From good ideas to good practice: putting teachers at the center of education improvement, where they belong

This commentary builds upon a very simple premise: Meeting the challenge of education quality around the globe depends first and foremost on the teacher in the classroom. It captures perspectives that are informed by over 25 years of work supporting and researching education quality and innovation in over 30 countries while working for international nongovernmental organizations, multilateral agencies, and academic institutions.

Over this span, education reforms have come and gone while instructional styles have run the gamut from tyrannically teacher-centered to anarchically child-centered, and virtually every system has yielded brilliant graduates, poor ones, and most in-between. Along with such shifts have been transformations in countries’ learning goals, curricula, governance, texts, assessment methods, and many other factors. In all of this, however, the teacher has remained the one constant and critical element, whether embracing or withstanding the ever-shifting tides in the struggle to achieve the greatest learning possible with her or his students. This might in part help explain the key conclusion of the 2007 McKinsey report, “How the world’s best performing school systems come out on top,” that three factors matter most in education: teachers, teachers, teachers. More specifically, to succeed, systems must most importantly recruit and hire the most capable and committed persons to become teachers, train their teachers well, and equip them materially, with policies, with support, and with models to allow them to perform their best.

Yet, despite the considerable gains by many countries in their pursuit of the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals, the shortage of certified and competent teachers condemns most quantitative successes with abject quality. For example, a 2011 study by USAID in Mozambique¹, a country with a primary level student to teacher ratio of 55:1 in 2012² (the fifth highest in the world) but that is often held up as an EFA success³, found that a full 59 % of 631 grade 3 students sampled were unable to read a single word in Portuguese, the language of instruction. The current and forecasted global shortfall in the supply of qualified, competent teachers forebodes a worsening of such outcomes. According to UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics⁴ (2006:3), sub-Saharan Africa “will need to raise its current stock of teachers by 64 %—from 2.4 to 4.0 million—in less than a decade.” In 2011, the United Nations reported the need to add at least two million new teaching positions worldwide by 2015 while 6.2 million new recruits are required to maintain current levels with attrition among the ranks (The Guardian, 2011⁵).

Combining such pressures with the endemically low status (and pay) of teachers in so many developing countries, ministries of education regularly resort to recruiting teachers from the lowest of the tertiary recruits and, in many countries, must hire teachers with low levels of schooling and even with no certification at all to staff all their classrooms. Perceiving teachers as just one of the many inputs that create “quality” education, governments and donors alike act is if it is sufficient to achieve quality by designing the other education inputs so precisely that all teachers need to do is employ these different inputs with full fidelity to generate strong learning. There are only problems when a teacher diverges from script. The idea is that by creating high quality in the curriculum, texts, instructional tactics, assessment techniques, etc., education systems should be able to counterbalance any shortcomings in the quality of the teaching force and of individual teachers. The classic scenario is that a school inspector can walk into any grade 5 mathematics class on 27 April and expect to find every teacher on page 148, using the same instructional method and examples and, thereby, achieving the same high learning levels. Teacher, raise your arm now.

Such uniformity, or ‘homogeneity,’ in terms of nonhuman inputs is reasonable to imagine from a ministry of education, which society charges with conceiving and diffusing a coherent, equitable, and consistent education program for all a nation’s people. Yet, there is an intractable contradiction embedded herein. This is that a country’s schools and classrooms are instead characterized by heterogeneity on virtually all fronts, including across communities, across schools, and across teachers and their students. Diversity across and even within communities is evident in the mix of ethnic, religious, historical, cultural, “aspirational,” and other features of its inhabitants. It is also captured in the varied nature and assets of the local economy, sociopolitical scene, natural and man-made environments, and linkages to the rest of the country and beyond.

