Rise Better: Collaborating with teachers to improve teacher support for the effective uptake and delivery of structured teacher guides

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Learning in groups, learning in loops: How to start using data for development in implementation research

Proposal

Rising Academy Network (RAN) delivers its FLN approach across their own schools, public-private partnerships (PPPs), and non-state school provider partnerships. Using structured pedagogy, an evidence-based approach to teaching and learning (Piper et. al, 2021), RAN provides their students and teachers with high quality materials, ongoing coaching and mentoring. The RAN model has 3 key pillars: curriculum, coaching, and feedback cycles. Together with grade-level and remedial curriculum materials, which include structured teacher guides and student books, RAN provides in-service training for teachers on the use of the guides, and ongoing coaching. Class observations and data on school performance guides reflection and goal-setting conversations with school staff.

Nonetheless, in RANs’ partnership programs coaches report that teachers struggle to use teacher guides effectively in half of the classrooms they observe. Our aim is to increase the effectiveness of structured teacher guide use by investigating teachers’ user experience and testing approaches to support teachers’ use of guides to prepare and teach effective lessons. Implementation research can support the design and evaluation of education interventions (Moir, 2018). We will use this approach to work collaboratively with teachers, school-leaders and coaches to better understand behavior, and attitudes regarding lesson preparation and the use of the teacher guides. This evidence will enable us to design and test solutions to address barriers that teachers are facing regarding the use of the teacher guides. The research takes place across the five different programmes, PPPs and Private schools, in Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
The research consists of three phases that align with the terms of the school year. At the beginning of the school year 2024/2025 RAN will implement their new structured teacher guides. In phase 1, we will gather qualitative insights into barriers to, and enablers for the effective uptake and delivery of teacher guides. We will investigate teacher motivation and behavior in particular, and identify positive outliers for the use of the teacher guides. We will also look at the differences between the different geographies and programmes and how they influence the uptake and delivery of the teacher guides.

Phase 1 findings will inform one or two solutions for phase 2 following an iterative process where we work with a small number of schools to develop, test and optimize the potential solutions. During phase 3, the solutions developed in phase 2 will be tested in a selection of schools across the different programmes and qualitative data will be collected to understand if and how the designed solutions impact the uptake and delivery of teacher guides.

At the end of our study we hope to have co-designed supportive approaches that help teachers prepare and deliver lessons with the RAN core curriculum teacher guides, as well as have gained a deeper understanding of teacher motivation and behaviors regarding lesson preparation across our private schools and PPPs.

At CIES we will present qualitative data from phase one, highlighting teacher motivations and behavior regarding lesson preparation. We will also share co-designed solutions to the barriers identified that we will test.

Authors

• Anne-Fleur Lurvink, Rising Academy Network

• Francisco Carballo, Rising Academy Network