Why is teacher engagement so important to us at Justice Rising?

 

This blog was commissioned for a Virtual Teacher Symposium hosted by Better Purpose on behalf of the Gates Foundation on 7th October 2024.

Since 2015, Justice Rising has been building, equipping, and operating schools in the conflict-affected province of North Kivu in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We currently operate our own network of 23 schools and are partnering with the provincial government to support 30 partner schools. Teachers in DRC have insufficient resources and overcrowded classrooms (p5), and face significant challenges, including record high displacement in the DRC, due to which five JR schools were displaced in 2023-24. As a school operator, supporting teachers to do their job well sits at the heart of our work. Our approach to supporting teachers is based on cognitive load theory and behavioral science, and engaging teachers plays an integral role in shaping our approach.

If you don’t measure what you value, you value what you measure. When we engage teachers, we send them the message that we want to pay attention to what they think and how they feel, because their work is important and they are important. 

Teachers’ work is important. Good teachers are critical to achieving our mission to transform war zones through education. This is because they make children feel safe, motivated and help them learn at school. Teachers, good and bad, often shape what we remember about school. We need to make sure we’re helping all of our teachers to become good teachers by providing ongoing training and support to help them improve. 

We think effective teacher professional development (TPD) - ongoing training and support - should focus on gradually improving teacher practice. Understanding existing teachers’ behavior is, therefore, an essential first step to designing TPD.
According to behavioral science, change should be easy to adopt and incremental (p24-25) and teachers’ behavior often relies on habits (p3). Moreover, entrenched habits are difficult to break (p10,16), and teachers often stick to existing habits (p8). At Justice Rising, we ensure that we have a strong understanding of teachers' existing habits (good and bad) and design TPD that acknowledges these and seeks to reinforce or break and form new habits as necessary. Where possible, we integrate “powerful tweaks” (small behavioral changes) within existing teaching habits and space the introduction of these “powerful tweaks” so that we are limiting the number of changes we’re asking teachers to make. At a school network level, we prioritize the “powerful tweaks” on a yearly basis, based on our observations across the year, and at a school level, we support school leaders to prioritize what their teachers need. We find this helpful / impactful for several reasons: it helps us show respect to our teachers and value for their professional behaviors, attitudes and beliefs as well as increasing teacher buy-in; reflecting existing knowledge and skills of teachers makes our training feel more relevant (p.21) and finally, we feel it helps us to target our support to the median teacher.

And you are important. We want motivated teachers with good well-being, so we take time to pay attention to what teachers think, and how they feel. This is important for teachers themselves and for their work. If we want our teachers to be motivated to improve, we need to show respect and appreciation for their knowledge and skills. When we do not engage teachers, we risk demotivating them by bulldozing existing behaviors, attitudes and beliefs. We should not treat teachers as blank slates, with low-to-no skills and weak knowledge. Much of what teachers do already is valuable and worth leveraging, and even weaker practices deserve our understanding. Teacher engagement helps us understand their knowledge and skills and then we work to ensure it is reflected in the TPD we offer. TPD should leave teachers feeling and being more effective, so collecting and monitoring data on both of these is crucial. 

How do we engage teachers?

TPD at Justice Rising both begins and ends with teacher engagement: we depend on teacher engagement to understand the problems we face and what we have to build with (in terms of existing capacity), and we also depend on it to understand how effective our solutions are. We draw extensively on human-centered design (HCD) principles when designing and testing solutions, because they offer a robust, structured approach to designing interventions, prompting designers to understand users' (in our case, often teachers’) needs, behaviors and experiences. We have used tried-and-tested observation and interview approaches designed to engage teachers from Schools2030’s excellent HCD design toolkit. HCD principles prompt and enable us to show respect and value for the behaviors, attitudes and beliefs of teachers and school leaders by putting them at the center of the design process. We have also found them particularly helpful for ensuring inclusion through the collection of multiple perspectives. 

Here’s how we engage teachers:

→ Look and listen at key opportunities to understand existing behaviors, attitudes and beliefs.

Since we operate a network of schools, we try to make the most of the easy access that we have to teachers, and we try to engage teachers as part of our normal operations. Teacher engagement takes place 1) during our design process (of curriculum materials, TPD sessions, and school management tools) and 2) through our school operations. Whilst in our design process, we tend to follow more structured teacher engagement activities (like those found in the toolkits shared above), in our business-as-usual school visits, alongside providing support and guidance for school improvement, the technical team is there to keep deepening our own team’s knowledge and understanding of school operations, including current behaviors, attitudes and beliefs. 

To achieve this, the technical team and school support team work together to cast the net wide to try and capture as much information as possible, so that we can understand what existing practices look like in our schools. (By contrast, when we offer support and guidance to school leaders and teachers, we adapt principles from leverage observations to school-wide visits to provide narrowly-focused, specific and actionable guidance and feedback. This is not the focus of this piece!) 