Within a school, distinctions are visible routinely within the infrastructure and material assets and programs, including instructional and extracurricular, the leadership, linkages with the local community and to the education system, the range of extracurricular activities, and more. Individual classrooms may also be laid out and equipped differently. In the classroom, teachers differ not just in the sorts of factors that would appear in their personnel files—their sex, their years of experience, and the level and nature of their preservice and accumulated in-service training—but also in their personal interests, networks, talents, strengths and weaknesses, cultural background, and other dimensions. Finally, and no less vitally, every school and classroom is distinct for the children that occupy them, unique as individuals, as groups and even as whole classes for their academic abilities and other talents, their experience, their interests, their dislikes, their physical assets and health status, and so on. All these factors combine to create a truly unique amalgam, which can, and regularly does, change from one day and even from one moment to the next. Indeed, I have yet to meet a group of educators in the world who has not shared my wonder at the mystery of how two groups of students with virtually equivalent characteristics on paper and studying the same topic in the same classroom with the same teacher can act and learn so differently. Such diversity clearly betrays the notion that every teacher can achieve the same learning outcomes with her/his students by employing exactly the same methods.

The growing urgency by countries to adopt “relevance” in their national curricula, training students in “21st Century Skills,” offers a robust illustration of the improbability of delivering high-quality education to all of a country’s students by a one-size-fits-all approach. While specific knowledge may be relevant at its source of origin, it risks becoming patently irrelevant when compiled as content and skills from many distinct settings and populations and presented as a coherent lesson between the two covers of a textbook, particularly when taught as knowledge to be tested on a national exam.

Returning to the central premise of this commentary, homogenized education models, methods, and materials can only truly gain relevance and genuine effectiveness when each teacher is equipped and empowered to adapt it to the unique conditions of her or his school and classroom. Rather, systems tend to try to compensate for the intractable differences across teachers by homogenizing and “perfecting” all the other factors, the implication being that teachers are not perfectible but if a system can just get them all using competently a combination of “what works,” quality learning will result. This logic is ill-conceived. Education is a patently human, not an industrial endeavor, and therefore, systems must turn to teachers to bring value to the many inputs the system controls and delivers to them as it is they who are the ultimate gatekeepers of quality and learning at school.

In reality, a reworked curriculum, a new “proven” pedagogic approach, or any other innovation does not automatically transform the instruction of many diverse teachers into a uniform approach that yields quality practice and outcomes. Instead, any single education reform or innovation in effect becomes 10,000 reforms or innovations once delivered into the hands of 10,000 teachers. The assertion here is that national education systems (and partners) typically adopt curricula, texts, standards, and training precisely to erase such heterogeneity from the classroom—think of the “No Child Left Behind” reform of the USA launched under the Bush administration in the early 2000s⁶. However, the opposite—that heterogeneity reigns—is not only possible but, it is argued here, is preferable as teachers will never perform as robots, repeating exactly what they have been programmed to do since, it bears repeating, education is a supremely human endeavor. This reality should persist at least until systems convert entirely to digital-based, online instruction, which, ironically, is appreciated at least in large part not for its unbending homogeneity as a mode of education delivery but because of its vast flexibility in adapting to the very particular learning (and instructional) preferences, styles, and requirements of each individual learner (and educator).

Viewed from this angle, it should be possible to perceive heterogeneity across teachers as a considerable source of richness from which systems can, and indeed must, benefit. To assert this even more provocatively, a teacher’s ability to operate flexibly within the system is a sine qua non of quality in instruction and learning. Certainly, teachers require curricula, textbooks, instructional models and pedagogic materials of high quality along with rigorous standards that have been developed and validated by recognized experts (as the McKinley report concludes, teachers must be supported). However, to repeat, it is ultimately classroom teachers, both alone and as a community of practitioners, upon whom an education system relies to convert these great inputs into good instructional practice and learning, or not. These inputs must serve as tools, not as manacles, and systems must cultivate and liberate the creativity and initiative of its teaching force at the same time that it fosters their content and pedagogic knowledge and skills to be able to select the most appropriate mix of inputs—i.e., that suit all the factors that characterize a classroom, its setting, and its occupants—and to use these well.

It is important to note that this assertion is not a petition for a laissez-faire, anything-goes strategy. Rather, it is a summon for systems to replace rigidity with rigor. Most basically, “rigidity” focuses on methods and content while “rigor” hones in on outcomes. Thus, a rigid model enjoins an inspector to assess highly a teacher who enacts competently and with fidelity the curriculum and methods s/he has learned in teacher training sessions. If a teacher’s application of the official pedagogic ‘gestures’ is faithful to the ‘script,’ s/he may be judged as competent, often irrespective of the students’ learning outcomes. In contrast, rigor asks the same inspector to judge a teacher’s performance based predominantly on the quality of her/his students’ learning (judged against official curriculum standards), with relatively little account of the methods used to achieve these (within reason, of course)⁷.

