Sides of the Same Coin: Similarities and Variation Between Sub-Saharan Classrooms

As we near the 2015 completion mark for the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) educational interventions have taken on increased importance in Low and Middle Income Countries (LaMICs). The focus is not just to meet the aspirations of the MDGs but to build sustainable systems to maintain progress beyond 2015. The diversity of efforts to meet the MDGs speaks to both the challenges and the opportunities of conducting school-based preventive intervention research, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Educational interventions in LaMICs are tasked with dual goals of situating students to learn while shielding them from the on-going or lingering effects of violence and unrest. They must also meet the challenge of providing quality education to an increasing number of students after the introduction of universal access to education, both primary and secondary, in many countries.

Educational interventions in developing countries have focused on teacher professional development and educational inputs, but few have also examined the socio-emotional processes in the classroom..  Singular focus on instructional capabilities ignores the crucial role of socio-emotional support for learning that teachers also provide to their students in the classroom.  The classroom is the integral setting through which students are exposed to cognitive as well as socio-emotional development.  Theoretically grounded, empirically tested research from the US provides a core framework of processes and practices that create a learning-conducive environment in a classroom, inclusive of essential socio-emotional processes (Allen et al., 2011; Jones, et al., 2011; Reyes et al.,2012; Seidman, 2011). Using this core framework as the foundation for Teacher Instructional Practices and Processes System (TIPPS), a systematic classroom observation instrument, we aim to add a tier of understanding these classrooms from a settings perspective. By design, TIPPS items are sensitive to the distinctions between the socio-emotional and instructional support in the classroom

We will discuss the results of classroom observation using the TIPPS classroom observation instrument in Congolese (n=30) and Ugandan (n=742) classrooms. Within these two varied contexts, the core processes of the classroom remain the same – the country-specific culture plays a crucial role in both the comparison and understanding of each country’s classroom sample. Patterns of both instruction and socio-emotional support will be presented. We will also discuss the prevalent dynamics of respective country’s classrooms from a research as well as a teacher feedback perspective.