Abstract
The book contains six chapters, beginning with an overall review of the domain of professional development of rural teachers by F. Helen Drinan. The following five chapters are case studies of programmes and policies related to the continuing professional development (CPD) of rural teachers in Romania (by Ana Maria Sandi), China (by Liu Jing), Cambodia (by F. Helen Drinan), Mozambique (by the organisation Ajuda de Desenvolvimento de Povo para Povo/Development Aid from People to People) and Ethiopia (by Theodros Shewarget Belew). At the end, Drinan brings together the summary points and policy recommendations emerging from the case studies.
The editors are academics functioning as officers and specialists with UNESCO. The contributors have extensive experience with education projects and institutions. The book is the result of a joint endeavour by two UNESCO institutions that conduct research on, and disseminate learnings for, building the capacity of rural teachers in the context of the goal of Education for All by 2015. These are the International Institute for Capacity Building in Africa (IICBA) and the International Research and Training Centre for Rural Education (INRULED). The book underscores the urgent need to build teachers’ capacity if the goal of quality education for all children has to be met.
In Chapter 1, ‘An Overall Review of Support for Rural Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development’, Drinan reviews the policy and vision statements in the Jomtien Declaration in 1990, in the UNESCO review of Education for All in 2011, and in the UNESCO Strategy for Teachers, 2012–15.
She observes that the 1990 document presented a holistic, decentralised vision, giving importance to the professional freedom and working conditions of teachers. Later documents put forth a centralised, top-down, structured vision. She points to the dominance of a deficit model of teacher development currently found in government circles aimed at rectifying the lack of qualification, training and education of the teachers employed. While such deficit models may be inevitable as immediate, short-term steps, Drinan emphasises the need to adopt a reflective model of continuing development for teachers. She notes that sharing best practices as a strategy for supporting CPD must also be viewed with caution because political, economic and social contexts vary widely.
Moving from an examination of international policy frameworks, Drinan goes on to categorise the kinds of CPD models found around the world—whole school systems, cluster-based systems, teacher resource centres, school network systems, partnership systems, distance education systems and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems. She refers to practices in European nations where most of CPD takes place in schools, in both rural and urban situations, involving the devolution of decision-making powers. The effectiveness of this model is validated internationally by researchers and practitioners of CPD. In the example of the school network system in Australia, critical features of effective CPD, such as control of the agenda and the process by teachers can be seen. The formation of teachers’ networks can also create alternatives to government-sponsored in-service training programmes, as seen in Japan. Teachers’ networks need not imply a disjunction from state-led reform processes because they can enable teachers to ‘understand and translate educational reforms into their own local contexts’ (p. 22).
We need better studies of these models. We need to understand what kinds of changes in the roles, responsibilities and powers of education functionaries are entailed by networks of schools and teachers. We need to know the mechanisms and strategies that enable their robustness and viability. These models stand in contrast to government-driven processes that seem to have a limited role in the authentic CPD of teachers. Many such state-led processes are also donor supported and controlled, as the case studies in this book show.
Drinan offers a useful review of research studies on the impact of the different models and points to the features that make them popular.
From an examination of systems of CPD, Drinan moves to a categorisation of various activities of CPD and a review of their effectiveness, such as peer coaching, mentoring, modelling, observation and feedback and action research, giving examples from different countries.
Based on the review described above, Drinan identifies the key components of effective CPD for rural teachers: (1) meeting local needs; (2) developing local leadership and planning processes; (3) adopting appropriate courses and materials; and (4) ensuring community involvement in school planning and reform.
Drinan has rightly brought up the need for professional development of school administrators and supervisors, and also the need for building a critical mass of change agents if good quality CPD is to be made a sustainable reality. This is particularly important because specificities of programmes, systems and models have been known to change due to shifting political aims, changes in funding, transfers of key personnel, competing commitments, etc.
In Chapter 2, ‘Mentoring System for Teachers’ Professional Development: A Case from Romania’, Sandi examines a problem that emerged in Romania in the 1990s, that is, access to schools was good, but there were serious problems of the quality and relevance of education. Achievements of rural students lagged behind those of urban students. The education ministry responded to the situation by setting up the Rural Education Project, funded by the World Bank, which created a system of mentors who supported teachers in schools. Sandi outlines the piloting and scaling up of the project, examines its outcomes and challenges and describes how these were measured through a longitudinal study tool.
Chapter 3, ‘County Teacher Support System: A Case from China, “The Southwest Basic Education Project”’, by Liu Jing, looks at a bilateral project of the governments of China and the UK, which ran from 2006 to 2011 and covered 27 of the poorest counties in China. It created training modules and conducted training programmes in a cascade model. Teacher Learning Resource Centres were set up. It focused on building the skills of county trainers to observe classrooms and to give constructive feedback. The chapter places the achievements of the project against the backdrop of pre-existing policies and describes the extent to which it was integrated into the mainstream educational system.
