Implementing school-based teacher development in Tanzania

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a pilot school-based professional development programme for Tanzanian primary school teachers launched in February 2011 and evaluated in December 2012 by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training with the support of UNICEF. The study set out to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of the pilot programme in changing pedagogical practices before it was scaled up nationally. It was found that teachers who had participated in the school-based training showed significant differences in their pedagogical practices and demonstrated a positive attitude towards their training and their pupils, and saw teaching and learning as an interactive, communicative process. Drawing on the findings, the paper explores the challenges and the lessons learned for scaling up school-based teacher development at the national level in Tanzania and other countries in the east and southern African region.

Keywords:

• school-based teacher development
• teacher education reform
• Tanzania
• primary education
• capacity development
• quality education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The evaluation team were only commissioned towards the end of the pilot and so the opportunity to influence the design of the evaluation using a randomised controlled trial or quasi-experimental design with pre-test and post-test control group design was missed. To strengthen the causal inferences that could be drawn from the study, a comparison group of four randomly selected schools from a district council not taking part in the pilot was used in addition to the longitudinal comparison with the baseline data.

2. Ward coordinators act as education advisors and are employed by district councils.

3. Because of the low academic qualifications of the vast majority of those entering primary teaching as Grades A and B, teachers are offered the opportunity to follow in-service courses upgrading their subject knowledge so they can gain access to diploma and degree courses. There is, however, little emphasis on upgrading pedagogical subject knowledge.

4. For example, if there were three activities occurring within a five-minute time slot, each would be allocated one-third of the time.

5. A type of questioning exchange designed to encourage pupil participation using a mid-sentence rise in voice intonation to get a response from the pupils during an explanation or following a pupil answer. The answer, usually in the form of a choral answer, takes the form of a repetition or completion of a phrase or word, initiated by the teacher.

6. A teacher check on understanding often functions as a ritualised teaching exchange with the teacher asking the class whether they are following. It was found that teachers rarely probe for pupil understanding.

Additional information

Funding

The studies cited in this paper were funded by UNICEF, Tanzania. The authors are grateful to UNICEF for their support but the views expressed are those of the authors.