The Best Things Come in No Packages: Continuous teacher professional development for scale and integration in Lebanon

• In Event: Quality support for quality outcomes: building the evidence-base for teacher and coach professional development models

Proposal

Background:
Ensuring high-quality schooling at scale is difficult under the best of circumstances. In the case of Lebanon, a country with an influx of refugees that doubled the student population in four years - such a task presents a near-insurmountable challenge.
In response, billions of dollars and hundreds of humanitarian agencies and NGOs have flowed in to Lebanon. While these entities have no doubt implemented many beneficial programs, efficiency in providing quality education has suffered from fragmented coordination both within and across agencies. In addition, many NGOs’ solution of utilizing pre-packaged, trademarked curricular and training packages— optimized to implement quickly, under crisis conditions— hinders integration into existing educational frameworks in protracted crises. In an era where the average length of displacement for refugees has grown to 17 years, education in emergencies requires a new paradigm to ensure coordination, coherence, and sustainability for students and teachers.

Current Study:
We focus our study on the feasibility of co-constructing a framework of flexible core teacher practices to serve as a foundation of teacher professional development. Core practices are high-leverage practices that (1) occur with high frequency in teaching, (2) cut across different curricula or instructional approaches, (3) are research based, and (4) have the potential to improve student achievement (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanaugh, 2013). In high-income contexts, research has demonstrated that teachers’ instruction is responsive to professional development on core practices (Cohen et al., 2016) and that teachers who perform core practices at higher levels increase student gains on rigorous assessments (Grossman et al., 2014).

In Lebanon, a set of pilot teacher practices (Instructional Dialogue, Critical Thinking, and Metacognition) were derived in coordination with representatives from Department of Scholastic and Pedagogical Guidance (DOPS) utilizing the existing Lebanese Teacher Competency Framework. DOPS representatives, in coordination with New York University and the World Bank, utilized video captured from Lebanese classrooms to develop a quality spectrum (i.e., a rubric) of each practice, to be used as the foundation of classroom observations and feedback as well as to create a shared vision and language of the core practices within DOPS.

Using trained external enumerators, teachers in middle grades (4-8) were observed and scored on a scale of one (low) to four (high) on the framework as well as a validated tool, the Protocol for Language Arts Teaching Observations (PLATO) (Grossman, Loeb, Cohen, & Wyckoff, 2013). To determine internal consistency, we investigate Cronbach’s alpha on items within each construct; inter-rater reliability is investigated via a subset of double-scored observations; concurrent validity is investigated by correlating teachers’ scores on the framework with PLATO and student ratings of teacher effectiveness.

We find evidence of good internal consistency, acceptable inter-rater reliability, acceptable concurrent validity with PLATO constructs, and mixed correlations with student measures.

Implications:
We demonstrate emerging evidence of the co-development of a valid framework of core practices in a crisis context. We argue that this framework serves as a proof point that education in crisis contexts can move from fragmented provision of pre-packaged curricula to evidence-based “essential ingredients”.

Authors

• Lindsay Brown, Global TIES for Children, New York University

• Alonso Sanchez, World Bank