Enhancing, Formalizing, and Scaling Pre-Service Literacy Instruction in Pakistan

• In Event: The Role of Pre-Service Education in Producing and Perpetuating (In)Equalities:The Case of Early Grade Reading (Part ONE)

Proposal

Program interventions such as the Blended Learning experiment under TEP in Pakistan increased calls across that country for improved institutional capacity at the teacher training institutes to prepare primary teachers to teach early grade reading. This presentation explores how, in response, the USAID-funded Pakistan Reading Project has partnered with a broad range of education stakeholders to develop, pilot test, and prepare for scaling up a formal reading instruction and assessment curriculum for pre-service teachers.

In this discussion, senior literacy specialists from Creative Associates describe the particular challenges that arose in developing this formal curriculum. The efforts, perspectives, and institutional interests of many stakeholders had to be coordinated, and institutional barriers to innovation had to be addressed.
Through intensive dialogue with the Higher Education Commission (HEC), the National Curriculum Review Committee, University Faculty, pre-service practicum completing teachers, and practicing teachers, Creative’s staff invited their counterparts to reconsider how reading teachers are developed, and how to help them acquire the knowledge, awareness, skills, and attitudes that they need to teach early grade students to read in an evidence-based manner. Then, in partnership with these counterparts, they developed a curriculum for ADE and B.Ed. students that was based on international standards for teaching prospective educators to teach reading, and that addressed the essential components teachers need to know in order to teach reading well.

However, as the presenters explain, simply cultivating these new understandings and creating a high-quality curriculum explicitly addressing the preparation of pre-service teachers in reading was not sufficient to catalyze sustainable institutional reform. Because the standard pre-service curriculum in Pakistan had, for decades, subsumed the topic of reading into the study of given languages, there was some initial resistance to “isolating” coursework in reading specifically as a separate teaching discipline. The process of receiving approval for the implementation of the new curriculum is detailed in this presentation as an example of essential policy dialogue that lays the groundwork for sustainable improvement in how pre-service teachers are taught to teach reading.

This presentation concludes with an exposition of the pilot test results of the new, official pre-service curriculum, which was implemented in 8 Universities and teacher training colleges in 2015/2016. The audience will examine with the presenters the degree to which pre-service faculty’s skills in teaching about reading improved, and the degree to which students in those new courses gained skills that will help them deliver high-quality reading instruction in primary classrooms. Recommendations from the pilot study are provided, and current plans for the roll-out of this curriculum to the 111 teacher training institutes in Pakistan, as well as for the monitoring and evaluation of that roll-out are shared. From exploring both the narrative of this experience and the data it has yielded to date, participants will gain greater insight into the complexities of strengthening the capacity of teacher training institutions so that they can implement nationwide, sustainable change in their teacher preparation practices in the early grade reading field.

Author

• Fathi El-Ashry, Creative Associates International