Background

TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa) is a research and development programme creating `open content' multimedia resources and course design guidance for teachers and teacher educators working in Sub-Saharan African countries and providing through TESSA WIDEN, support in implementation of TESSA materials into new or existing teacher education programmes in a range of different contexts. TESSA's focus is to support the training of teachers to meet the increased demand for effective primary teachers through the production of high quality materials for school-based training. In so doing it is helping achieve the Millennium Development Goal to provide education for all children by 2015 (Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education: ensure that by 2015 children everywhere, boys and girls alike, will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling). This goal represents a significant challenge, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where it is estimated that over 40 million children have no access to primary schooling and over 60 million no access to lower secondary schooling. Extensive efforts are being made by national governments and international organisations to meet this goal of which TESSA is part.

Inextricably linked to the millennium goal is the need to supply and train significantly larger numbers of effective teachers for the expanding basic education sector. Alongside the need to recruit more teachers, there are many of those currently teaching, who are unqualified or under-qualified, which adds to the problem. HIV/AIDS is also impacting on the existing and future supply of teachers, as well as on pupils, and is likely to continue to so for many years to come.

In most parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, it is proving necessary to develop school-based models of teacher training using up-to-date and relevant resources and appropriate support systems. This allows teachers and others training to be teachers to be able to continue to work and maintain their family and community commitments. The kind of support systems for such approaches need to use new ways of working, new technologies and creative ways of structuring courses that allow more teachers to be trained quickly. There is much evidence to show that pupils in remote areas are disadvantaged educationally (Emerging Voices, 2005). Many teachers are not prepared to go into remote rural areas where distances are large, travel is problematic and resources of all kinds are generally poorer than in urban settings. TESSA, by using innovative approaches in course and materials structure and production, and by exploring ways of using new technologies to support these communities hopes to raise the self esteem and professional standing of teaching and to acknowledge and support the rights to quality education and training of the teachers and pupils in these rural communities,

One of the most important changes is to develop teachers' understanding of teaching and learning, moving towards a more learner centred approach that is not just paying lip-service to policy reforms but also raising the level of achievement within schools. As Parker and Deacon (2004, p18) state, changing classroom practice is hard to do as teachers take up ideas and approaches in different ways. TESSA needs to accommodate a range of different approaches to learning and classroom practices within the materials that take account of the teachers' current understanding and challenge them to move forward with out alienating them.

New forms of technologies and communications are playing an increasingly important role in supporting school-based models of education and training. The DEEP Project (Leach. 2005), which explored the use of using handheld computers and laptops in remote rural classrooms in Egypt and South Africa, has shown the tremendous positive impact such approaches can have on developing teachers understanding of teaching and learning and has informed TESSA's approach.

By developing school-based, `open content' i.e. online resources for teachers and teacher educators that can be adapted by the user for individual or institutional or local use, TESSA is putting a huge resource into the community. The only onus placed on users of open contents is to share with the source site the ways the materials have been used and adapted. This releases into the sector huge resources for others to take and use as found, or develop further, and is a context for collaboration across schools, institutions, localities and nations.

However, given the current variability on the state of connectivity within Sub-Saharan Africa there is still a need to provide a paper version of the resources. In the initial stages of the TESSA project it is anticipated that most teachers will access the materials through teacher education courses, whether through Higher Education Institute (HEI) course or locally provided Continuing Professional Development (CPD). TESSA materials therefore will also be available as downloadable pdfs and resources such as web links or audio streams will be adapted to ensure that those teachers and teacher education institutes using the print based resources will not be disadvantaged by lack of access to the online TESSA features.

In the context of these ongoing developments the next part of this paper explores the underlying principles not only for the TESSA materials but also for the teacher educator resources and the TESSA WIDEN strategy that are being developed alongside the TESSA materials for teachers.

Underlying principles

Key to developing any quality and effective teacher education programme is a clear understanding of the approach to teaching and learning that is to drive the production process. TESSA sees learning as an active and social process in which individuals engage with issues, people and resources in a variety of contexts and settings.

Active nature of learning

The TESSA model of a teacher (Appendix C) makes explicit the key tenets of teaching and learning that have been adopted to drive the conceptualisation of the TESSA resources. It was derived from various sources including national teacher education requirements and curriculum documents for the participating TESSA consortium countries, from Devereux (2005) and research about teacher development and teacher education. It also, as Mokgalabone (1998) argues in an African context, that teacher education should be based on the needs and concerns of teachers, and as such, uses a constructivist epistemology.

TESSA aims to help the teachers identify, by working through case studies and activities within the local school and community, a context for them to construct new meaning about their roles and responsibilities that challenge or confirm their practice. This will enable them build up a repertoire of ways of working in the classroom that can be adapted to the needs of their pupils and contexts they work in. By giving the teacher tasks to do the teacher is actively guided to consider the impact on them as a person and their understanding of their role in supporting their pupils learning. Theoretical underpinnings, to support the classroom experience and aid learning are drawn our from the activities and supported by specific resources that may offer relevant insights to enable the teacher to construct or often co-construct their own meanings (MacNaughton and Williams, 2004).

