Peer tutoring as a space for teacher professional development

• In Event: Innovations on teacher professional development from the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX) initiative - Research learnings from country experiences

Proposal

As a society we currently face an unprecedented era of globalization, information availability and rapidly changing contexts. This poses ever-increasing complex challenges for teachers around the world. These challenges are particularly crucial in developing countries that need to strengthen their education systems urgently to attain greater social, economic, and political stability. Such is the case of Honduras and Nicaragua. In these countries, teachers have little preparation to teach students to face the challenges of the 21st century, making Teacher Professional Development (TPD) a fundamental tool to improve their educational quality.

In this context, a pilot was developed in 40 rural schools where teachers were trained in a specific Peer Tutoring methodology (TeP, by their initials in Spanish). The TeP methodology entails the active training of teachers in a series of skills, centering on the belief that students are capable of actively learning at their own pace through precisely formulated questions. Some of these skills involve the development of contextually rooted scaffolding strategies for the local curriculum, the use of metacognition and social-emotional skills in the learning process, among others. Although TeP was not thought of as a TPD program, teacher training in this methodology can be thought of as a post-tertiary TPD insofar as it involves the development of knowledge and skills that change core beliefs and practices that in turn improve student learning.

To study the effects of the TeP methodology as a TPD strategy, the research focused on qualitative data: class observations, interviews with teachers, and student focus groups, which allowed a comprehensive understanding of how teaching beliefs and practices changed vis-a-vis the TeP methodology.
Main results show that changes did take place and are linked with constructivist paradigms: teachers perceive themselves primarily as mediators of knowledge and see students as active protagonists of their learning; teachers recognize that all their students are capable of learning at a different pace; teachers learned to ask in different ways so that the students arrive at the answer by themselves, thus using the question as a useful scaffolding device; and more socio-emotional elements of learning appear as salient and valued, like communication, self-knowledge, and trust, among others.
TeP training demonstrates essential aspects of effective TPD: it offers teachers opportunities to grasp and adapt curricular content; and it provides short-term feedback of student’s progress through daily implementation, boosting teachers' motivation for strategy refinement.
Key insights from the project include the importance of training new teachers through stable personnel within an institutional structure for sustainability; as well as aligning training with local educational policy guidelines to integrate it with teachers' daily work. Further research is needed to explore long-term results and establish causal links between the TPD strategy and student learning experience. A new pilot with the Honduras government aims to enhance scalability and provide additional insights on the effects of TeP as a TPD strategy.

Author

• Manuel Cheyre, Fundación Educación 2020