Improving Schools Through Teacher Development

Case Studies of the Aga Khan Foundation Projects in East Africa

S.E. Anderson, Stephen E. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367604790
• eBook ISBN: 9781000557541
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Government & Business
• Index: Business

This book presents a story of school improvement activity in East Africa from 1985 to 2000, which focused on sustained teacher development. The core of the book consists of six evaluations of school-and district-wide school improvement projects (SIPs) supported by the Aga Khan Foundation in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. The case studies present an evolving body of knowledge about the successes and challenges of a comprehensive approach to school improvement grounded in a common set of strategic principles. The strategic principles embody the belief that the chances for quality improvement in teaching and learning are greater when change efforts *are school-based, *involve whole schools as the unit of change, *emphasize the ongoing professional development of teachers, *attend to school management and organizational conditions affecting the capacity of teachers to implement change, * prepare for the institutionalization of organizational structures and processes that enable continuous school development, and *evolve through partnerships among relevant education stakeholders. The book concludes with commentaries by international experts in school improvement and teacher development on the SIP project designs, implementation and outcomes, and on lessons that can be drawn from the projects and their evaluations for school improvement policy, practice and theory in developing and developed countries around the world.

1 The Double Mirrors of School Improvement: The Aga Khan Foundation in East Africa

Stephen E. Anderson

DOI: 10.1201/9780203751213-1

This book presents a remarkable story of school improvement activity over the past decade and a half in the East African countries of Tanzania. Kenya, and Uganda. The school improvement projects (SIPs) that provide the focus for inquiry and discussion in the chapters that follow were all initiated and supported by the Aga Khan Foundation and Aga Khan Education Services, in collaboration with various other international donors and with local education authorities within the participating education jurisdictions. The core of the book consists of a series of six case study evaluations of the implementation and outcomes of these Aga Khan Foundation (AKF) sponsored school improvement projects.

The timing of this book is propitious. First, there has not been a recent collection of case studies of school improvement initiatives in the developing world (For previous collections, see Rust & Dalin, 1990; Lewin & Stuart, 1991; Levin & Lock-heed, 1993), although interest in this topic remains high among donor agencies, governments, and practitioners (e.g., Craig, Kraft, & du Plessis, 1998). Second, dramatic changes in the context of elementary and secondary education in many developing countries over the past decade (e.g., reduced government funding, decentralization of school governance, more community involvement in school funding and management, privatization) have created a different political, economic, and organizational context for efforts to universalize and improve basic educational provisions. The pioneering experiences of AKF in creating effective, sustainable, field-based support systems for continuous school and teacher development within these changing contexts can contribute usefully to discussions in this area. Third, these shifts reflect similar trends worldwide (e.g., increased local control and responsibility for school development and improvement within a context of centralized curriculum policy, test-driven external accountability, and policies promoting greater competition and choice among schools). As a result, school improvement experiences in the developing world have increasing theoretical and policy relevance to contemporary education movements in non-Third-World contexts.

The Aga Khan Foundation’s Approach to School Improvement

The story this book tells is remarkable in several ways. First, it is a long-term story of international donor and local educator commitment and efforts to improve the quality of education in African schools under very challenging circumstances. Individually, each project highlighted in the case studies extended over multi-year (3-10 years) funding, mobilization, and implementation cycles. Within each project, it is possible to discern an evolutionary progression of strategic actions and results. The local knowledge that emerged about more and less effective strategies for improving the quality of education in the targeted schools is embedded in the cases. Collectively, the story encompasses an interconnected series of AKF-engendered school improvement initiatives in East Africa over a period of about 15 years.¹ The knowledge from each project fed into the planning and implementation of successive projects across the region. While the evaluations of the projects reported in the case studies do not conclude that a miraculous solution to improving schools in developing countries has been found, the case studies provide a rich and cumulative body of knowledge about school improvement issues, strategies, and outcomes in the developing world.

The individual and collective school improvement experiences told in these case studies are also remarkable because of what can be learned from them about the potential and the limitations of an approach to school improvement grounded in a common set of research-based strategic principles that have been variously enacted in diverse settings subject to changing political and economic contexts over time. Six key principles underlie the design of each of the projects studied. The chances for improving the quality of teaching and learning in schools are greater when improvement efforts (a) are school-based, (b) involve the whole school as the unit of change, (c) emphasize the ongoing professional development of teachers, (d) attend to school management and other organizational conditions affecting the capacity of teachers to implement change at the school level, (e) prepare for the institutionalization of organizational structures and processes that enable continuous school development beyond the school improvement project phase, and (f) evolve through genuine partnerships among relevant education stakeholders.

