Teacher professional development at scale in the Global South

Overcoming a massive teacher shortage and lack of teacher capacity around the world is a key challenge if we are to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) — ensure inclusive and quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030. UNESCO estimates that 68.8 million teachers need to be recruited and trained in developing countries. However, current approaches to teacher professional development (TPD) often suffer from poor quality and high costs, particularly when trying to deliver training at large scale. New approaches are required to enable the delivery of large-scale, cost-effective, continuous professional development programs for teachers.

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Landscape Review
Professor Cher Ping Lim will provide an overview of the results of the landscape review of teacher professional development at scale (TPD@Scale) models across the Global South. TPD@Scale refers to large-scale, ICT-mediated learning environments that engage large numbers of learners, remotely and/or face-to-face, with limited expert intervention. The landscape review provides a comprehensive overview of the state of ICT-mediated teacher professional development at large scale for primary and secondary education teachers across the Global South.

TPD@Scale: Philippines and Indonesia
For the Southeast Asian country cases, he will talk about the national scale up of ELLN Digital in the Philippines, which targets over 300,000 K to 3 teachers in more than 38,000 public (government-run) primary schools in a phased roll-out over the next two years. “ELLN” is short for Early Language, Literacy and Numeracy; “Digital” refers to the blended learning design of the course, a combination of guided independent study using multimedia courseware, classroom application and reflection, and face-to-face co-learning in school-based learning communities.

Professor Lim will also talk about the establishment of the teacher learning centre (TLC) by the Putera Sampoerna Foundation – School Development Outreach (PSF–SDO) in Indonesia to address the challenges of teachers’ limited access to quality TPD. Established in a kabupaten or regency (equivalent to a municipality), the TLC is a systematic and structured independent learning organization managed by teachers under the supervision of the local government. The TLC is able to plan, develop, and initiate programs to strengthen teacher competencies and build a robust professional learning community of between 15,000 to 18,000 teachers.

A two-step cascade model for education without infrastructure
Professor Diana Laurillard will present a two-step cascade model that offers TPD via MOOC platforms to support teachers and professionals working in the most challenging contexts, where the edtech infrastructure is minimal or absent. They use large-scale online platforms to orchestrate the collaborative development of new knowledge by the teaching community on enhancing education for local groups, including the use of digital methods where available.

Personalised teacher professional learning: A holistic approach using tablets
Professor Freda Wolfenden of the Open University will be talking about “Personalised teacher professional learning: A holistic approach using tablets.” This presentation will draw insights from three low resource sites – Ghana, India, and Nigeria – where teacher educators have been using tablets in school and college classrooms. Data analysis reveals how participation with the tablet transforms teacher educators’ professional identity and shifts their dialogue with teachers towards more formative feedback. Interactional data from the tablets help teachers develop their understanding of how ways of knowing develop in different classroom situations and are valuable in setting
targets for teachers.