As we join school leaders on school tours, learning walks and lesson observations, we keep our dual purpose in mind: to provide support and to learn about existing practices. For our own learning, we engage teachers to:

  • Show respect / appreciation

  • Gain insight into behaviors, attitudes and beliefs

  • To sense-check teachers’ feelings

As we engage teachers (for a list of activities, see the Appendix below), we seek to identify existing behaviors, attitudes and beliefs, and help our team understand them. We also keep an eye out for artifacts that provide a useful entry point into existing behaviors, attitudes and beliefs: e.g. a schedule of TPD activities for the term can spark a conversation to uncover existing behaviors, attitudes and beliefs pertaining to TPD. Other forms of teacher engagement include holding feedback sessions with focus groups, workshopping prototypes when designing solutions, and conducting teacher surveys. 

Engaging our teachers and school leaders on a regular basis helps us to leverage existing capacity - be that a belief, attitude, artifact or practice - when we are designing our school improvement activities. They are like building blocks, and understanding what these building blocks are made up of helps us to build (design solutions/interventions) with what we have. 

→ Case study: How Justice Rising engaged teachers in the development of Chalkboard Guides

Chalkboard Guides are user-friendly structured lesson guides developed by Justice Rising to deliver foundational learning in protracted conflict and crisis settings. They contain everything teachers need to teach their lessons and leverage the ubiquity of the board as a teaching tool. CBGs apply behavioral and cognitive science, embedding evidence-based teaching strategies into familiar teacher practices to ensure effective instruction with minimal training.

During problem definition

  • Observed reading lessons across our schools to understand shared norms around the teaching of reading - including how teachers use resources, what resources are available, lesson structure etc. 

  • Conducted joint observations together with school leaders and listened to their reflections on these lessons to understand how teachers and school leaders think about and understand the teaching of reading. 

  • Interviewed teachers to further understand their approach to teaching reading.

Doing this enabled us to not only understand the problem, but to identify what existing practices, attitudes and beliefs we could use as building blocks in the design of our solution. 

During solution design

  • Prototypes were designed by a former teacher.

  • Invited a small group of teachers from a representative sample of our schools to test the first prototype of Chalkboard Guides for two weeks - teachers could opt out.

  • Communicated very strongly that they were testing Chalkboard Guides for us, and the teachers were not being tested.

  • Trained our data collection team not to give lesson feedback during observations, and just collect data on how teachers used Chalkboard Guides.

  • Collected teacher feedback about what they found useful and how they would improve Chalkboard Guides.

  • Actioned teacher feedback to add more detail to teaching activities, added administrative details as per government expectations (see images below).

  • Asked teachers to choose the best format for the instructions on teaching activities - they chose the format they were most familiar with, and even though this format left a lot of white space, we followed their choice.

  • Retested the second prototype for two weeks and collected data on how teachers use them and feedback on useability. 

This helped us develop a familiar-feeling prototype that teachers can learn to navigate and use with four hours of training.

During curriculum production

  • Recruited teachers rather than subject experts to write Chalkboard Guides to ensure guides felt familiar and adoptable.

  • Placed the Chalkboard Guides writers within one of our schools so they could access teacher feedback easily on lessons.

We produced guides that felt familiar and adoptable to a median teacher, but the quality assurance workload was intensified.

During solution piloting

  • Collected teacher feedback on how Chalkboard Guides make them feel, what they like, what they paid most attention to, what they would improve. 

  • Looked at teacher feedback alongside the data we collected on instructional behavior.

We were assured that teachers associate using Chalkboard Guides with positive feelings, such as relief and confidence. We were also able to gain insights into teachers’ priorities through the question on what they paid attention to.

 

An early CBG prototype.

 
 

An example CBG, after integrating teacher feedback.

 
 

What do we want to do better?

For Design

As our team evolves and grows, we need to put systems and procedures in place to scaffold and standardize our design process. We are currently testing our own design workbook that integrates HCD exercises, behavioral change mechanisms and cognitive load theory into a four-stage design approach that prompts and scaffolds effective teacher engagement.

For Sense-checking

Until recently, we have relied on direct feedback from teachers through listening sessions and informal discussions to find out how they are feeling. We want to collect their feedback more regularly and with more rigor, so we are rolling out regular teacher surveys to sense-check teachers’ feelings. The surveys are currently paper-based (but can easily move to smartphones once this becomes more feasible) and administered by our School Support Officers, alongside parent and student surveys. 

For Useable Data

We also recognize the need to improve how we systematically organize the data we collect about current behaviors, attitudes and beliefs across the organization, so that we can use this data to drive design decisions.

Appendix

Teacher engagement activities during school visits

 

  2. (Pages 36-39 from Schools2030 provide a great bank of questions to choose from.)

 
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