Effectively harnessing technology for improved teacher professional development – Evidence from Rwanda and Mongolia

Session Submission Type: Group Panel

Description of Session

There is great potential for technology to improve teacher professional development in under-resourced countries around the globe. This panel examines empirical evidence from two of these contexts – Rwanda and Mongolia.

The rapid expansion of basic education in Rwanda has strained the quality of education and created great demand for effective teachers. In addition, the shift to English as a medium of instruction resulted in the urgent need to improve teachers’ English language proficiency. In response, the government instituted a school-based mentorship program, so that every school was assigned an English-speaking mentor to directly support teachers in English language and pedagogy. Understanding that these mentors would be relatively isolated and resource-deprived, FHI 360 was funded by DFID’s Education for Innovation program to develop an online Mentorship Community of Practice (MCOP) for the school-based mentors (SBMs) to communicate with each other, share ideas and resources, and grow professionally. For evaluation purposes, the intervention targeted half of the country’s mentors (~500), while the remaining half served as the control group. Building on the work of the Rwanda Education Board (REB) and the provision of laptops to mentors by USAID’s L3 project, FHI 360 developed a web portal (www.mcop.rw) and provided the intervention group with USB modems, training in use of the portal, and regular teaching tips via SMS. The first presentation gives an overview of the MCOP project, describing how it fits within the larger post-EFA environment in Rwanda, in which education quality remains a key challenge. The second presentation summarizes the results of a qualitative “Processes of Innovation” study that was undertaken throughout implementation in order to inform scale-up and sustainability. This study delves into the effect of the MCOP on the roles and responsibilities of key players, highlights possible risks and tensions, and examines unintended consequences. The third presentation summarizes the results of the project's mixed-methods impact evaluation, which included rigorous baseline and endline studies with intervention and control groups of SBMs and the teachers they worked with. The evaluation measured the impact of the intervention on three high-level outcome variables: SBM knowledge, practices, and attitudes; teacher knowledge, practices, and attitudes; and peer-learning and support among mentors.

The final presentation presents the results of a study that investigates current climate of ICT utilization within the teaching practice in Mongolia. The main stream of the research on ICT utilization in developing regions is to examine from external factors, such as availability of the infrastructure, hard/software, and technical skills. This study, however, investigates from the view point of an internal factor, the teacher’s self-efficacy. The purpose of this study is to identify factors affecting self-efficacy of the primary school teachers in Mongolia and it attempts to interpret the teaching practices within the framework of the cognitive psychology.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Annie Smiley, FHI 360

Individual Presentations

• Rwanda's Mentorship Community of Practice (MCOP): Effectively Harnessing Technology for Improved Teacher Professional Development - Ildephonse Bikino, FHI 360; Mary Sugrue, EDC

• Evaluating Impact: MCOP's Effect on the Knowledge, Skills, and Practices of Mentors and Teachers - Annie Smiley, FHI 360

• Learning from Innovation: Processes Informing MCOP's Scale-up and Sustainability - Elisabeth Wilson, FHI 360

• Factors on Teacher’s Self-efficacy in Mongolia: A Quality Assurance for the ICT-Integrated Education - Yukiko Yamamoto, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Shinobu Yume Yamaguchi, Tokyo Institute of Technology

Discussant

• Jonathan Metzger, NetHope