Education Research in Africa
 
Ward Heneveld


Most of the research on the effectiveness of primary school teachers in Sub-Saharan Africa does NOT support the predominant commitment that significant pre-service teacher training is necessary for teachers to be effective. Because there are established systems that exist to prepare teachers before they are hired, the model persists despite the evidence. Why isn't pre-service training very helpful? First, throughout much of the world teacher training is provided by people with advanced training and little classroom experience. I'd say that the gap between what education professors teach and the reality their students have to face when they teach is directly proportionally to how deprived the population and school systems they will teach in are. So, the gap is very large in Africa.

Second, African primary schools have lots of non-regular teachers because the governments cannot afford enough trained teachers, either to train them or to pay their salaries if they hired them. For example in rural areas in Madagascar I would guess that about one in three teachers is hired and paid by the community. And, third, even if systems moved to pre-service training that included significant field experience (I had ten weeks at Makerere, 4 and 6 weeks each), the models provided by practicing teachers is modest at best and regular in-school support by teacher trainers/supervisors is prohibitively expensive, especially given the difficulties of local transport.

So, we should be finding different models for teacher training. I'd like to see countries adopt a policy that hired untrained teachers, gave them that six weeks that seemed to suffice for you, and then on the job allowed them to pursue formal certification through programs that forced them to reflect on their practice and to try new methods with students.