Teaching as Collective Leadership - Research and evidence from the Teach For All network

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Teach For All is a global network of more than 60 independent, locally led and governed partner organizations and a worldwide organization working to accelerate the progress of the network. Each network partner recruits and develops promising future leaders (fellows) to teach in their nations’ under-resourced schools and communities and, with this foundation, to work with others, inside and outside of education, to ensure that every child can develop their potential.

Teach For All’s global network emphasizes the importance of a whole child development approach to education and as such supports local partner organizations to experiment, adapt and conduct research on their ongoing training and support model. Today’s children will inherit a challenging world. To make a more just, equitable and sustainable society, they will need to navigate uncertainty, collaboratively solve complex problems, and create meaningful careers in a changing economy. And yet, too many children experience education models that are designed to achieve narrowly defined academic goals, sometimes at the cost of other important student leadership outcomes; dismissive of the critical importance of community values and cultural identities to helping students realize their potential; and uninformed by a revolution in the science of learning and development. Perfecting inherited, industrial-era ways of teaching and learning will not lead to an equitable, just, and sustainable future on this planet.

Teach For All’s global insights have led to the creation of the new Teaching as Collective Leadership (TACL) framework, developed through studying more than 3,000 different transformational classrooms around the world. TACL emphasizes that the purpose of education is to develop students as leaders of a better future, for themselves, and their communities. In addition to emphasizing student foundational skills, the framework breaks with current paradigms of education designed to achieve narrowly defined academic goals for students, and instead propose one centered in holistic development of students' wellbeing, connectedness, awareness, agency and mastery. These emerging insights, resources and tools have profound implications for teacher recruitment, selection, training and support, and measurement and research. For instance, the TACL framework offers actionable and locally customizable guidance for teachers, teacher coaches, and program designers who are oriented towards developing student leadership. Teach For All’s Global Learning Lab developed the TACL framework as an actionable and locally customizable framework for network partner organizations like Enseña por Colombia as a local example. .

In addition to providing program designers with globally informed resources for programmatic design, TACL is inspiring a new research and learning agenda at Teach For All. Our research team has been employing new measurement and research methodologies to capture lessons and insights about how to best support student holistic development. Our research agenda is focusing on developing insights, building resources, and connecting our network partners together to explore the following:
How are local partners developing their own comprehensive systems for measurement of holistic student outcomes and teacher outcomes aligned to their contextualized vision of whole child development approach?

How are local partners leading innovations in teacher development strategies inspired by TACL, and how are these adjustments being researched on their impact on whole child development?
What global resources and network learning opportunities can support our local partners to create measurement systems and research opportunities that contribute to our global understanding of whole child development?

This panel will bring to life key insights from these learning questions both from the global organization as well as from network partners from the Teach For All network on monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning including
An overview of the Teaching as Collective Leadership (TACL) framework, the actionable and locally customizable framework developed by Teach For All for teachers, teacher coaches and program designers to grow students as leaders of a better future for themselves, for their communities, and for all of us. Built from co-discovered global patterns in transformational classrooms, and intended to provoke productive, critical reflection and to foster locally contextualized innovations in teacher recruitment, selection, training and support, the TACL framework has inspired new lines of research and measurement within the network.
The Teach For All’s Global Teacher and Teacher Coach Study, which is aimed to assess whether initial exposure of the TACL framework on teachers and teacher coaches leads to differential teacher mindsets and practices in the classroom through the support of their coaches. The study also developed new contextualizable measurement tools (formative and summative) to provide teachers and coaches with feedback on teacher mindsets related to holistic student development.

An ongoing experimental study of Teach For All and Enseña por Colombia (ExC) with Universidad de los Andes based on making adjustments and adaptations to ExC’s teacher training, support and feedback process aligned to TACL. The study is aimed at experimenting and testing design choices for teacher training and support around four social and emotional learning skills prioritized by the organization through a collaborative and iterative process as well as with well-being tools for teacher and teacher coaches - and measuring the impact of those changes on the mentalities, perceptions and behaviors of teachers, as well as academic results and socio-emotional skills of students.

A quasi-experimental study of Teach For All and Teach For Nigeria (TFN) in partnership with the RAND Corporation on TFN’s approach to whole child development through ongoing training and coaching of new teachers. The study investigates multiple facets of whole child outcomes in students, including mastery of foundational literacy, maths, social and emotional skills that are prioritised by TFN. The study also focuses on local education authorities and school level factors as potential drivers to create conducive environments for whole child development. While the evaluation commenced prior to the implementation of TACL, the study offers insight on how network partners’ efforts to orient to a contextualized vision of holistic student outcomes can support fellows to grow these skills and contribute to their school community.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Organizer

• Murugi Kagotho, Teach For All

Chair

• Cynthia G Boruchowicz, Teach For All

Individual Presentations

• The Teaching As Collective Leadership (TACL) framework: Developing students as leaders of a better future - Alexandra Vassallo, Teach For All

• Measuring teacher mindsets and student leadership growth: Insights from the global teacher and teacher coach study - Robert Dean, Teach For All

• Strengthening teaching and learning based on the Teaching as Collective Leadership (TACL) framework: The journey of Enseña por Colombia - Edwin Cuellar, Enseña por Colombia

• Developing whole child outcomes through teacher training:The impact and implementation of Teach For Nigeria - Edikan Unyime Mbang, Teach For Nigeria