In Chapter 4, ‘School Cluster System as Support Mechanism for Teachers: A Case Study from Cambodia’, Drinan gives a brief background to the history and politics of Cambodia before presenting the concept of school clusters. School clusters in Cambodia predate the 1990s, and the system is believed to have evolved from Buddhist teachings. It is seen as a bottom-up system, and its prevalence affected the way in which the new concept of school clusters was implemented as part of a national project from the mid-1990s with support from UNICEF. Drinan traces the development of the school clustering system over the next decade. It seeks to be a decentralised structure supporting the capacity building of teachers through weekly meetings, access to libraries, etc. She describes the positive role played by a World Bank initiative, Education Quality Improvement Project (EQIP), which provided funds in response to grant proposals developed by school clusters. She lauds the model of accountability exhibited by these clusters. However, she also shows how rivalry or disagreement between funders and projects with different visions and expectations can undercut the benefit and sustainability of projects possessing considerable potential.
In Chapter 5, ‘Pedagogical Workshops as a Rural Teacher Support System in Mozambique’, Ajuda de Desenvolvimento de Povo para Povo (ADPP) presents its work on CPD. ADPP, an NGO founded in 1982, runs several institutions and collaborates with local communities in the areas of education and health, and in the fight against HIV. Giving the backdrop of the challenge taken up by the project, the chapter points out that Mozambique had since its independence in 1975 tried out 21 different training models for teachers, and the quality of each model was uneven and unsatisfactory. The government launched an initiative to decentralise school support systems, and ADPP collaborated in this effort by introducing pedagogical workshops (PWs), which act as resource centres for teachers, especially the untrained ones. PWs were introduced in Manica province in 2000 with the support of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, and had been scaled up to more than 20 provinces by 2012. ADPP has a phased plan to hand over the PWs to government agencies when they are ready for the transition. The chapter foregrounds the importance of local community ownership as well as proper planning for financial stability and income generation in sustaining any meaningful initiative by an NGO.
In Chapter 6, ‘Rural Teachers’ Continuing Professional Development Support System: The Case of Ethiopia’, Belew examines how Ethiopia developed a programme for CPD in 2005. It included a two-year induction course and compulsory CPD activities for a minimum of 60 hours a year for newly recruited teachers. These included trainings, action research and appraisal of work and classroom observation by mentors. However, a review showed that these processes were not fully implemented, and hence a new CPD framework was developed in 2008 with better systems for monitoring and evaluation. The thrust was to make schools responsible for the CPD activities of their teachers, and to make the school leadership a key actor in the process. This was complemented by in-service training at the cluster level. The responsibilities for CPD at each level of management were delineated clearly. The new concept of continuous supervision and support of teachers is compared to the earlier occasional inspectorial mode. With this change, the need to build the educational understanding of administrators at all levels becomes crucial.
In the last chapter, Drinan examines the practical difficulties and constraints that have not been elaborated on in the book, but that nonetheless have an immense impact on the success of CPD efforts. These factors include teacher shortage, limited budget for adequate CPD follow up and lack of institutional memory in the state system, whereby lessons and experiences emerging from previous projects and programmes are forgotten and similar initiatives are launched some years later. Drinan calls for addressing these constraints. She also highlights the way in which the impact of CPD should be evaluated by laying down predefined outcomes and methods for collecting evidence for these goals, such as discussions with teachers, interviews with pupils and focused classroom observations. Further, Drinan pleads for educating the teacher educators in pedagogy and enabling them to implement model teaching–learning processes themselves. This area is in dire need of attention. Interestingly, she also says that teacher educators must enjoy teaching so as to inculcate a positive attitude towards teaching in their students. Is this a hint at using such affective criteria in selecting teachers and their educators? This is another idea that deserves to be discussed more widely.
The book is valuable as an overview of theoretical, practical and policy aspects of teacher development. However, the policy recommendations drawn from the case studies would have had greater relevance if sharper comparisons had been attempted with, say, school-based CPD systems found in some parts of the world. Besides, the discussions in the chapters are explicitly premised on the idea that rural teachers have much less access to resources and support compared to urban teachers. It is true that the large-scale expansion of schools is witnessing the influx of many poorly qualified and untrained teachers, and there exists a challenge of ensuring accountability of their work. Since the expansion has taken place in rural areas, it is seen and presented as a rural problem. This formulation can, at one level, deflect us from taking a sharper look at the problems that confront us. A problem of even greater magnitude and one that is not unique to rural areas is the failure of the current paradigm of education to meet its own goals. It treats knowledge as given and then perceives the pervasiveness of low-quality learning as a problem to be solved. There is an urgent need to re-educate all stakeholders in a new paradigm of knowledge and learning that envisions the building of democratic relationships, not just achieving the Reading Writing Arithmetic (3 Rs) skills or learning given bodies of knowledge, as the goal of education.