This blog has been written by STiR Education Uganda in the framework of the 13th Policy Dialogue Forum on Innovation in teacher policy and practice for educational recovery, happening 2-3 December in Kigali, Rwanda, and on-line.

Register to the Forum here.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an enormous challenge to Uganda’s education system. A year of school closures has turned the lives of 10.2 million children and 200,000 teachers upside down.

The country’s initial response to this situation focused predominantly on ensuring continuity of learning for all children. However, teachers were not involved in this process – which made it likely that they would be less effective in supporting students once schools reopened.

School closures during the pandemic have affected teachers in other ways too. It has caused many teachers social and emotional stress, as they are often unsure of both their obligations and how to stay connected with students to support learning.

Taking to the airwaves

STiR Education, an international NGO that focuses on reigniting intrinsic motivation within teachers and education officials, came up with an innovative solution for Uganda that mitigated the impact of COVID-19 on teachers, the wider education system, and supported their readiness to return to school.

STiR worked closely with senior officials within the country’s Ministry of Education and Sports to develop a radio-based continuous professional development (CPD) programme for teachers. This involved a 30-minute session delivered over national and local radio every two weeks.

The sessions were based on simple but effective evidence-based teaching strategies to help all teachers progress and improve their practice. Each lesson was accompanied by a one-page document or infographic shared over WhatsApp to reinforce the content. STiR also shared recordings of each broadcast with officials so they could forward them on to teachers. In this way, it ensured that as many educators as possible could engage with the content.

STiR recognised that it would be insufficient to engage teachers alone. So they introduced weekly one-on-one coaching sessions with district officials, with the aim of supporting them to lead fortnightly conference calls with small groups of school leaders to review the radio lesson content and to develop plans for the teachers that they were supporting. This has helped to ensure the biggest possible audience for the content, and has maintained the engagement of the entire education system.

Reigniting motivation

The organisation says that the results of this innovation have been positive. The radio lessons have motivated and inspired teachers to take steps to improve their teaching, while the follow-up support materials shared on WhatsApp further strengthened their professional development.

Radio has huge potential as a professional education delivery medium for teachers in the midst of school closures and travel restrictions, according to STiR.

Teachers in the programme have learnt to believe in their ability to create change. They have cultivated a growth mindset, learned and promoted safe practices around COVID-19, and addressed gaps in their own teaching practice - all while being helped to emotionally prepare for their return to schools.

Learning to address gaps through instruction

STiR Education was pleased to hear that some school leaders have bought radios for staff rooms to increase teacher engagement. The organisation says it has also worked to identify ways to share examples of teachers who have found the radio content particularly beneficial. For example, some teachers sit in small groups, listen to the lesson, and then call in to share how they plan to support learners in the community in preparation for the reopening of schools.

This year, STiR’s content has had a particular focus on supporting teachers’ psycho-social and socio-emotional well-being. To improve learning at scale sustainably and equitably in this rapidly-changing world, teachers’ emotional resilience can be strengthened by promoting feelings of safety, trust in others, self-worth and hope for the future.

A happy medium

Radio has proved to be a cost-effective medium for delivering teacher development content across STiR’s 40 districts and municipalities – and beyond. STiR also used the innovation to successfully reach teachers outside its districts of operations in Eastern, Central, and Northern Uganda.

However, STiR says that it has not all been plain sailing. It faced two major barriers: firstly, patchy mobile network coverage affected the quality of school leader conference calls. The STiR team tried to mitigate this by scheduling calls in advance so that the leaders could ensure that they are in a location with good network reception. Sharing content via WhatsApp has also helped to make this less of a problem.

Secondly, this approach presented limited opportunities for teachers to collaborate and share professional development plans. In response, STiR provided opportunities for teachers to call in at the end of each lesson to share their reflections and to receive feedback on their plans from fellow educators. STiR remarks that this has created a sense of community, and has helped teachers to gain the confidence to collaborate and share feedback.

Going forward, the STiR team acknowledges that it is critical that training via radio addresses both the psycho-social and pedagogical needs of teachers so that they can, in turn, support the development of skills, knowledge, values and attitudes in those they teach. This can be achieved through activities that improve teachers’ emotional well-being as well as their pedagogical practice.

The pandemic has undoubtedly presented multiple challenges to education around the world. Innovation will be instrumental for speeding up education recovery. STiR states: “We are proud to support the ongoing professional development of teachers’ in Uganda via radio, WhatsApp and weekly coaching calls, not least because ultimately it will benefit the group most in need of our help and support: our schoolchildren.”

