Examining the relationship between teacher’s use of play-based pedagogies and professional development approaches in Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Improving primary education teaching for diverse learners through play based pedagogies: insights from Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and Viet Nam

Proposal

While evidence of the impact of learning through play (LtP) on student outcomes in high-income countries is vast (Parker & Thomsen, 2019), there is little research linking LtP to learning outcomes in low-and middle-income contexts in primary schools. Evidence that does exist in low-income contexts follows the positive outcomes of LtP from birth through the preschool years (Chaudhary & Kaul, 2018; Zosh et al., 2017). Despite the mounting evidence of the importance of play on learning and development in the early years, playful pedagogies have not permeated into primary schools. Accordingly, an education improvement initiative seeks to expand playful pedagogies into primary schools in five low and middle-income countries (LMICs).
Organization 1, as the initiative’s external evaluator and learning partner, will share findings from midline data collected from over 500 schools in three programs: Project 1 (implemented by Organization 5 in Kenya), Project 2 (implemented by Organization 4 in Ghana) and Scaling Learning through Play (implemented by Organization 6 in Rwanda). These data will be drawn from a cadre of instruments developed for this study including interviews with teachers, head teachers, trainers, meeting facilitators and coaches as well as observations of reading and mathematics lessons, teacher coaching sessions and teacher meetings.
We will examine the different approaches taken by projects to support teachers to test, adapt, and adopt LtP in their classrooms, as well as teacher’s perceptions of their value and effectiveness. We will link these findings to classroom observation data on the frequency with which teachers employ more collaborative, interactive, creative, exploratory, and student-driven play-based approaches. We will present changes detected in both Teacher Professional Development (TPD) inputs and classroom practice between treatment and comparison groups, and from baseline to midline of this longitudinal evaluation.
The focus of the presentation will be to articulate the elements of, and conditions for, TPD that data suggest may increase the use of LtP in the classroom. It will contribute to the growing body of evidence on how LtP can be achieved at scale in LMICs, and what a model for TPD for play based learning may look like in different contexts.

Authors

• Jonathan Stern, RTI International

• Matthew Jukes, RTI International

• Laiba Bahrawar, RTI International