Strengthening the Classroom From within: Supporting Social-Emotional Learning in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Schooling provides children access to cognitive, social, and emotional development, mainly through their experience in the classroom. Researchers hold steadfast to the idea that this experience can greatly affect the promotion of long-term economic productivity and health.  For disaster or conflict-affected areas, the supportive classroom may exponentially contribute to a child’s resilience in the face of adversity.

However, attempts to identify the factors that explain why some classrooms yield better outcomes than others have had limited success.  To remedy the issue, an in-depth knowledge and understanding about how a classroom-based intervention works requires observations of theoretically specified patterns of teacher-student and student-student practices, interactions, and routines within the classroom.  For improvement to take place, this information needs to be fed back to teachers, supporting the strengths of the classroom and providing strategies to overcome weaknesses.  Thus, we describe our efforts to develop a reliable, valid, and cost-effective observational instrument that can serve as both a research tool and feedback device for teachers to improve their practices.

Publically available psychometric data on international instruments of this nature are scant or discouraging.  Conceptually, such tools appear to assess a single dimension of quality, use subjective rating scales, and are not driven by a theory of change.  We sought to develop an instrument that addressed these limitations and is sensitive to cultural contexts.  

We developed Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS), an instrument field-tested for cultural relevance and driven by OPEQ’s Theory of Change and extant findings on a few well-developed tools.  TIPPS includes nineteen key concepts that indicate the quality of (i) emotional/social support in the classroom environment, (ii) teacher-provided opportunities for learning and personalization of the material, (iii) facilitation of students’ cognitive development, (iv) equitable treatment of students, and (v) student engagement. Unlike other instruments, we employ four alternative choices, each alternative specifying concrete examples.  Observers choose the alternative that best represents their observations in the classroom for each of the nineteen dimensions.  The result is an observational tool that provides teachers with concrete feedback, empowering them to make changes within their classrooms, and creating a learning conducive environment for their students.

We will discuss the TIPPS manual, scoring sheet, and guidebook for training, as well as cultural contextualizing efforts and initial findings from the OPEQ RCT in the Democratic Republic of Congo.