In public fora and training settings, I often invite educators and education officials to recall the teachers who had the greatest positive influence on their learning and lives. “Are they the teachers who obediently and unbendingly stuck to the text, the methods and the standards,” I ask, “or were they those who strayed, who brought their own personality and ‘spin’ to each lesson and to the full course?” Without exception, they smile nostalgically and acknowledge that it was indeed the “rebels” who had motivated them most and helped trace their future paths to achievement and fulfillment.

1 Heterogeneity and the classroom

So, how do we as educators, policy makers, and researchers proliferate these rebels across a system without inviting anarchy but rather elevating the achievement of learning? How do we liberate teachers with confidence that they will muster their creativity and initiative along with their knowledge and skill to meet the system’s rigorous standards rather than fall into sloth and indiscipline and thereby penalize their students? To begin, we need to treat teachers as professionals rather than as semiskilled laborers on an assembly line. Even if many teachers are, in effect, truly only semiskilled, lacking formal pedagogic training and even sometimes having only partially mastered the content and skills they have been hired to deliver as teachers, it is improbable that they will elicit suitable results from their students on a sustained basis if we expect them to do little more than instruct with unbending, and often even uncomprehending, adherence to a standard script. Furthermore, what an enormous waste of talent and potential for the many teachers who do have the skills, knowledge, and motivation to move beyond the script and enliven their instruction with emotion, creativity and new content, adding props, ad-libbing, gesticulating, and exhorting to educate and inspire their students rather than anesthetizing them. In addition, we could and should be using these teachers to model good practices, showing and accompanying their colleagues to convert good ideas to good practice and to guide and support continuously their less qualified colleagues to improve their practice and help their students achieve more routinely the systems’ learning goals and standards with rigor, not rigidity.

Treating teachers, and the whole teaching corps, as professionals returns us to the second two conclusions of the 2007 McKinsey report (op cit.): equipping them technically and systemically to be able to succeed. Systemically, teachers require high-quality inputs—curriculum, textbooks, other instructional resources, facilities, and assessment standards, tools, and policies⁸—to help their students learn successfully. Technically, they require the core pedagogic competencies and content knowledge to put these inputs to effective use. As the body of knowledge and skills that students must possess to be productive, socially engaged adults continues to evolve,⁹ so must the knowledge, skills, and resources of teachers.

Seen from the vantage of an integrated, coherent system, it is the way that each of these elements promotes the others that is most crucial. Thus, the quality of educational inputs is not simply an innate feature that looks the same irrespective of the operational setting—i.e., the classroom. Rather, their application and, consequently, their effectiveness depend intimately on the degree and success to which each teacher can shape them to the particularities of her/his unique classroom conditions and context to achieve the system’s common learning outcomes. Again, recognizing the need for heterogeneity, rather than using these centrally generated factors to ‘straitjacket’ teachers, these factors must instead constitute a choice. Furthermore, teachers must have sufficient “wiggle room,” or authority, to be able to select judiciously from among and within the inputs and to adapt them appropriately while they adopt them. At the same time, recalling the enormous range across teachers’ qualifications and competence, it is vital also to ensure consistent, available, and flexible support to help them build the skills and confidence to use this “wiggle room” responsibly and effectively (a strategy for doing this appears below).

So what does this look like in the classroom? Rekindling the earlier reference to relevance, uses of mathematics in the city differ in many ways from maths in a rural area. So too, it may be argued, should the teaching of maths; the principles will be the same, but the best opportunities to explicate, illustrate, and apply to consolidate learning will not. In the same vein, a highly artistic, creative teacher brings different talents, interests, and shortcomings to a social studies lesson than does an avid rationalist. While both should be able to succeed with their students, it will likely often be the case that at least one, and quite possibly both, will struggle if obligated to employ a highly rigid approach.

