When Lucia was working as an assistant in a health clinic in her home community, Sistema de Aprendizaje Tutorial (SAT)—a program designed to help people from rural areas gain a secondary-level education—recruited her to be a teacher. As soon as she started her new job, however, she realized that she was not prepared to teach the topics she was supposed to be covering. While working through a unit on soil science, for example, she felt confident about the scientific content in the curriculum, but knew that she had to defer to her students when it came to discussing  the farming activities that would put that science into practice.

In rural Honduras, as in many rural areas, there is no direct teacher-development pipeline. Many students don’t finish secondary school; those who do often cannot afford to attend university for the requisite formal training. Teachers from urban areas are reluctant to relocate far from their families to take positions in rural communities. And continuous, in-service training has traditionally been difficult to gain for those who do aspire to teach in rural areas. Continued access to a professional learning community (PLC), such as the one offered through SAT, affords teachers the opportunity to reflect on their practice, make sense of their shared experiences, learn new strategies, and connect their work to larger social and cultural contexts.

In the SAT model, in fact, in-service teacher training both replaces and complements the university preparatory model in supporting the development of a non-traditional set of teachers. To recruit a pool of applicants, SAT advertises on local radio programs and places job announcements in local newspapers. Candidates are required to have completed their secondary schooling and must be working towards a university degree; but, critically, they don’t need to have that degree in hand to begin working with SAT. After an interview and an aptitude test, the individuals selected for the program begin to receive intensive training on the content of the SAT curriculum. This training take place three times a year and is tightly linked with the upcoming units of content the teachers will be teaching (the SAT curriculum covers three “blocks” of content each year). Teachers progress in their training with the same cohort (other individuals from nearby regions who also teaching their same grade), and the process continues through the entire secondary curriculum, paralleling the advancement of their students.

Read the source article about educator effectiveness by Becca Shareff and Erin Murphy-Graham at Stanford Social Innovation Review.