Teacher Professional Development

Ensuring high quality formal schooling at scale is difficult under the best circumstances. In the case of Lebanon, where an influx of Syrian refugee children nearly doubled the student population within four years, such a task presents a near-insurmountable challenge. Yet strong, consistent evidence tells us that the key to student learning is high quality teaching. Despite this evidence, teachers are rarely adequately supported to build professional knowledge. Instead, teacher learning opportunities are often short, lecture-style workshops on a series of diverse topics, disconnected from the daily work of teaching. Furthermore, the approaches or skills touted by the workshops likely rely upon foundational practices that teachers routinely do not have.

These issues are exacerbated in emergency education settings, where dozens to hundreds of non-state actors such as NGOs and humanitarian agencies provide fragmented education services — inclusive of teacher training — with little to no coordination. In Lebanon alone, there are nearly 300 registered NGOs working within education. In addition, many NGOs’ solutions of utilizing pre-packaged, trademarked curricular packages — optimized to implement quickly, under crisis conditions — hinders governments’ ability to integrate programming into the existing educational framework. This is particularly problematic in protracted crises such as Lebanon’s, who have been hosting Syrian refugees in large numbers since 2011.

This project asked whether and how a coherent and sustained approach to teacher and coach professional development, based on a set of prioritized foundational practices, could build and sustain teacher professional learning. The Building Expert Teachers Through Evidence-based Research (BETTER) approach to teacher professional learning is flexible, easily integrated into existing school curricula, and agnostic with regard to curricular approach to best fit the needs of crisis and conflict contexts as well as those in protracted crises. In Lebanon, the intervention was designed to align to the context and the existing teacher competency framework.

The study was planned to measure change in teacher practice and coach and teacher perceptions of the new approach. Due to school disruptions from political instability and COVID-19, baseline data on a national sample of teachers, coaches, and students was analyzed to validate and test a teacher observation measure developed within the partnership.

Through this project, we worked closely with stakeholders from MEHE, including coach leaders and coaches, to generate research questions and a feasible design, contextualize learning opportunities, ensure intervention fit, and build institutional capacity.

Research Design

In partnership with MEHE and WB, we designed our study to causally investigate how a new approach to teacher professional development impacted teachers and coaches. To do so, we sampled first shift, middle-grades (4-8), English, science, and French subject coaches in the Department of Scholastic and Pedagogical Guidance (DOPS).

All English, French, and science (biology) coaches who work with teachers in grades 4 to 8 participated in the study, pending consent. Within each subject area, coaches were randomized to the treatment or control condition. Coaches assigned to the control condition continued their business as usual coaching practices. Coaches assigned to the treatment condition underwent training in the focal core practices and coaching strategies described in the program section below.

As part of the study, a national sample of teachers, pedagogical coaches, school principals, and students were surveyed about their perceptions of the coaching program and their school and classroom contexts. Trained enumerators additionally collected observation data on teacher classroom practices.

Program Design

Working in partnership with pedagogical coaches from DOPS, Global TIES for Children co-developed and implemented a coaching and teacher professional development approach for intentional and sustained teacher learning utilizing a practice-based approach to developing teacher skills and knowledge. The BETTER teacher professional learning approach builds upon decades of scientific research that demonstrates that effective professional development programs demand active and applied learning from its participants, provide sustained and repeated learning opportunities, provides models of effective practice, provides expert support, and fits within a coherent framework of practice (Desmione 2009; Darling-Hammond et al, 2017).

Specifically, our approach was steeped in two bodies of research: the development of professional practice (Grossman et al., 2009) and the development of expertise (Ericsson, 1996). We employed the teacher practice framework developed as part of this project with hands-on opportunities to acquire new skills including: the naming of practice and its components, the real-time demonstration of what it looks like to enact the practice, and multiple opportunities for coaches and teachers to try it out with peer and expert feedback. Through these practice opportunities, we drew on the notion of deliberate practice ensuring opportunities are finite in scope, focused around specific goals, and sequenced along a performance trajectory.