The importance of situated learning and the building of communities of practice

Lave & Wenger (1991) have been influential in describing the `situated' nature of learning, namely, that the social interactions and perceived values of the individual learner provide the learning situation, and have far more influence than cognitive processes or conceptual structures. Situated learning is about increasing the person's participation in their community of practice (i.e. the environment they operate in) and requires good teaching ability. TESSA's teaching materials attempt to build support and `scaffold' the learning situation in a way that enables teachers to imitate, observe and experiment within their classroom and local environment. By being asked sometimes to work with colleagues or local experts for example, or reading about or listening to another teacher offers them route ways into different possible communities of practice both real and `virtual' which give them confidence to have a go and try something new.

By setting people problems, guiding them through the difficulties, and by organising collaboration with more capable peers, in their school or community for instance, TESSA hopes to set up situations that stretch people further than they would normally go on their own. It will move them, with help, beyond their present achievements into what Vygotsky (1978) has called the zone of proximal development i.e. the zone of future development.

Developing positive attitudes to learning and active learning dispositions

Motivating teachers to want to change and maintaining that enthusiasm for learning is crucial if TESSA is to succeed. To do this it is necessary to consider ways of developing teachers' dispositions to want to learn and improve their practice from the start. Carr (2001) defines learning dispositions as `being ready, willing and able to learn' which can be further defined as learning or coping strategies that are gained by habit. TESSA needs to take note of what Carr (2001) expands into five dispositions as listed below and which are used as a basis to explore other TESSA principles, namely:

Taking an interest

At the heart of the materials production is the need to engage and motivate teachers into wanting to use the materials to change their practice. TESSA must be eye catching stimulating and relevant to their contexts if they are to be used and have the interest of the learner. The use of short but easy to use materials is important and has resulted in the course being modular so that teachers can choose to use small parts or bigger chunks. They can start at any point. The materials are addressed to the teacher as learner and developing professional, and are friendly and inclusive. They are not addressed to the pupil.

By using local materials, contexts and communities in various ways and the versioning of the materials into local contexts and translating as necessary into French, Kiswahili, Arabic and isiXhosa besides English, TESSA materials respond to the needs of the teacher and their interests.

Being involved.

From the very start TESSA involves teachers in doing things - particularly practical things - in their classroom as from day one they are involved in their own learning and progression. TESSA is not about instructing and imparting knowledge by `telling' as this has very little effect but is about collaboration between the teacher, the school and local communities, and in many cases, especially in the early stages of TESSA, with their local district officers or teacher educators and other learners in institutions.

Persisting with difficulty or uncertainty.

To learn anything new we have to persist with difficulty and uncertainty and move from our own safe world to one that is less safe but within supportive parameters. The trick for the TESSA is to build a relationship in which the learner knows they are expected to try their hardest but that there will be help in the materials or through different support networks and individual communities of practice.

Communicating with others

Communication in its widest sense is at the heart of TESSA's success. Communication is using the systems and networks within one's own community to both understand about that community and learn from it and interact more effectively with it. Through its structure and approach TESSA has to support the teacher in developing their understanding of the value of such networks and ways to do this and build real communities of practice. Understanding the context of social values, relationships and joint activities is vitally important to learning and development and is fundamental to all TESSA's teacher materials, the teacher educator resources and TESSA WIDEN.

Taking responsibility.

Seizing opportunities to take personal responsibility, actions and decisions, is crucial to individual learning. Recognising other points of view and seeing self and others, as having both rights and responsibilities is core to this theme. In supporting this area the process of sharing information about learner performance and altering teaching as a result of this information, encourages learners to take responsibility for their own learning. Critical to TESSA is to develop the teachers understanding of the pupils perspective so that they can best match their needs. Hopefully by modelling such practices through both the teacher materials and the teacher educator resources TESSA will provide role models and through TESSA WIDEN actively share responsibility for implementation.

Importance of support

Because support is such an important element in teacher development and change it is necessary to explore it further here. TESSA materials, whilst they are free standing, `open content' for any one individual or institution to use, a major part of the project is to work with partner countries and institutions to explore ways of implementing TESSA that can then be shared freely and openly with others through the TESSA web portal. As the UNESCO (2002) Report acknowledges ` the history of distance education is littered with projects that looked good initially but could not be sustained as they were not built into national education systems (2002, p26).' Mindful of this, and aware that successful open and distance learning programmes closely integrate other approaches to teacher education and professional development into their structure, TESSA has two other strands. The first is the production of teacher educator resources and the second is TESSA WIDEN, which is about working alongside members of the consortium developing strategies and ways to implement and support the use of TESSA in their teacher education programmes, whether they be for initial teacher training or for ongoing professional development of teachers. The latter, according to the Report of the Ministerial Committee on Teacher Education - A National Framework for Teacher Education in South Africa (2005) is seen as becoming more and more significant for teachers if any kind of change is to be sustained and further developed.

