Training teachers or robots: Unexpected findings of a 7 country teacher professional development study

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

Proposal

Teacher professional development for teachers has burgeoned across LMICs. RTI’s literacy programs alone are providing TPD for nearly 1 million teachers. USAID, DFID and World Bank’s recent education strategies stress the importance of the quality of TPD to improve learning outcomes. When examining the budgets of large-scale literacy programs currently being implemented in LMICs, an enormous portion of the budget expenditure relates to TPD costs. Given the 10s of millions of dollars spent on TPD every year in our sector, we would expect more detailed and careful research on the design elements of successful programs and examination of how well the TPD designs that exist match current research. This increased research interest and scrutiny seems to have expanded to learning materials, with quite a few recent studies examining the characteristics of student books and teachers’ guides in the education sector. There remains a substantial gap, however, regarding what is known about the characteristics of TPD programs and how these different characteristics affect program design and success.
RTI has undertaken a substantial analysis of the TPD structures and designs in its 10 of its active programs and 17 programs that have been implemented over the last several years. This study has three data sources. The first is a survey of the TPD design characteristics of 17 recent programs which examined which types of TPD were utilized (pre-service training, face to face in-service training, instructional coaching, instructional coaching by school-based support staff, and professional learning communities), the scale, scope and cost of these TPD types by country, and the program’s view of the relative effectiveness of these various skills. The second data source is a detailed analysis of the training manuals used by 15 of RTI’s recent programs. This analysis examined each manual to determine how much time was spent on which technical areas (5 components of reading, writing, other subjects), what resources were to be used during the training (flip charts, teachers’ guides, blackboard, etc.) and what training methods were expected to be used. The frame that we used for this study divided the training methods into lecture or explanation, discussion, modeling of the activity by the trainer, and practice of the activity by the participants. In this study, we call these four areas (lecture, discussion, modelling and practice) the four components of training. The final data source is an observational analysis of face-to-face TPD in 7 countries and 8 programs.
We examine the relationship between the manuals expected time allocation and their actual time expenditure as well as investigate whether there are differences in time allocation in the manual and the observed training based on the impact evaluation results of the programs. We find that TPD programs spend more time on lecture and discussion than they plan, and less time modeling and far less time practicing the activity in small groups or pairs. The study suggests several changes to TPD interventions, including the training of trainers, the design of the training manual, and the implementation of the training itself.

Authors

• Benjamin Piper, RTI International

• Jessica Mejia, RTI International

• Yasmin Sitabkhan, RTI International