Scaling Education Innovations in Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia: Assessing the Design of School In-service Teacher Training

This chapter uses the scale-up framework developed by Management Sciences International (MSI) (Cooley, Scaling up–From vision to large-scale change: Tools for practitioners, MSI, 2021) to assess the innovation of School In-service Teacher Training (SITT) currently being scaled up and adopted in selected secondary schools in Tanzania, Kenya, and Zambia. SITT has since 2012 been implemented in selected primary schools in Tanzania with the evaluation showing significant improvements in students’ learning outcomes at the primary level. The design of the secondary SITT intervention did not systematically apply to scale frameworks making it relevant to explore how it is in alignment with the MSI framework. The study used mixed research methods as well as a documentary review of the SITT scaling design to address the study objectives. Findings show that the design of the innovation aligns with the scaling features of involving key stakeholders particularly higher education institutions as researchers, teacher education institutions as mentors, capacity building to teachers and education leaders, structured pedagogy and engagement of government across the countries. The findings facilitate further large up-scaling of the innovation and policy uptake. Findings also inform the design of the scaling strategy as a subsequent step towards making the innovation more publicly appealing to governments and potential users.