‘School-based’ implies that targeted needs for improvement reflect identified concerns at the school level, and that multi-school interventions are tailored to school-specific needs as well as to common needs among schools within a system. School-based also implies that on-site assistance is provided to head teachers, teachers, and other stakeholders involved in planning and implementing improvement initiatives at the school level, and that access to external resources, support, and help is provided.

School improvement efforts that target whole-school change are based on the presunption that the overall quality of teaching and learning in schools is more likely to increase when all teachers in a school participate and cooperate in the pursuit of shared goals for school-wide development and change. Strategically, this implies that school improvement initiatives are designed to maximize the probability that all or most teachers will participate in and benefit from the resources, professional development, decision-making, and other forms of school-improvement-related support provided through a project.

Teacher development activities are a cornerstone of all the projects. At a minimum, this includes in-service learning to improve the quality of teachers’ instructional practices. The forms of in-service learning invoked are variable across the projects, and include such interventions as access to teacher-center- and school-based workshops; in-class coaching by consultants, supervisors, or peers, or all three; team planning and problem-solving by collegial work groups within the school; action research; teacher inter-visitation within and between schools; and professional study groups. In-class coaching by master teachers and peers is a common in-service denominator across the projects. Most projects have also included interventions to develop local teacher leadership for teacher and school development at the school and district levels.

The project designs have all addressed teachers’ in-service learning as one component in a systemic approach to whole-school improvement that includes simultaneous attention to various focuses of school development. The range of organizational conditions addressed grew in comprehensiveness over successive project experiences. The range includes capacity building for basic resource acquisition and development (e.g., low-cost teaching and learning aids), head teacher training in school and change management, mobilization of school-level parental involvement and funding, and development of district leadership and support for school improvement. Planned interventions to improve school management became more prominent in response to project evaluations that highlighted the centrality of effective school management in initiating and sustaining school improvement, and in the context of persistent state and international pressures toward decentralization of school funding and governance. Another common feature across projects has been an investment in the development and improvement of teacher resource centers at the district, school cluster, or school level that have the capacity to support teachers’ professional learning needs (e.g., workshops, consultants, libraries) and the production of teaching aids.

Each of the school improvement projects highlighted in the case studies was initiated with explicit intention to prepare for sustainability once the special project status and funding ceased. Sustainability applies not only to the use of innovative teaching practices and to changes in student learning, but also to the organizational structures and processes created at the school and district levels to support the ongoing development of teachers and schools. The establishment of innovative teacher leadership positions, for example, has been accompanied by overt problem-solving about the challenges of continuing those positions under normal budgetary, staffing, and operational conditions (e.g., compatibility with traditional teacher and supervisory roles, funding, professional development for new roles). The introduction of new ways of supporting teacher learning, such as collaborative work groups, in-class coaching, and incentive grants, has been followed by reflection on both the impact of these methods on teacher development and on local capacity for continuation. Parental contributions to school governance and funding as a result of initial project interventions have turned into challenging scenarios for renewal of ongoing parental support for school improvement. All the project evaluations address the prospects for local sustainability of project strategies that might enable continuous teacher development and school improvement.

Efforts to forge partnerships among different stakeholder groups in the pursuit of education quality improvement have been integral to all the Aga Khan Foundation school improvement projects. Initial conceptions of partnership were invitational and couched in terms of dissemination of project interventions and outcomes, that is. encouraging ‘nonproject’ schools to join in on ‘project school’ professional development activities, offering to share project developed resources with other schools. As the projects grew in scope and comprehensiveness, the concept of partnership evolved, and included interventions to foster joint responsibility for school improvement planning, resource provision, and implementation among the Aga Khan Foundation, Aga Khan Education Services, local school district authorities, parents and communities served by targeted schools, both public and private school sectors, and other NGOs and education quality improvement initiatives at play in the school improvement project sites. The mobilization of parent and community involvement in school management and development emerged as a focus of need and intervention in the initial projects in Kenya and Uganda. Community development for school improvement became a formal component of the school improvement model with the 1994 Mombasa project, drawing upon AKF’s experiences with communitybased Madrasa nursery schools.