To summon the presently popular use of Vygotsky’s “scaffolding” concept in teacher training and professional development¹⁰, systems must bolster teachers in their delivery while equipping them to maneuver horizontally and vertically along the metaphorical planks with ever-increasing independence and flexibility, employing the standard education approaches and inputs in ways that conditions, including, particularly their students, dictate. To repeat, this is not a laissez-faire proposition. An education system certainly must establish institutional parameters to which teachers adhere. However, it must also equip, encourage, and motivate its teachers to employ these inputs effectively (and creatively!) to suit the unique characteristics of their respective classrooms as well as to continue to improve their practice based both on training and support provided by the system and, increasingly, on personal and collective experimentation and reflection.

2 Heterogeneity and teacher training

The literature worldwide has long been uncompromising on the need to move training as close as possible to the classroom and casts as highly problematic the “cascade” approach to in-service training¹¹. Yet, both institution-based preservice training and cascade in-service professional development remain prevalent. Irrespective of what we know about what “works best,” most developing countries remain entrenched in these tried and untrue teacher training methods. This often happens because there are neither the human, material, nor financial resources for systems to cover the great distances over which are scattered the vast numbers of teachers to provide training and support of adequate proximity, quality, and time.

The move in many countries to the increasing use of school-based professionals with greater skill and training (or sometimes just more seniority and clout)—often called key resource, mentor, master, or model teachers—is an important step in addressing this systemic lacuna, both in terms of coverage and of frequency of support. The decades-old strategy of grouping schools in clusters, with a core and several linked satellite schools, also capitalizes on the notion of proximate expertise. However, neither approach seems yet to confront directly the issue of imposing uniform, homogenous solutions on what are clearly distinct, heterogeneous contexts. Rather, while summoning school- or cluster-based peers to support fellow teachers, the dynamic seems to remain primarily one of transmission or guidance by one teacher who knows better to those who are less capable or practiced.

Sadly, the hierarchy of the system persists, with resource teachers’ commonly maintaining the verticality, or top-down directionality, of the cascade approach to diffuse and enforce the homogeneous ‘solutions’ devised at the system’s center. While the presence of mentors, key teachers, etc. surely brings benefits, a truly context-based approach to improving the practice of teachers and strengthening their capacities requires also a more reflective, collective problem-solving dynamic. Such a ‘horizontal’ approach engages all teachers, both together and alone, in a continuous effort to assess their collective and individual practice along with their students’ learning to identify shortcomings and new challenges (including new policies, standards, and models introduced by the ministry) and to articulate, experiment with, assess, and progressively refine and improve their practice with solutions adapted to their unique settings.

This approach to teacher-led professional development and experimentation was fundamental to the refinement and validation of several significant education innovations within the USAID-funded Advancing Learning and Employability for a Better Future (ALEF) project in Morocco, implemented by the Academy for Educational Development from 2005 to 2009. The project did use cascade training to introduce a range of innovations—information and communications technologies (ICT) as a pedagogic tool, “relevance pedagogy,” entrepreneurial spirit development, managing girls’ dormitories, etc.—to teachers, the school heads, and the corps of pedagogic advisors. However, the bulk of learning and mastery of these innovations was left to teachers within schools and with colleagues from other schools, whom the project enjoined to “discover” by means of their own iterative practice and reflection how best to shape and employ, and even to assess, the innovations for improved learning outcomes. Indeed, in line with the overall theme of this special issue, the project’s components were driven by a participatory and democratic approach to the development of teachers via engaging professionals throughout the system to support the design and implementation of the initiatives. This process, actually, comprised one of the project’s innovations, called the “Sharing, Deepening and Adjustment Workshop” (APAR). The APAR brought together school-level educators, supported (but not led) by local advisors (conseillers pédagogiques) and inspectors, as communities of education practitioners¹² to reflect together and regularly on their individual and collective practice in order to improve continuously both their teaching and the innovative models themselves. Among other benefits, by creating and operating as a local community of practice, teachers address issues as they arise rather than continuing with the same practices they know are not working while awaiting the (usually infrequent) arrival of the district advisor. Reports from project colleagues and counterparts now nearly 5 years after ALEF’s end confirm that the APAR model continues to be used in many schools and has in fact been adopted as the main mechanism for disseminating and supporting practice related to the ministry of education’s program to introduce ICT into teaching nationwide.