Collectively the above principles provided a context in which to debate the content and structure of the TESSA materials about to be described.

The TESSA Materials

Teacher Curriculum Resources Development

The first stage, and the one that is happening in earnest at the moment, is to produce high quality, online, school based, materials for teachers based in school - whether qualified, unqualified or under-qualified - that they could use with their learners and that will help them think about their roles and responsibility to the learners. These are and designed so that any teacher, who has access to these resources, could take an activity, and with minimal preparation use, it in their class with their learners that afternoon or next morning.

Currently there are five curriculum areas and within each of the five areas of literacy, numeracy, science, life skills and the social studies and the Arts there are three modules the titles of which are listed in Table 1 below.

Table 1

Each module is made up of five sections each and within each section there is a standard format. After an introduction to the section, which sets out what the teacher can expect to learn by doing the section and a listing of the two to five learning outcomes, there is a pattern of a webpage or text page, a case study and activity that is repeated three times per section. The activity is something to carry out in school that allows the teacher to explore different ways of working in their classroom and reflect on their understanding of its effectiveness as a centre of dynamic teaching and learning.

Within each section there is progression in ideas around different aspects of teaching and learning with the third or final activity being the key activity that pulls ideas together. For example, a section might investigate the use of questioning - both teacher and pupils' question - as technique to enhance the exploration of the properties of materials in science. The first activity may look specifically at ways of helping teachers ask more open ended questions whilst trying to classify a small collection of local materials, whilst the third or key activity may be a shared experience of teachers and pupils working together to raise suitable questions around the properties of an unknown material that would with appropriate planning lead to proper scientific investigations.

In developing Appendix B - The pedagogical strategies of an effective teacher - and to guide and remind authors as they wrote TESSA wanted to reinforce the cross curricular nature of these strategies and skills. Rather than restricting questioning to science it appears in different forms and contexts in each curriculum area to help those teachers who use section from more than one curriculum area to see ways of transferring and modifying their techniques to different situations.

Each section has up to six resources that can include anything from a template for pupils to use, a story to use in class, pictures, a way of assessing learning, back ground knowledge for the teacher or an insight into the current thinking or research about the effectiveness of working in groups of different sizes to ways of organising resources to support a learner centred environment. These will be adapted as necessary for downloadable pdf files.

The resources are a vital part of the support system for the teachers. Some support the actual doing of the activity in the classroom by providing templates that can be used immediately. They might take the form of recording sheets for pupils or list a range of questions that could be used by the teacher to help pupils look closer at a text or patterns in a mathematical exercise. Others might be specifically addressed to the teacher to draw out underlying theory, provide background information or specific subject knowledge or help reflect on their learning.

Just by participating in the activity or reading the case study the teacher will not automatically, as Ensor (2001) has shown, make the links between what is experienced and the implications for their teaching and ways of working. TESSA has tried to build in as many ways as possible to support the teacher to link experiences together to deepen their understanding of teaching and learning beyond the superficial.

Teacher educator resources

TESSA teacher educator resources are being designed to support teacher educators in using the TESSA teacher materials in their teacher education programmes. The UNESCO Guidelines state `changed activities within the teacher's own classroom is the essence of teacher education (2002, p.53)' and Robinson (2003) suggests in order to make such changes in classrooms real `concentrated attention needs to be paid to the developmental task of changing practices in teacher education (p31). The TESSA teacher educator materials are specifically designed to support teachers who teach teachers, to develop their practice to support the changes advocated in school classrooms. They will explore the underlying principles of TESSA and model different ways of working with teachers as learners. It is hoped that this will encourage teacher educators to reflect on their practice and develop new ways of working. Glickman (2003) suggests that projects, which bring educators together for the mutual benefit of both schools and teacher education programmes are often more effective.

The teacher educator resources will provide guidance on ways to structure and scale up the size of school based teacher education programmes to help meet the estimated target of 3 million teachers that UNESCO (2000) estimates is need in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. It is hoped these resource by showing different ways to use the TESSA materials will raise the quality of teaching and learning, particularly in remote rural communities because the new ways of working for teacher education will provide the potential to broaden the size and geographical scope of courses and programmes.

TESSA Implementation - WIDEN

Finally, the third stage is to work with the nine partner countries and the various institutions involved, using some of the funding for the whole programme from both the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Charitable Trust and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, to develop teacher education programmes and courses that enable the organisations to scale up their teacher education provision to meet the challenging millennium goal for primary education without sacrificing the quality of their training.