STiR Education is taking part in this year's Policy Dialogue Forum. Learn more about the event here.

The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this article do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO and the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030 concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The ideas and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors; they are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.

Photo credit: STiR Education Uganda

Authors: James O'Meara from ICET and Purna Shresta from VSO.

The Global Education Summit in July raised a record US$4 billion, which will help 175 million children learn. This stunning effort shows what is possible when governments work with the UN and other intergovernmental organizations, alongside development agencies and organizations from civil society and the private sector. Such cooperation will help us achieve the common objective envisaged in the fourth Sustainable Development Goal: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Education that includes everyone and gives everyone a fair chance of learning is not possible without ensuring that everyone has access to quality teachers. It is crucial to implement policies and practices that promote inclusion and equity for teachers in every educational context, considering gender, socio-economic status, location, ability, and other factors that can lead to exclusion.

Ensuring that everyone has access to quality teachers requires significant levels of investment, especially in least developed countries and small island developing states. To ensure quality education for all by 2030, Sub-Saharan Africa – the region with the highest concentration of least developed countries – will need to recruit and prepare 15 million teachers.

Providing access to quality teachers for all requires:

• closing the gaps in teacher numbers, qualifications, gender, and connectivity in sub-Saharan Africa. The proportion of qualified teachers in the region has steadily declined since 2000 at both primary and secondary levels. Female teachers play a pivotal role in encouraging girls’ enrolment, but less than 50% of primary teachers and 30% of secondary teachers are female. Lack of infrastructure and Internet connectivity were exposed during COVID-19 school closures when they posed an immense barrier to distance and hybrid teaching.
• holistic and inclusive policy dialogue that genuinely involves teachers, during the development, implementation and assessment of teaching policies and practices that promote fair opportunities for all teachers.
• innovations in recruitment, as current approaches are failing to close teacher gaps. New approaches should focus on creating new pathways into teaching for people from groups underserved and underrepresented in teacher workforces. Establishing such pathways will help to close not only the numbers gap but also demographic gaps, for example by positioning local role models from local communities who use local dialects in hard-to-staff classrooms across the globe.  
• quality professional development for all to increase levels of teacher retention. If we are to “retain the trained” we need to support countries along every stage of their journey in designing, implementing and evaluating high-quality and effective teacher professional development programmes and systems. If we fail to “retain the trained” by 2030 we will have failed to heed the warnings by the UNESCO Institute of Statistics in 2014 that by 2030, 89% (24 million teachers) of the teacher gap will be caused by attrition.

Helping 175 million children learn moves us closer to the shared vision expressed in SDG4. The international education community will be able to maintain the momentum created by the Global Education Summit – and help to ensure quality teachers for all – at the 13th Policy Dialogue Forum and governance meetings of the International Task Force on Teachers for Education 2030, which will be held in Kigali, Rwanda, and online from December 1 to December 3, 2021. The meetings provide the ideal setting to come together again and invest in teachers now ­to ensure sustainable recovery from the COVID-19 crisis and prepare today’s learners for tomorrow.

Have your say in developing, implementing and assessing teaching policies

The Inclusion and Equity in Teacher Policies and Practices Thematic group is launching a series of online discussions – synchronous (September 2021) and asynchronous (October and November). The discussions are designed to allow you to get involved with shaping policies and practices that promote fair opportunities for all teachers. By sharing your knowledge, you can help bridge the growing gaps in teacher recruitment, preparation and deployment, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19.

Your engagement in this inclusive policy dialogue will ensure teachers and their representative organizations have a greater voice in policy-making processes. You can participate in these discussions at a time and place convenient to you, increasing the diversity of perspectives on how to provide pathways into teaching for the underserved, vulnerable and underrepresented (including migrants, people with disabilities, indigenous people, ethnic minorities and the poor), closing the teacher numbers gap across the globe.

Details of the first synchronous session on September 24 will be posted on the TTF website. If you are already a TTF member, please visit the TTF website and join the Inclusion and Equity in Teacher Policies and Practices thematic group in the Member Space before the event so you can receive information on TTF events. If you are not a TTF member, please contact the coordinators of the thematic group: Purna Shrestha at purna.shrestha@vsoint.org or James O’meara at james.omeara@tamiu.edu.

Photo: The teacher and her students in a Rwanda primary school. Credit: GPE