46k kids that attended open lessons, 525 open lessons run, 340 volunteer teachers engaged, free graduation exam preparation classes with ~660 kids studying for free (2022, Child Fund Germany);
• Building the psychological resilience of female educators and school children relocated from the war-affected areas (2022, UNFPA);
• Institutional grant support (Pact/USAID, 2021-2022);
• Running a dedicated inclusion section on the New Ukrainian School website (2018-2022, Renaissance Foundation);
• Developing online-course on work with children with special educational needs for primary school teachers (2018-2019, Pact inc);
• Prompt psychological assistance and programs of professional development for educators (2022, International Renaissance Foundation);
• Development of an online course and manual on effective communications for educational managers" (2019-2020, Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom);
• The Ukrainian studies component for children who are temporarily abroad due to Russian aggression:  Ukrainian language, literature, and history of Ukraine in the project “Stay with Ukraine” (2022, with partners Educo, Theirworld, Global Business Coalition for Education); 
• Develop training programs for the development of writing skills and, in particular, essays for pedagogical universities participating in the project, training programs for improving the qualifications of practicing teachers based on IPPE: “National Project: We Writing Essay” (2021, Grammarly); 
• Development of online integrity lessons for grades 3 to 4 (2020-2021, Child Fund Germany).