Following the success of the teacher training program articulated in "Learning to Teach by Learning to Learn," my colleagues at Kimanya Ngeyo and I started sharing the results and stories associated with the teacher training to government officials across Uganda. The combination of the New Teacher Policy and a new curriculum for secondary education that emphasizes a competency-based approach to education meant that many across the Ugandan context have a thirst to find innovative approaches to influence how the education systems evolves moving forward.
Over the course of 2022 and 2023, we started having conversations with civil servants in the Teacher Education and Training Department (TETD) in Uganda to see how the approach could potentially be integrated into broader systems for teacher development in the country. To begin, with the support of funds offered by J-PAL's Innovation for Government Initiative, Kimanya Ngeyo, the Development Innovation Lab, and IPA Uganda organized a week-long workshop in Jinja district to explore possibilities. The workshop included commissioners from various departments in the Ministry of Education, Principals of Core Primary Teacher Training Colleges, directors of education-related government directorates and various staff members of departments representing almost all departments of the Ministry of Education. All participants studied spent a few days absorbing results from the research, studying materials in Kimanya-Ngeyo's training, attending teacher trainings themselves, and interviewing teachers who had gone through the training. In its totality, the experience painted a full picture of the potentialities of teachers that can be unlocked through thoughtful approaches to teacher training.
One of the principals of a College was tasked with preparing concluding remarks. Here is a snippet of what was shared:
"We've interacted with these materials, but as we interacted, we came up to understand that, this is a methodology. Not only an outreach, like […] you probably thought at first, but it is a methodology that is very, very much needed by the teachers. The teacher trainers at college level, the teachers who are teaching the primary children and secondary children. Because we found out that this methodology first and foremost is guided by reflections, the way they were met.
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"So as you give [children] part of this content, you bring in some questions for them to begin now thinking, giving their views of how they see this. They add all onto what they have learned. So this one expands on their understanding on the content at hand that is being taught. Then also the reflections after. It makes them go on this content further, widen their understanding on it, to the extent of going back home and working with their parents.
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"They have shown us that everything we do is science. And it has taught us that we are supposed to be scientific in whatever we do. Everything! Be it business. That if I want to begin my small business, I have to carry out these processes in order to do a better business. All these go to the child in the class. That's why you've heard them say that people go for Agriculture. People go for this. Because it lets one to understand that now I'm going to dig, but as I go to dig, for example, onions, what can I do to do this? Yes, I want onions. It makes you go out to see, to meet that person who has cultivated the onions. What did he do? What did he use? What did this one come out with? So that you go into something you know very well. And as you do all this, you are becoming a scientist. And not only in agriculture, but even in this small, small business. You can even learn to begin pancakes. I can begin pancakes, but you also need to go and see what others are doing. Then you come back. So there is a lot of research that we are supposed to do as you work out our teachings in the classroom. As you teach and you mark books, you are supposed to ask you yourself, why did these students perform the way they have performed? You reflect on this. And as you reflect, this one will help you to even go and make consultations, make research further, so that these children of yours you are teaching become better students as you teach them. This one has also helped us to understand these things more. And as we go back to our colleges, I think we are not going to leave this out, but we are going to add to what we have been doing to produce better teachers than we are producing now.
The principal also touched on issues related to the purpose of education, the "self-transformation" of the teachers, and the use of pedagogical approaches coherent with the competency-based curriculum introduced in secondary schools.
Many statements were made regarding the value of extending this approach to more teachers throughout the country, and especially through the teacher training college system. As a result, we carried out qualitative interviews with teacher training tutors to better understand the nature of the work and to envision an approach that could scale the process of teacher transformation that seems to result from Kimanya's program. We outlined the structure of how tutors of Core Primary Teacher Training Colleges (CPTCs) support teachers in the field and found that their in-service tutors play a similar role, functionally, to Kimanya's tutors.
The challenge, now, is to carry out research to help us learn how the effects of this general skills approach to teacher training might scale. Contrary to "structured" pedagogical approaches, in which a teacher is supported with a (sometimes) scripted lesson-plan that has proven to be effective, the "Learning to Learn" approach assumes that teachers have the potential to carry out action-research that flexibly and cumulatively improves teaching practices over time. To scale this approach implies building a new culture of teaching. How to create such a culture across diverse regions in Uganda is the focus of an upcoming research project. We propose to study the scale-up of this program through a model of ``scaling through accompaniment.'' School administrators and teacher tutors at CPTCs will participate in the trainings, in addition to teachers. We randomly assign schools and teachers to the training, and assign them to teacher networks with varying degrees of accompaniment density. We hypothesize that embedding teachers in overlapping networks of support from actors who have engaged in the training-fellow teachers, government teacher tutors, and administrators-will create persistent and dynamic effects on student learning through channels that reflect processes of collective learning. Our proposed model of scale departs from common approaches in the literature, and has the potential to offer a new perspective on the nature and practice of scaling interventions.