The case studies and commentaries in this book offer a comparative perspective on a series of long-term school improvement initiatives in East Africa. The projects illustrate the enactment, results, and challenges of school improvement designs that are grounded in a cluster of strategic principles for educational change: change that is school-based, school-wide, participatory and collaborative among key stakeholder groups (e.g., education personnel in different roles and levels in the education system, school parents), focused on teacher development, systemic in addressing school management and organizational conditions impinging on teacher development, grounded in local inquiry, connected to local teacher centers, and attentive to the sustainability of school improvement structures and processes, as well as of teacher and pupil outcomes.

The Road to School Improvement: A Work-in-Progress

This book is relevant to anyone with a genuine interest in learning about school improvement policies and practices. Its potential readers include education policymakers, education leaders at local district and school levels, education researchers and consultants, and external agencies that invest in the promotion of quality improvement in education. It offers a challenging set of stories and findings; how-ever, it is not a recipe for change. The efforts of AKF and its partners in school improvement in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda remain a work-in-progress. The case studies open a window on that work-in-progress and invite readers to engage in, learn from, and reflect upon the experiences of the projects, just as the contributing authors have done.

Neither the sponsors and developers nor the evaluators of the case study projects would claim that the strategies for school improvement embodied in these initiatives represent the only route to improving the quality of education in African schools. Indeed, one might argue, as some of the evaluators do in their critiques, that other strategies are worth considering in light of the issues and challenges presented in the implementation and outcomes of the projects at the school and school district levels. Four such debatable strategies common to most if not all the school improvement projects are (a) an investment in district-level teacher development personnel, (b) an emphasis on enhancing teachers’ general pedagogical expertise, (c) a focus on the adoption and use of child-centered activity-oriented methods of teaching and learning, and (d) the promotion of data-based decision-making for school development.

The district-wide school improvement projects rely heavily on the establishment and in-service interventions of cadres of district-level teacher development consultants. In recent years, many school districts in North America and other areas of the developed world have drastically reduced the availability of support services for teachers at the school-system level, partly as a cost-saving measure, but also because of the absence of compelling evidence that investment in curriculum and professional development consultants affects the overall quality of teaching and learning (regardless of benefits for individual teachers in need of assistance). The emphasis in the Aga Khan school improvement projects on developing teams of teacher development agents within the school system but external to schools, could be said to ran counter to trends elsewhere in the world. It may well be, however, that lack of access to opportunities for professional development and low awareness of possibilities for classroom improvement among teachers in many areas of the developing world creates a fundamentally different set of conditions for ongoing professional learning, thereby creating a much stronger rationale for continuous, locally based external assistance from master teachers who are linked to a broader research- and practical-knowledge base on effective teaching. The case studies do not argue that local consultant-centered support systems for in-service teacher development are the only way to go. They do offer insight into the experiences of school districts that have pursued that route to improvement, often in combination with more participatory forms of teacher learning at the school level (Shaeffer, 1990).

One of the continuing challenges in the AKF school improvement projects has been to find cost-effective ways for district consultants to provide assistance to teachers in large numbers of schools at a sulficiently intensive level to make a real contribution to teachers’ efforts to master new methods of instruction. Project results suggest that periods of 6 to 12 months of in-school coaching by one or more external consultants can significantly enhance teacher learning of new teaching methods. They further suggest that it is feasible to organize that level of intensive service on a district-wide basis using cyclical schedules, whereby all schools get access to external professional development activities on an ongoing basis and subsets of schools get intensive aid at the school level during particular terms or years. While there are practical problems in such systems related to such things as role definition, financing, and transport to and from schools, the major difficulty arises in creating conditions and expertise at the school level for teachers to carry on with their own development without dependence on persistently high levels of external assistance. Efforts in the Aga Khan projects to create school-level cadres and networks of teacher leaders to facilitate continuous improvement have been difficult to put into practice and to sustain. Another finding from the projects and evaluations is the importance of training for people acting in teacher development roles at the system and school levels concerning both the content (e.g., desired teaching methods) and the process of change (e.g., peer coaching, action research, assessing teacher needs).

