RISE Online Presentation Series: Teachers and the Teaching Profession I: Training and Coaching
In the absence of the RISE Annual Conference, this summer’s Online Presentation Series continued the RISE tradition of gathering emerging scholarship that considers the learning crisis from an education systems perspective. Each author presented their paper in a pre-recorded video that will be available via the RISE YouTube channel (and RISE website).
The four papers in this panel examined both the importance and the complexity of training and coaching for in-service teachers. Two of these papers evaluate non-traditional modes of teacher training.
RISE Fellow Janeli Kotzé compared the effectiveness of virtual, tablet-based coaching and on-site coaching for South African primary school teachers, and showed that the high-tech coaching intervention had lower per-unit costs than the on-site model but was ultimately less cost-effective because it had smaller effects on student learning.
Charlotte Jones discussed a study of the delivery of teacher professional development through communities of practice implemented at scale in Kenya and Rwanda, and identify characteristics of effective communities of practice.
A third paper looked not only at teachers but also the local community. Andy de Barros examined the efficacy of teacher training and instructional materials for a primary school mathematics program in Karnataka, India, and discuss whether student learning received an additional boost when the training and materials were complemented by community engagement events.
Finally, Todd Pugatch presented results from an evaluation of the impact of an extensive teacher training program on the delivery of a compulsory entrepreneurship course in Rwandan secondary schools across a range of outcomes. He will show that the training had positive effects on teachers’ pedagogical practices and students’ participation in entrepreneurial activities, but no effect on students’ cognitive or non-cognitive skills, nor on their overall income.