Teacher Professional Development

Each Journeys Handbook has an accompanying Facilitator's Guide that serves as a manual for the facilitator responsible for leading a teacher training on Journeys. This particular Facilitator's Guide is meant to accompany the Journeys Plus Activity Handbook for Pupils. The Facilitator's Guide is meant for training purposes only.

RTI’s multi-country study examines a range of instructional support packages that include a variety of designs for coaching and communities of practice across all of RTI’s existing programs in order to determine what modes of coaching support are most effective. This includes coaches at both the school level and external to the school, as well as government officers compared with project hired coaches. This research is able to compare the relative effectiveness of coaching approaches with educational support provided by communities of practice meetings held at the school or the school cluster level. These findings have provided existing and future programs with best practices for how to more effectively implement coaching support structures at scale.This presentation was delivered by RTI at CIES (April 2020) as part of a panel focused on how literacy improvement efforts work at scale, and what types of coaching designs and behaviors impact teacher pedagogy more effectively than others.

Literacy instruction programs have arguably had limited success because they focus on the technical – but not the social – aspects of literacy instruction. Reform efforts in sub-Saharan Africa have regularly failed to shift pedagogy away from teacher-led whole-class direct instruction to activities that are more effective for learning. In part, the failure is due to a lack of recognition of the social nature of classrooms where teacher-child interactions are conditioned by cultural predispositions. New research from Tanzania identified such challenges to pedagogical reform and points to potential solutions. One approach focuses on the child - to develop their social and emotional competencies. Teachers in Mtwara, Tanzania - but not parents – think that confidence and curiosity are important for student learning and report that interactive teaching activities are less effective in rural areas where students lack these competencies. Evidence suggests that building students’ confidence to participate in class is achievable relatively quickly. A second approach is to adapt teaching activities. Teachers in Tanzania report reluctance to implement teaching activities that undermine the social goals of instruction, such as avoiding embarrassment and promoting a sense of fairness and togetherness in the classroom. Instruction would be more effective if activities are co-designed with teachers to achieve both the social goals and the cognitive/learning goals of teaching.

The Malawi National Reading Program (NRP) is the country's flagship education program aimed at improving the reading skills of all Malawian learners in Standards 1 to 4. USAID supports the NRP by providing finance and technical assistance through several activities including MERIT: Malawi Early Grade Reading Improvement Activity (MERIT), Yesani Ophunzira (YESA), Strengthening Early Grade Reading in Malawi (SEGREM) and Reading for All Malawi (REFAM). MERIT focuses on teacher professional development and support, YESA on continuous assessment and remediation, REFAM on inclusive education, and SEGREM on materials development. Since 2016, the NRP has reached over 56,000 teachers and 4.6 million students in all public schools in Malawi. In addition, results from the 2018 Early Grade Reading Assessment shows that the NRP has had some success in improving reading skills of students in Chichewa and English, and especially for those students in the Standard 4. Implementing successfully at a national scale requires that all partners have had to coordinate and collaborate with each other, with the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MoEST) in the lead. This panel includes representatives from the MoEST and NRP implementation partners discussing their roles in supporting the NRP and sharing lessons around their approach, achievements, and challenges as they collaborate to get all children learning. The combined experiences of the different partners will be useful for other projects, organizations, and governments who are looking to make a wide-scale change in their education systems.

Despite successes in improving access to primary education, the Malawi education system has struggled to produce high levels of learning. The country has consistently ranked at or near the bottom in regional learning assessments, and an Early Grade Reading Assessment conducted in 2010 showed that 76 percent of Standard 2 learners could not identify any letters. To address the low reading performance, The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) partnered with the Government of Malawi to pilot several projects aimed at improving reading performance. The lessons from these pilot projects led to the development of a National Reading Strategy (NRS) and a National Reading Program (NRP). With support from USAID, the NRP’s goal is to improve the reading skills of all students in Chichewa and English in the first four years of primary school. It does this through reforms to the curriculum, teacher professional development and coaching, development and distribution of teaching and learning materials, continuous assessment and remediation, and targeted support for learners. USAID supports the NRP by providing finance and technical assistance through several activities including MERIT: Malawi Early Grade Reading Improvement Activity (MERIT), Yesani Ophunzira (YESA), Strengthening Early Grade Reading in Malawi (SEGREM) and Reading for All Malawi (REFAM). This is the recording of the #vCIES 2020 conference session, which includes representatives from the MoEST and NRP implementation partners discussing their roles in supporting the NRP and sharing lessons around their approach, achievements, and challenges as they collaborate to get all children learning. The combined experiences of the partners will be useful for other projects, organizations, and governments who are looking to make a wide-scale change in their education systems.

Recording of #vCIES 2020 conference panel presentation entitled: Effectiveness of Coaching as a Teacher Professional Development Strategy in low-income countries

This document is intended for program and curriculum experts interested in implementing evidence-based early grade mathematics programs. It was developed by the authors of this document, who are mathematics teaching and learning experts with extensive experience adapting evidence-based practices in low and middle-income contexts. Our collective field and research experience, combined with the existing evidence base, led us to focus on four instructional strategies that are key to effective mathematics instruction: 1. Respecting developmental progressions 2. Using mathematical models to represent abstract notions 3. Encouraging children to explain and justify their thinking 4. Making explicit connections for children between formal and informal math While these four instructional strategies are very important, they are not the only instructional strategies that can result in improved learning outcomes. Effective early grade mathematics teachers draw from an extensive repertoire of evidence-based instructional strategies and strive to create a learning environment the supports that development of positive mathematical identities.

Primary 2 Lusoga Teacher's Guide developed by National Curriculum Development Center with support from RTI through USAID and the USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program. This and other curricular materials made available on SharEd are not for revision or resale inside our outside of Uganda.

Primary 2 Ngakarimojong Teacher's Guide developed by National Curriculum Development Center with support from RTI through USAID and the USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program. This and other curricular materials made available on SharEd are not for revision or resale inside our outside of Uganda.

Primary 3 Leblango Teacher's Guide developed by National Curriculum Development Center with support from RTI through USAID and the USAID/Uganda School Health and Reading Program. This and other curricular materials made available on SharEd are not for revision or resale inside our outside of Uganda.