Most of the school improvement projects target teachers’ instructional knowledge and skill as a prime focus for development. This contrasts with strategies that emphasize the development, in-service training, and implementation of specific programs that contain packaged teaching and learning materials, lessons and teaching guides, assessment procedures, and so on. In the former approach targeting teachers’ instructional knowledge and skill, the long-term aim is to develop teacher understanding and skill in lesson planning and a broad repertoire of teaching strategies, with the expectation that teachers will gain the capacity to independently decide how to plan and apply these strategies to targeted subject matter objectives, content, and student needs. In the latter approach involving development, testing and implementation of specific programs, similar teaching methods might be employed; however, they are learned and mastered as tools associated with specific lessons and expectations for program delivery. The evaluations of teaching reported in the SIP case studies reveal the complex and long-term challenge of raising the level of teachers’ instructional expertise in settings where the baseline level of teachers’ basic literacy and professional knowledge can be quite low. Critics might conclude that well developed programs combined with best-practice in-service designs are a more efficient and effective way to raise teaching standards on a large scale (Thiagarajan, 1990), notwithstanding the all-too-frequent tales of failed or superficial implementation of external programs (e.g., Olorundare, 1990; Ibrahim, 1991; Prophet, 1995). The findings from the case study project evaluations add empirical substance, but do not bring closure to this debate. Others might argue that prior or equal attention should be given to developing teachers’ subject matter expertise, and there is certainly evidence from past research to suggest that the quality of student learning in developing countries is correlated with the level of teachers’ subject knowledge (Fuller & Clarke, 1994). While consideration of teachers’ subject knowledge has not been ignored within the AKF school improvement projects, the issue has not been tackled head on, and the projects have tended to leave that focus of teacher development to upgrading programs provided through local teacher training institutions.

The advocacy and support for activity-based discovery-oriented teaching methods within the Aga Khan Foundation school improvement projects provides a further focus for reflection and debate. This pedagogical orientation and its associated practices are promoted as an alternative or complement to the teacher-centered direct teaching methods typically reported in studies of teaching practice in African schools (e.g., Fuller & Snyder, 1991). Reviews of research on effective teaching practices in developing countries offer modest but mixed support for the claim that more student-centered, interactive, and open-ended teaching and learning methods are associated with higher levels of student achievement (e.g., Avalos, 1980; Fuller & Clarke, 1994). Past studies of efforts to introduce and support the implementation of such pedagogical methods in Africa are often disappointing in terms of the degree and quality of teacher change (e.g., Arthur, 1998; Kunje & Stuart, 1999; Prophet, 1995; Rowell & Prophet, 1990). This lias led some scholars of educational change in developing countries to express doubts about promoting child-centered pedagogical methods in curriculum, cultural, organizational, and professional contexts that have long favored teacher-centered didactic methods of instruction (Guthrie, 1990). One alternative proposed is to invest in helping teachers become more skilled at direct teaching methods that may be more practical in the resource-poor systems typical of so many developing countries, and perhaps more ‘effective’, as long as education quality is judged on the basis of curriculum content coverage and student performance on examination systems is closely aligned with content expectations. The projects and evaluations presented in the cases do not resolve the question of what images of pedagogy should be advocated and supported in African schools. They do add to knowledge about the circumstances affecting efforts to introduce progressive teaching methods in developing countries, including the difficulties of developing widespread teacher expertise, of accessing low-cost teaching and learning resources, and of adapting those methods to classrooms with high pupil-teacher ratios (e.g., 50100 pupils per teacher in some settings). The significance of these projects, how-ever, has less to do with the choice of teaching methods than with what can be learned about creating infrastructures and organizational cultures that can support ongoing school and teacher development focused on locally determined student learning needs.

Who would argue against the intent to get local educators at the district and school levels to engage in ongoing assessment and evaluation of student learning and teacher development needs, and to utilize that information in deciding on school improvement goals, plans, and outcomes? Most of the district-wide Aga Khan SIPs included proposals for systematic baseline data collection and tracking of student performance, teacher beliefs and practices, school management, parent involvement, school resources, school finances, and so on. A few have required project personnel or external evaluators to create independent standardized tests of student performance and to conduct comparisons of student results in school...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Double Mirrors of School Improvement: The Aga Khan Foundation in East Africa
• Chapter 2 Evolution in School Improvement with the Aga Khan Foundation, from 1984 to 2000
• Chapter 3 Building Professional Community at Mzizima Secondary School, Tanzania
• Chapter 4 Conflict Between National Curriculum Standards and Efforts to Improve Teaching
• Chapter 5 Supporting Child-Centered Teaching under Universal Primary Education in Kampala, Uganda
• Chapter 6 Decentralized Partnerships for School-Based Teacher Development in Mombasa, Kenya
• Chapter 7 Incentive Grants, Management Training, and Teacher Change in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania
• Chapter 8 Curriculum Materials and In-Service Training for English-Medium Instruction in Zanzibar
• Chapter 9 The Aga Khan Foundation Experience Compared with Emerging Alternatives to Formal Schooling
• Chapter 10 The Aga Khan Foundation School Improvement Initiative: An International Change Perspective
• Notes
• References
• Contributors
• Index