Learning about teaching quality from within the classroom: Evidence from Rwandan secondary schools

• In Event: Adapting secondary schooling in Rwanda to the context of COVID-19: Lessons from the Leaders in Teaching Initiative

Proposal

As part of a comprehensive approach to measuring teaching quality, Laterite and the REAL Centre have conducted classroom observations of mathematics classes in Rwandan secondary schools. For this, we chose to adapt the World Bank’s Teach observation protocol for three well-considered reasons: 1) Teach was designed for application within low- and middle-income countries and has been validated in more than 1000 classrooms, including those within Sub-Saharan Africa; 2) Teach reflects many aspects of teaching quality highlighted as foundational by teachers within Rwanda, including having a focus on student-centred pedagogy; and 3) whilst Teach has an existing framework, the instrument was able to be modified for our particular context of application. Here, we report on findings of observations conducted in 97 mathematics classrooms at the Secondary 3 level in LIT intervention areas of Rwanda. The study included observations of 15 female and 82 male teachers (with this skew being due to the smaller number of female teachers teaching mathematics in Rwandan secondary schools). Data collection occurred in February 2020 (so shortly before school closures), with schools randomly selected from a larger sample of 360 schools included in our quantitative data collection. Within this presentation, we report results relating to the following four key areas of Teach: Time on learning, Classroom Culture, Instruction and Socioemotional Skills. Our findings show that the majority of teachers in observed classrooms use their teaching time effectively. Teachers also perform strongly in the area of Classroom Culture and are particularly effective at establishing positive behavioural expectations for their students. For Instruction, teachers demonstrate strong skills when facilitating their lessons, for example, by providing clear learning objectives and explanations of content. Of all areas of the tool, teachers faced the greatest challenges in supporting students’ Socioemotional Skills in the classroom. This has potential important implications as schools re-open, when support for student socio-emotional skills will be of even greater importance.

Authors

• Emma Carter, University of Cambridge

• Beatrice Ani-Asamoah, Laterite

• Philip Leonard, Laterite

• Pauline Rose, University of Cambridge