Teacher-training to transform classrooms, teachers and communities in Uganda

Kimanya Ng'eyo (KN), a Ugandan NGO founded in 2007, implements a teacher-training program using the Preparation for Social Action (PSA) program. PSA's materials were developed in Colombia as part of an NGO, the Foundation for the Application and Teaching of the Sciences, and adapted for the African context. KN collaborates with district education officials to invite schools to select 2-3 teachers to participate in their training program. The training is one year long and combines two-week periods of full-time programming with KN tutors with in-service periods. During the full-time trainings, held during term breaks, teachers move together through a sequence of texts and engage in practical exercises that help link the readings with everyday reality. During the in-service periods, PSA tutors randomly visit classrooms to observe how teachers are engaging with students and reflect with them on outcomes.

The PSA materials prepare teachers to integrate the study of scientific knowledge with social action in local communities. PSA develops capabilities in four broad areas: language, mathematics, science, and processes of community life. While topical facts are given attention, the courses seek primarily to build several general capabilities of scientific inquiry through group activity. These include the capacity to describe the world around oneself with precision and clarity, to identify data for testing theories, and to combine insights from theory with praxis. The format of the training targets teachers' attitudes in three novel ways. First, discussion exercises that explicitly demonstrate how scientific concepts can be used to solve local problems help teachers to design useful community projects for their students to undertake. Second, as teachers engage one another in an open seminar environment during the training, they learn to appreciate the value of a non-authoritative classroom and how to teach in a participant-centred way. Third, collective reflection exercises help participants organize insights from their teaching experiences, improving communication among teachers.

2018-01-02

2021-12-23

Teacher Motivation, Student Learning Outcomes

Pedagogical shifts, Student Motivation, Student Aspirations, Parental Demand for Education

Each year starting in 2017 and ending in 2020, the program will roll out to primary schools in one new subcounty in Jinja District. This will result in a total of three subcounties by 2020. Each time that a new subcounty is added, we will select 34 schools in the subcounty to participate in the experiment. Each school will nominate 2-8 teachers for training. After nomination, we will randomly assign 17 schools to treatment and 17 schools to control. Then, treatment schools will have the opportunity to actually send teachers to the yearly trainings. Treatment schools will continue to send 2-3 teachers per year to training until the end of 2020.

Outcome measures will be collected yearly from each treatment and control school using the following four techniques:
-Teacher survey
-Classroom observations
-School administrative data
-Community member survey

Randomization is done in office by a computer using pairwise matching on school characteristics.

Randomization is at the school level.

Yes

104 Schools

416 Teachers; 10,400 Pupils

52 Schools in Control
52 Schools in Treatment

Teacher Attendance: 1.4 days per month, 8.5%, 0.27 SD; How often teachers have conversations with parents: 2.7 Conversations per month, 25%, 0.34 SD; Student standardized exam scores: 0.33 SD

Learning to Learn by Learning to Teach: Pre-Analysis Plan