Millennium Challenge Account Georgia

• In Event: Partnership for effective and sustainable in-service training practice at-scale

Proposal

Millennium Challenge Account Georgia (MCA-Georgia) was created to manage $140 million investment by US Government. Enhancement of education quality needs extensive and rigorous interventions in order to have a sustainable and significant impact on a country’s development agenda. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) was identified as crucial for countries economic growth based on the poor results in international assessment such as PISA and TIMSS. MCA-Georgia supports STEM education quality improvement in Georgia by providing diverse but sustainable approach across all its activities, including in the general, vocational and higher education sectors with the belief that the outcomes of each project will remain within the country and will continue to develop further.

Training Educators for Excellence Activity initiated by MCA-Georgia in partnership with a Government entity was launched utilizing a centralized management approach smoothly transitioning towards decentralized approach. The goal of the activity is to advance STEM teaching at public schools in Georgia and improve learning outcomes of over 500,000 students annually. The project is complemented with education infrastructure improvements aimed at rehabilitating and equipping public schools in the regions of Georgia.

In the current presentation we will focus on the Training Educators for Excellence (TEE) project which aimed at improving student learning outcomes by training 18,000 STEM teachers and more than 2000 public schools principals and 2000 school based professional development facilitators. In order to ensure TEE project sustainability, MCA-Georgia designed the project with the following logic: granted the Government to implement the project; set up policy systems to ensure the high quality of the training delivery; built local capacity by training sufficient amount of trainers; ensured that school principals were main counterparts in promoting teachers’ classroom behaviour change; increased capacity of school management team by adding facilitators as participants to the trainings; trained in service teachers; involved municipalities in the process; decentralized approach by providing grants to professional teacher and principal associations to support best outcomes of the trainings; converted face to face trainings to online format so that materials are available for all interested parties.

Author

• Magda Magradze, Millennium Challenge Account-Georgia