In fact, the project even used the same community of reflective practice model to shape ALEF’s key innovations. Rather than enlisting external or ministry ‘experts’ to design new models or, more likely, to corral latest ‘best practice’ in education to test and validate these in a select number of project settings, ALEF brought these experts together with teachers and other “front-line” education agents—the ‘experts’ of actual practice—to shape and test each innovation in the crucible of the classroom. Employing a basic action-research approach¹³, the process engaged teachers together with agents from the project, the ministry of education, and other advisors to articulate the key objectives of a particular innovation—e.g., managing school ICT laboratories or mobilizing local communities to enrich classroom lessons—and, using an iterative process, to elaborate, experiment with, assess (alone and together), and refine the respective components of a strategy. By this approach, the different teams also essentially created, refined, and validated the associated support documentation—tools, student manuals, teacher guides, etc. The process even engaged teachers in fashioning the student assessment protocols and developing and delivering related teacher training models.

At two workshops on the topic of an education community of reflective practice conducted in 2012 for educators and education leaders linked to programs of the Aga Khan Foundation in East Africa and Central Asia, participants evoked several factors that they felt could undermine efforts to convene and involve teachers in constructive reflection and improvements to their practice. These included the likely unwillingness of many teachers to participate, the persistent imposition of hierarchical authority by education officials, overly crammed instructional timetables that leave little time for the “luxury” of such meetings, and the likelihood that teachers locally will not have the required expertise to address certain issues that arise, among others. The experience in Morocco also revealed that while teachers are often eager to share their respective experiences, they often struggle, at least initially, with the “deepening” and “adjusting” parts of the APAR equation. Instead, they often stopped after the “show-and-tell” portion of the process. But the enthusiasm and commitment of both teachers and education inspectors and officials to move forward with a pilot effort to institute the community of practice as routine in a sample of Ugandan, Kenyan, Afghani, Tajik, and Kyrgyz classrooms were unanimous and high. And the reports of the Aga Khan colleagues responsible for the approach in the East African and Central Asian settings concerning the approach’s effectiveness, now a few years later, have continued to be uniformly positive.

3 Conclusion

Clearly, the education system’s ability to rely on teacher initiative and creativity to convert both standard and innovative approaches and models into successful classroom instruction and learning requires teachers with at least a minimum of competence and commitment. This is not only not assured in many settings but also clearly not the case with many teachers. However, the “dirigiste” approach that binds teachers uncompromisingly to rigidly defined methods, curricula, texts, standards, etc. has also proven its shortcomings¹⁴. Meant especially as a fail-safe (or “scaffolding”) for the poor teachers, the reality is often that this group is typically not truly elevated by these systemic shackles in any meaningful way. On the other hand, the many teachers who do bring considerable competence, commitment, and experience to the profession achieve less well and become frustrated. The tale of the US No Child Left Behind reform again is full of such testimonies.¹⁵

To repeat, education systems and their partners (donors and others) need to stop treating teachers as mere factors of production, or inputs, within an industrial education system¹⁶. Rather, we must remain keenly cognizant that education is a strictly human endeavor and endow teachers with the trust, responsibility, and authority many of them truly deserve and that we wish for the rest. In my 5 years at the head of the ALEF project in Morocco, the most satisfying reactions of all came from the many teachers who avowed, “I’ve been a teacher for 15, 20, 25,… years, and now, for the first time, I feel like an Educator.” I often asked groups of teachers what about the project that led to their successful adoption of the strategies and to their students’ improved results. “Basically, we are asking you to work harder and more with no extra pay or other outside incentives. Why are you doing this?” The answer, they would assert without pause, was simple: “You are allowing us to do what we have long known we should be doing in our classrooms but have been prevented from doing. And therefore, our students are learning more and better and we are all having more fun.” It was not a magic spell, but such change, I offer, started (and can still emerge) from two places. One was the respect and joy the project and its ministry of education collaborators brought to all their interactions with teachers. The other was basing these interactions on a solid foundation in terms of content, pedagogy, and standards. After, it was mainly a matter of letting the teachers educate as they, alone and as a group, found best suited their students, the setting, and themselves.