Lessons in Teacher Professional Development from 10 Years of Literacy Boost

• In Event: Teacher professional development at scale: lessons learned in improving teacher practice in low and middle income countries

Proposal

In 2009, Save the Children began implementing Literacy Boost, a reading intervention model that aimed to increase instruction quality in reading and address the dearth of books and reading opportunities in children’s lives. This intervention was created following four 2007-2008 learning outcomes studies in Haiti, Nepal, Ethiopia and Guatemala that showed that children in program settings across the globe were not gaining basic reading skills as assumed. Over the next decade, Literacy Boost’s teacher professional development modules would be adapted to more than 30 national curricula and ministry of education training systems across the globe for implementation in Save the Children program sites – some of the most marginalized areas of many countries. The teacher professional development design suggested by the literature was to have short (4 hour), periodic (monthly) trainings. These sessions would end with the generation of concrete lesson plans for the teachers to try once back in the classroom for practice and coaching between sessions. Further, the next training session would begin with reflection on how well the strategies worked over the last month and a discussion of challenges in the classroom. Adherence to this professional development design was tight in some program settings or not in others given local policies and priorities. This presentation will consider the variation in modalities of teacher professional development during this period. Beginning from the same design ideals, it will compare how teams on the ground across the globe adapted to fit the education systems and policy realities in which they work. It will present this comparison against a backdrop of cross-country impact on reading skills development for consideration. Further, it will discuss both the common challenges and the successful areas of government–NGO collaboration in teacher professional development across the Literacy Boost sites. Finally, it will offer several case studies of government partnership leading to systemic change.

Authors

• Carol Deshano Da Silva, Save the Children

• Amy Jo Dowd, Save the Children