Conceptualizations of Effective Teaching in Punjab Primary Schools

• In Event: Digital interventions in Pakistan: what do Global South teachers need for a 21st-century experience?

Proposal

With the second largest population of out-of-school children in the world and persistently poor outcomes in public schools in Pakistan, the adaptation of the World Bank’s Teach program in Pakistan’s Punjab province was intended to provide a framework to improve teaching practices in primary schools. Using a locally adapted version of the Teach framework, a teacher professional development program that blends in-person mentoring using a Classroom Observation Tool and online learning was introduced in 2018 and scaled to all primary schools in 2020 in the Punjab province to improve teaching practices.

Purpose: While adapting reform is intended to bring widespread change, teachers, as individual and autonomous members, are ultimately the decision-makers when it comes to changing teaching practices. Identifying how this blended professional development program has shaped teacher beliefs about effective teaching practice helps to understand its possible influence on actual teaching practices. This study examined how Punjab’s blended professional learning program has influenced teachers’ and school leaders’ beliefs about what makes an effective teacher.

Research Design: This qualitative study drew results from interviews and observations of nine administrative clusters in three districts of Punjab, purposely selected for extreme variations in average scores on the Classroom Observation Tool while balancing selections for gender and urban vs. rural clusters. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 80 teachers, school leaders, and training mentors to understand participants’ conceptualizations and beliefs about effective teaching. Structured observations of classes in 40 classrooms in the same schools were conducted to understand the teaching practices and strategies implemented by teachers. Both interviews and observations were analyzed using a thematic analysis, with a focus on alignment with the adapted Teach framework.

Findings: The results revealed that teachers, school leaders, and mentors did not develop a shared understanding of effective teaching. Few participants, even those responsible for its implementation, connected the standards of the Teach-informed program to effective teaching, indicating a limited adoption of the framework in participants’ beliefs. Some participants struggled to identify what makes an effective teacher, instead highlighting reasons why students may not be learning that had to do with students’ homes and families. Moreover, observations of classroom teaching practices indicated limited variations in teaching practices despite the extreme variant sampling on the average scores of the Classroom Observation Tool.

Implications: The results of this study indicate that reform leaders in education must pay special attention to the autonomy and individual beliefs of teachers, school leaders, and teacher mentors. Explicitly connecting new frameworks and observation tools to teacher beliefs in the monitoring and design of teacher learning will be especially important to building actual changes in teaching practices. This study further indicates that teacher beliefs should be central to reform, and at the focus of change in improving teaching practices.

Author

• Jessica Albrent, Lahore University of Management Sciences