Spotlight on Centers of Excellence for Teacher Training
What We Do...Three Centers of Excellence for Teacher Training, or CETTs, have been funded by USAID to improve teacher training in Central and South America and the Caribbean. Located in Honduras, Jamaica, and Peru, these Centers are generally affiliated with major universities that develop training for teachers on how to improve and strengthen their teaching skills. The JBS Aguirre Division staff evaluates training outcomes using a research-based list of best practices to assess changes in teaching practices.
The studies examine 21 dimensions of professional development such as teaching basic reading skills, teaching how to understand text, teaching oral and written expression, effective instruction, and classroom management. Progress of CETT teachers is rated using a four-stage model. The fourth stage, Mastery, is the highest level; it indicates that a teacher has learned and applies the evidence-based practices taught during the training sessions. JBS’s findings, based largely on observing teachers in the classroom, are used to revise the training and continuously improve it.
The first study, conducted in 2004, assessed the early stages of program implementation and compared CETT teachers with non-CETT teachers. Findings showed that CETT teachers received higher ratings than non-CETT teachers on almost all assessed dimensions. In 2006, JBS staff conducted a follow-up study with a small group of teachers. This study demonstrated how much progress the CETT teachers had made. A review of best practices used by teachers showed that 50 percent or more of CETT teachers had achieved Near Mastery (Stage 3) or Mastery (Stage 4) in a number of key areas of best practice. For more on CETT findings >>
Project staff members are currently conducting an impact study in 10 countries. The study measures teacher learning and implementation and is triangulating this with student learning gains from student testing.
Why We Do It…Walk into a classroom in a poor country or disadvantaged community in Central or South America or the Caribbean and you are likely to notice the glaring absence of educational trappings. Books. Posters on the wall. Learning tools. Toys. Even the overhead lights are turned off because if left on they will raise the temperature in the already unbearably airless, steamy room.
Students in these classrooms don’t start the school year with bulging pencil boxes or backpacks full of back-to-school goodies. In many instances they own a solitary pencil each. A classroom coloring activity involves a group of students sharing three crayons, all broken. If fortunate enough to participate in a crafts project, the teacher walks around the room with the lone tube of clue to construct the students’ creations.
Despite what may be considered bleak conditions, the teachers in these schools make up in heart and commitment for what they may lack in material resources and formal training. CETTs, located in Honduras, Jamaica, and Peru, help teachers improve the quality of classroom reading instruction in grades 1–3.
Keri Culver is an evaluation specialist for JBS who visits the schools as part of the study we are conducting. While welcoming the CETTs’ help in preparing them to better teach their students, teachers who receive the training are often nervous when visited by CETT evaluators, she says.
“The teachers are being observed,” Keri notes. “I often think, ‘What if someone came into my office and watched me and told me I had to do what I’ve been doing for years differently?’.”
“Teaching is not just a job,” Keri says. “It’s a profession that in many countries of the world is probably not as revered as it should be.” Couple the lackadaisical attitude toward education in some areas with political, social, and financial factors as well as workforce issues like teacher shortages and low educational requirements for teachers, and the profession can be challenging.
“For many CETT teachers the new practices have involved a deep change, a change of paradigm, requiring not only a change of practices, but a complete transformation in the way they think about themselves and their students,” Keri says. “For many, their own school experience involved only copying and rote learning. In particular, reading was often taught simply as memorizing syllables, without any focus on comprehension, whereas writing was equated with copying. These teachers themselves never experienced participative methods. Many had never read a book to a class, never asked questions about a story, never even thought that children were capable of writing down their own thoughts.”
“We try to honor what the teacher knows while building upon it,” Keri explains.