As the 2002 UNESCO guidelines on Open and Distance learning state, the history of open and distance learning is littered with projects that looked good initially but could not be sustained as they were not built into national systems. ` TESSA has taken this into account by adopting the three strand approach aimed at teachers, teacher educators and countries and institutions. TESSA WIDEN plans to work at different levels within these communities giving credence to Fleisch's (2002, p 95) statement that `genuine change in teacher practice and improvement of student learning requires both state mandated policy and school-level improvement initiatives.

The flexibility designed into the course enables countries, departments and regions to use the materials in a variety of ways. Tessa materials could be used the spine or core of a teacher education programme or as the first phase of an `emergency' training programme to quickly increase the number of qualified teachers. TESSA has involved all its consortium members from across sub-Saharan Africa in the production of the materials in various ways to encourage ownership and subsequent use and as they near completion TESSA is now moving into the planning stage of the implementation phase.

Conclusion

Lave (1996), along with many others, has asserted that for changes to be meaningful, learning has to be embedded in situations or contexts that make sense to the learner. TESSA has tried to build a learning curriculum and in so doing taken on board other ideas about teacher change that as long ago as 1993 Fullan maintained were important. He suggested that `the building block [of school change] is the moral purpose of the individual teacher' (1993, p.10-11) working with others towards a shared vision and purpose and that to achieve such change they needed to behave their way into new ideas. Kotter (2002:11) suggests is that the core method for securing change is almost always `see-feel-change' rather than `analysis-think-change'. TESSA has tried, by building an approach based on activity and reflection with inherent necessary support, to produce a programme that encourages teachers to involve and share with others in a way that will motivate them to become their own `agents of educational change'. (Fullan, 1993: 10-11)

By providing teachers with opportunities to act on their own environments in responsible and constructive ways and understand that they matter in society it is hoped that, as Posch (2000) suggests, this will strengthen their purpose and resolve.

It is hoped as TESSA teachers gain confidence in themselves and their abilities they will influence others, creating wider communities of practice and desires for educational improvement. This can only benefit those who see becoming a skilled and effective basic education teacher as valuable and important career itself and vital to the communities wellbeing.

References

Carr, M. (2001) Assessment in early childhood settings: Learning Stories. London: Paul Chapman

Devereux, C. M. (2005) Comparative analysis of teacher education curricula in a representative range of Anglophone Sub-Saharan Africa countries. Paper presented at TESSA Inaugural Consortium Meeting in Pretoria, August 2005.

Ensor, P. (2001) `From pre-service mathematical teacher education to beginning teaching: a study in reconcextualising.' in Journal for Research into Mathematical Education, 32, 3

Fleisch, B. (2002) Managing Educational Change: The State and School Reform in South Africa. Sandown: Heinemann.

Fullan, M. (1993) Change Forces: Probing the Depths of Educational Reform. London: The Falmer Press

Glickman, C. D. (2003) Holding Sacred Ground: Essays on Leadership, Courage and Endurance in our Schools. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Kotter, J. P. (2002) The Heart of Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Lave, J. (1996) The practice of learning, In S. Chaikin & J. Lave (Eds.) Understanding practice: perspectives on activity and context. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated learning: legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Leach, J. (2004) DEEP IMPACT; an investigation of the use of information technologies for teacher education in the global south. Researching the issues. DFID

MacNaughton, G & Williams, G. (2004) Teaching young children: choices in theory and practice. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Ministerial Committee on Teacher Education (2005) A National Framework for Teacher Education in South Africa. Department of Education, Republic of South Africa

Mokgalabone, M. B. (1998) Reconceptualising teacher models in teacher education in Perspectives in Education, 17, 2

Nelson Mandela Foundation, (2005) Emerging Voices: A Report on Education in South African Rural Communities. Capetown: HSRC Press.

Parker, B and Deacon, R (2004) Theory and Practice: South African teacher educators on teacher education. Centre for Policy Development (CEPD)

Posch, P. (2000) `Community, School Change and Strategic Networking'. In Altrichter, Herbert & Elliott, John (eds). 2000. Images of Educational Change. (pp 55 - 65) Buckingham: Open University Press.

Robinson, M (2003) Teacher Education ain Policy: the voice of the voice of teacher educators. Journal of Education for Teaching 29,1

UNESCO (2000) Statistical Document: Education for All 2000 Assessment.

UNESCO (2002) Using open and distance learning. UNESCO.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Appendix A

TESSA - A Model of a Teacher

This model of a teacher is derived from the analysis of the different curricula for teacher education in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and South Africa undertaken for the TESSA consortium. (Devereux, 2005) and a range of texts about teacher development and education worldwide.

A TESSA teacher, who best serves the needs of their learners, is a person who is:

Appendix B - TESSA - Pedagogical Strategies of an effective teacher

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