The ultimate objective of teacher professional development (TPD) programs should be to equip teachers with the skills, competences and practical capabilities to identify and meet the learning needs of all the children in their classrooms. TPD programs, in turn, must be adaptive enough to identify and meet teachers’ own development needs. To achieve this, reform suggestions have included teachers learning to teach through the study of classroom practice; through sustained, school-based, reflective practice; and through individualized, task/subject-specific, incentive-driven practice. In other words, teachers whose own professional development needs have been identified and met are the ones capable of identifying and meeting children’s learning needs. This sequential two-step process forms a key idea around which this blog is centered.

At their latest group gathering, members of the RISE Community of Practice (CoP) focused attention on tools for identifying teacher development needs to promote foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) in the Global South. The session included a panel of speakers who showcased some of the available tools for diagnosing teacher development needs – covering teacher competence tests, surveys of teacher beliefs and judgements, and observations of classroom practice. Breakout group discussions touched on the potential for initial and in-service teacher education (including continuous professional development) to identify and address teacher needs.

The tools presented and discussed by the RISE CoP can be categorized into two broad classes – teacher competences, beliefs and judgement assessment tools, and classroom observation tools. In the first class, the Centre for Teacher Accreditation tools are commonly used in India to assess and certify teachers’ technical and professional competences, information that is then used by teachers to pursue better opportunities and progress their careers. Drawing from the practice-based theory of content knowledge for teaching, the Research Triangle Institute’s Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching survey measures what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to teach elementary mathematics effectively. This information is then used to design relevant professional development programs. Tools for surfacing teachers’ beliefs and judgements about the skill or achievement levels of their students are important for understanding their in-class decisions about content coverage and pedagogical practices. The RISE CoP reviewed recently available evidence that suggests teachers’ beliefs and judgements tend to be inaccurate, with serious implications for children’s learning.

In the second class, four classroom observation tools that have been extensively used in the Global South were presented to the CoP – the Service Delivery Indicators (SDIs), the Stallings Observation System (Stallings), the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), and the Teach classroom observation tool (Teach). The SDIs and Stallings are classified as ‘low-inference’ since they require enumerators to just capture (not interpret), against a checklist, what they see happening in the classroom. The CLASS and Teach tools require highly trained observers to judge and score teacher practices and classroom behaviors. This need for ‘high-inference’ has meant that past applications have tended to rely on use of video recording of classroom lessons and subsequent scoring by expert observers. Classroom observation tools are intended to serve system diagnostic and monitoring objectives, with the main goal of informing the design and delivery of TPD programmes.