Integrated ICT solutions for supporting teacher development in community schools in Zambia

• In Event: Scale and sustainability of ICT-supported teacher coaching and mentoring: addressing costs and complexity

Proposal

EDC has been implementing technological solutions to the challenges of geographic isolation, lack of trained teachers, and limited resources for instruction in Zambia for 20 years. Our Learning in Taonga Market and QUESTT programs reached more than 1.2 million students through Interactive Radio Instruction (IAI), supporting untrained community members to deliver high-quality lessons that resulted in learning gains for students that outpaced those of peers in government schools. This effort significantly expanded the capacity of community schools and contributed to their expansion across Zambia to serve roughly 1/3 of the country’s primary-age learners.

With this vast expansion of community schools, support for their volunteer teaching force became even more essential. However, government resources for training and coaching community school teachers were extremely limited, and the geographic isolation of many schools made face to face options challenging. Working in three languages and in seven provinces, the Time to Learn and Zambia Can Read projects therefore tested innovative technology solutions for teacher training and coaching, proving their cost-effectiveness and efficacy in Zambia. A suite of ICT interventions including school-based mobile phones loaded with digital training and reference resources; an interactive assessment tool for zonal staff to prompt immediate connections to improvements in instructional practice; and tablet-based interactive literacy activities for students that modeled immediate feedback and guided practice for teachers were tested in community schools, with dramatic results.

The simple, technology-supported Time to Learn approach dramatically improved learning outcomes while keeping implementation costs low. The introduction of the training phones in led to reading passage scores doubling in Icibemba, tripling in Cinyanja, and quadrupling in Citonga. Participating Cinyanja-speaking students who began at extremely low reading levels in 2017-18 met or exceeded proposed national benchmarks for Grade 2 oral reading fluency and comprehension with only 3 months of teacher coaching and support. The tablet-based literacy apps proved to be more cost-effective over time than paper-and-pencil materials for students, with significant durability. Government staff so valued the ICT interventions that they adopted them for use in their own formal schools after being exposed to them while supporting community schools.

This presentation will share design and implementation insights into the integrated ICT model implemented in Zambia, focusing on the strategies for ensuring effectiveness, promoting institutionalization of ICT use within government structures, and keeping costs reasonable for long-term sustainability. Lessons learned from the process of rolling out and supporting this suite of ICT tools in the very challenging Zambian community schools context will be shared, and critical elements of success identified, to help inform planning for similar interventions in other environments.

Authors

• Jennifer Kennedy, Education Development Center

• Stefan McLetchie, Education Development Center (EDC)