The USAID-funded Uganda School Health and Reading Program (SHRP), implemented by RTI International, has been training teachers in Early Grade Reading (EGR) methods since early 2013. Up until 2018, all SHRP program in-service teacher trainings had been conducted through large-scale, residential trainings hosted at primary teacher colleges (PTCs). In May, 2018, SHRP piloted smaller scale teacher refresher trainings which were non-residential by conducting the trainings at coordinating center (CC) schools where teachers could travel to and from the training site to home each day. In order to learn the effect of these smaller, closer trainings compared to the traditional residential model, the SHRP team designed action research to determine if the smaller trainings held closer to the schools at CCs are more effective, or at least as effective, as the larger trainings in terms of teacher attendance, content coverage, teacher learning, and teacher satisfaction. This CIES 2019 presentation shares major findings and recommendations to action.

CIES 2018 Presentation, given by Scholastica Tiguryera. While in-service training is an essential component of early grade reading (EGR) projects, it only addresses the current force of teachers and is usually a one-time, resource intensive undertaking. In these efforts, pre-service teacher education is often not addressed overlooking the next generation of teachers who will also need to know how to teach the new reading curriculum. This presentation will discuss how the Uganda Ministry of Education and Sports (MoES) has worked with two USAID-funded EGR projects (School Health and Reading Program [SHRP] and Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity [LARA]), a government-run EGR project funded by the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), Kyambogo University, and other local partners to develop an addendum to the Primary Teacher Education Curriculum to ensure the early grade reading initiatives introduced by the projects are incorporated into the pre-service teacher training program.