Toolkit created by USAID/Uganda's Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity (LARA) as part of their Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) materials to reduce primary teachers' use of corporal punishment in school.

Forum Theatre / Community Theatre Drama Skit Script titled "Break Time is Over!" created by USAID/Uganda's Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity (LARA) as part of their Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) materials to reduce primary teachers' use of corporal punishment in school.

3 Corporal Punishment Posters from the USAID/Uganda Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity's (LARA) Social and Behavior Change Communication (SBCC) campaign in Uganda.

Animated video developed by the Uganda Literacy Achievement and Retention Activity under RTI International describing the 5 Ts - Time, Teaching, Text, Tongue and Testing.

Children’s development is significantly attributed to their experiences at home, from birth through the early years of schooling, and responsive caregiving from early on has a significant impact on later learning outcomes. Interventions aimed at increasing parental engagement in children’s early learning can be expensive, however, and there is limited evidence as to what works best for parenting programs in low- and middle-income countries. This report presents the findings from a parent engagement pilot intervention conducted by the Tayari program in three counties in Kenya that tested two methods of providing parents with home-based responsive play activities to promote children’s holistic development.

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.

Under the Tusome-Nakuru County Youth Bunge Forum (NCYBF), the program sought to engage the youth in improving early literacy skills among Grades 1-3 children in Nakuru County in Kenya. The Nakuru County Youth Bunge Forum (NCYBF) signed a memorandum of agreement with the local public library, the Kenya National Library Services (KNLS), Nakuru Branch to provide enhanced literacy activities. This CIES 2019 presentation will share the outcomes of the partnership, the effect on children’s literacy skills and the long term benefits to the program implementation and its sustainability.

The Tusome Early Grade Reading Activity is USAID’s flagship education program in Kenya. This CIES 2019 presentation shares the findings from research currently in progress to analyze Tusome’s 2017 lesson observation data, and shares lessons learned from: designing a coaching program to operate at scale; effectively combining incentives and sanctions to drive coaching activities; and effectively combining automated, moderately high-tech data pipelines with qualitative, low-tech feedback on coaching of coaches.

In this CIES 2019 presentation, Rachel Jordan presents how Tangerine Tutor is used to conduct and improve upon classroom observations in the USAID Uganda School Health and Reading Program.

This presentation unpacks findings from a seven-country teacher professional development study, presented by Dr. Benjamin Piper and Jessica Mejia at CIES 2019.