05/01/2020
"The seven deadly sins of donor-funded teacher professional development".
This is, without a doubt, one of the best pieces we've read in a while. A must-read for anyone interested in teacher development.
1: Idolatry
In donor-funded Teacher Professional Development, the focus is arithmetical, not educational. The most important indicator is “numbers of teachers trained.” This is an input, but we treat it as an output and we worship it as a measure of success, conflating numbers with impact.
2: Parsimony
In many areas of life, less is more. But when it comes to teacher professional development, less is less and more is more.
3: Exclusivity
Many programs often try to “fix” poor teaching by focusing solely on one actor on the educational stage—the teacher. Yet poor teaching is not just a cause of low-quality education systems; it is also a symptom. This exclusive focus on teachers causes us to ignore the many educational actors who influence teaching—principals or local education authorities.
4: Imposition
While many education programs focus on training as many teachers as possible, the vehicle for doing so—TPD—is often conceptualized, designed and implemented without consulting the intended end user—the teacher.
5: Denigration
A lot of professional development epitomizes the soft prejudice of low expectations. If we think little of teachers, we demand little, give little, and receive even less in return. The oversimplification of genuinely complex concepts strips the rigor from much professional development. When teachers struggle or fail to implement what they have learned, we take this as further evidence of their lack of ability, rather than a natural part of the learning process itself—or as a failure on our part.
6: Hubris
Concomitant with the sin of denigration is that of hubris. If teachers are problems to be fixed, then TPD providers are the fixers of those problems—though many have never been teachers, or taught so long ago that we forget what classrooms are like, or have never taught in that teacher’s context.
7: Abandonment
At the very moment that teachers need the greatest support—the point of transferring learning from the idealized lab of the hotel conference room to the messy reality of the classroom—training and support often end. Teachers need supervisory, external, and peer support, and school-based models so they can have “opportunities to learn about practice in practice.”
Source: Global Partnership for Education
Well-meaning development actors can still make mistakes in how they support teacher training in developing countries. Find out what these 7 sins of omission and commission are and how we could avoid them.
