Teachers' guides: isn't that what they should be?

Abstract

This essay reflects on recent research and pedagogical interventions by international organisations working in low and middle income countries (LMICs), in relation to preparing teacher’s guides. In particular, it examines the rationales and implications of decisions made by some agencies and programmes that have sought to improve early grade learning in LMICs. At the heart of the essay is the wider question of how change happens within centralised education systems, which are typical in LMICs, and how external interventions might contribute better to the process of change.

The stimulus for writing this essay was in part the publication by the World Bank of a document advocating certain ways of preparing and evaluating teacher’s guides, and the Bank’s request for feedback¹. At the same time, the experience of participating in several webinars during the pandemic made me more aware of widely different understandings of notions such as scripting for teachers. One presentation included a statement that ‘I prepared for this presentation by writing a script, so what’s wrong with providing scripts for teachers?’ On another occasion, a commentator referred to the need to provide scripts for teachers who are new to the idea of competency-based teaching, to which my instinctive response was: scripting for competency-based teaching would seem to be a contradiction in terms.

The essay discusses the role of scripting in lesson plans and teacher’s guides and suggests that the terms direct instruction, structured pedagogy and scripted lessons have – for some people – become almost synonymous, and that more precise language would be beneficial. The essay does not reject these terms or approaches, but argues for a more considered, consistent and nuanced use of the cited research and of the terms themselves.

At the end of the essay, some suggestions are proposed for an approach that recognises the need for teachers to contribute to the design of any educational intervention, and that teachers’ own decision-making should be provided for within any pedagogical intervention, as contrasted with approaches that assume that controlled inputs lead to controlled outcomes.