Improving community teacher development in the digital era

 

In sub-Saharan Africa, many teachers receive very little initial training and a large proportion of them do not have adequate in-service professional development. Thus, many primary school teachers do not have the skills to implement a curriculum and curriculum reforms. Moreover, in many countries, there are different tiers of professional development across categories of teachers, in which contract teachers and community teachers have the lowest levels of initial training and ongoing support to improve their skills.

Some of the challenges for teacher capacities can be traced to the competency of teacher trainers. To respond to these challenges, this project will design, implement, and strengthen an innovative system of content and networks to train teacher trainers, particularly those trainers who train in-service contract and community primary school teachers. This system will be developed for the bilingual and multilingual contexts of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Chad. It will use a hybrid format that integrates information and communication technologies with in-person methods. It will design a training model, test it, and provide knowledge and evidence that supports scaling this model.

This project is funded through the Knowledge and Innovation Exchange (KIX), which aims to improve policies and practices that will strengthen national education systems within member countries of the Global Partnership for Education. It was selected from a call for proposals from KIX in West and Central Africa and the Indian Ocean entitled “Generating and mobilizing innovative knowledge for regional education challenges”.