Teacher Focus: Tools for Foundational Learning Improvement (TFLI)

Tools for Foundational Learning Improvement (TFLI) is a recently launched integrated approach to empowering great teaching and school leadership, co-created by Inspiring Teachers and Centre for Professional Development, Training and Education (CPDTE) in partnership with IDP Foundation. This new partnership comes after lessons learnt from IDPF’s previous work on effective teaching models.

IDP Foundation is driven by a mission to improve access to, and quality of, all education for all children, now. We believe in the crucial contribution of the affordable non-state sector in progress towards SDG 4. Central to this is the role of teachers and how they can be empowered to deliver quality education to their students. In 2011 IDP Foundation partnered with Sesame Workshop to develop and deploy Techniques for Effective Teaching (TFET)- a program focused on the encouragement of imagination, and the spirit of inquiry, by providing child-centered teacher training with low-cost materials and videos featuring the colorful Muppets of Sesame Street. During Master Teacher Training, teachers were not just learning from the child development experts at Sesame Workshop, but are able to directly engage with the learning materials through practice.

After commissioning an impact evaluation by NORC at the University of Chicago to assess the effectiveness of the TFET program in Ghana, learnings from this evaluation were used to inform the next phase of our teacher training work and design of Tools for Foundational Learning Improvement (TFLI). This teacher training program was developed by Inspiring Teachers, a UK based educational development organization, in collaboration with the Centre for Professional Development, Training and Education (CPDTE), a Ghanaian teacher training and development organization.  

While findings from the NORC report showed a strong appetite for the TFET program and enthusiasm for child-friendly teaching, it also found that teachers required help translating learning into change. Based on these findings, Inspiring Teachers and CPDTE have designed a systematic phonics-based literacy program, delivered alongside school leader-led peer coaching and managed using a SmartCoach App. Below are the key challenges and recommendation from the NORC report that were used to inform design of TFLI, in addition to the solutions developed in response.   

• Report recommendation 1: need for in-class materials: 

• Solution: IT/CPDTE developed a systematic phonics-based literacy program, which included workbooks with aligned texts for whole-class reading. 

•  Report recommendation 2: Need for lesson plans 

• Solution: Teachers are provided detailed, ready-to-use lesson plans and student workbooks. 

•  Report recommendation 3: Need for literacy training 

• Solution: IT/CPDTE developed a structured literacy training and coaching program grounded in the science of reading. 

•  Report recommendation 4: Need for ongoing coaching of proprietors and teachers and sustained support 
• Solution: a peer coaching model was introduced that includes weekly meetings to implement the approach. 

TFLI  has been created to deliver an integrated package of tools, training and support that enables low-fee private schools to both improve their educational effectiveness and build their resilience. The program has been tested in 20 LFPS and has already received recognition from Ghana’s National Teaching Council (NTC).  

“Over the last year, we’ve launched a mixture of foundational literacy-focused structured pedagogy and school leader-led peer coaching programs in 20 schools. We’ve had huge demand for these programs, and results have been encouraging.” – Dr Larbi Mantey, Program Director, TFLI & Executive Secretary of CPDTE 

 Significant headway has been made so far, with the program already providing training to 44 school leaders and 171 teachers and reaching around 5,000 students. Moving forward, the program aims to expand to an additional 180 schools.

“We are very excited about this new partnership and have big expectations and hopes that, through our partnership with government, it has the potential to scale across both state and non-state schools, empowering teachers, increasing motivation, and improving foundational learning outcomes among their students.” – Corina Gardner, CEO, IDP Foundation

In June 2024, the TFLI Discovery Phase was completed. Insights from this phase confirmed that providing support beyond training through coaching and technology integration is beneficial in low-fee private schools to improve learning outcomes at scale.

The pilot was considered a success and achieved several big wins, including:

• The program was launched in 20 schools
• Inspiring Teachers and CPDTE have built a simple, practical assessment and student tracking tool, making it easy for teachers to use assessment-informed instruction with 2,200 evaluations that have been run so far!
• Built and tried a literacy program that teachers feel improves learning.
• Built tools that make tracking student progress practical.
• Received accreditation from the National Teaching Council.
• Inspiring Teachers and CPDTE co-founded Inspiring Teachers Ghana as a dedicated NGO.

The Inspiring Teachers Ghana team delivering TFLI have also made strong partnership progress in 2024:

• In May, they were selected for the MasterCard Foundation Ed-Tech Fellowship ($60,000 of acceleration grant funding and 12 months of support).
• In July, they were selected for the MIT Solve Leap Challenge Program – which will support them in using a/b testing.
• In August, they were selected for Global Schools Forums’s Impact at Scale Labs Program.
• Finally, in October, Inspiring Teachers was also awarded research funding from Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s Learning For All Initiative and Innovations for Poverty Action’s Partnership for Technology Program. This rigorous research program, in collaboration with University of Washington and University of Ghana researchers will evaluate TFLI’s impact in both low-cost private schools and government schools between 2024 and 2027.

Overall, the TFLI and the Inspiring Teachers Ghana team are delivering it with strong momentum, and at IDP, we are delighted to have played a catalytic role through the discovery phase.