Training & professional development

The Home Visiting Workforce Needs Assessment Tool aims to help Ministries and government agencies reflect on the ways in which they can support personnel delivering home visiting programs across sectors for pregnant mothers and caregivers with children under 3. Drawing inspiration from the UNICEF Pre-Primary Diagnostic and Planning Tool, this tool is intended for countries with home visiting programs at either the sub-national or national levels. The scope of this tool includes home visitors who work directly with young children and their families, as well as supervisors and trainers.

You can also download the accompanying User's Guide here.

Denise Bonsu, Kavita Hatipoglu, Michelle Neuman, Vidya Putcha, Mark Roland, and Jon Korfmacher

2020

The COVID-19 virus has created considerable uncertainty about the remainder of this school year, the next school year, and beyond. Federal, state, and local government responses should be informed by understanding current policies and their history, including the effects of the last major economic crisis, the Great Recession, on America’s state-funded preschool programs.
The 17th edition of The State of Preschool, the National Institute for Early Education Research’s (NIEER) report on the annual survey of state preschool policies, provides government policymakers valuable information for planning short- and long-term responses to the crisis. The report includes information for every state on child enrollment, resources (including staffing and funding), and quality standards. It also provides information on where children are served, operating schedules, and other program features relevant to planning the education of children in a post-COVID-19 world.

National Institute for Early Education Research

2020

This paper reports on a study into the possible roles social media might play in teacher education in challenging contexts. It focused on the role of WhatsApp use and developing teacher resilience by forming teacher communities of practice. This work built on prior activity taking place in teacher associations in three sub-Saharan countries: Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Rwanda and sought to develop both good practices in using WhatsApp for distance teacher development as well as engage in collaborative research. The paper shows that social media can play an important role in the professional development of teachers in remote and challenging contexts, but that we need to consider the workload and role of moderators and establish realistic expectations for groups, where there is limited access to the internet.

Gary Motteram and Susan Dawson

2019

It is paramount that the Education in Emergencies sector shares and learns from promising policies, practices, and research approaches for supporting teachers in crisis contexts. For this reason, this publication provides donors,policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and teachers with compelling examples of programs and practices that positively influence improvements in teachers’ work conditions and teaching practice. Authored by researchers, practitioners, and policy-makers working in education in emergencies, the 24 studies in this publication showcase promising practices in teacher management, professional development, and well-being from diverse regions and contexts.

The case studies are organized by three thematic areas:

• Teacher management (i.e. teacher recruitment, supply, compensation, supervision, certification, etc.)
• Teacher professional development (i.e. training modalities that include face-to-face training, coaching, mentoring, distance, and/or online learning etc. for either pre-service or in-service approaches; teacher collaboration; coordination across providers; collaboration with national teacher training institutes), and
• Teacher well-being (i.e. including social, emotional, physical, intellectual, financial, cultural, and spiritual well-being; interventions to support teacher well-being).

They present a snapshot of promising research methods, evidence-informed policy making, and innovative approaches to program design and implementation from diverse regional and crisis settings, as well as diverse organizations and teacher profiles.

Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE)

2019

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Flagship Community Health Worker (CHW) Resource Package compiles priority resources for strengthening CHW programs developed through USAID’s Bureau for Global Health (BGH) investments, as well as what USAID BGH’s flagship partners have produced and prioritized. It includes tools, research, guides, approaches, and best practices recommended by USAID’s flagship project community health experts through a series of convenings and reviews. The rationale for the development of this package was to showcase these priority resources for greater internal and external dissemination and agenda setting, including the Community Roadmap and the WHO CHW Hub. It is a living document*, and we expect to update it periodically as emergent state-of-the-art resources are recommended by flagship experts.

The resources can be used to integrate CHWs within the broader health workforce and to promote their professionalization. For this reason, some resources may support broader health workforce development and strengthening, policy, program implementation, or financing, but can be applied to CHW programs. Professionalizing CHWs is a key step for ensuring the effective role of community health within primary health care, critical for achieving health for all and global health goals. Resources may be cross-cutting or technically specific, and all are relevant to optimizing CHWs in a health systems context.

The resources are presented according to the WHO guideline on health policy and system support to optimize community health worker programs using the HRH2030 lifecycle approach and the main categories of WHO’s recommendations:

• CHW policy implementation enablers (cross-cutting)
• Build
• Manage
• Optimize

USAID

2020

This Guide is designed to assist national policy- and decision-makers and education officials to develop an informed teacher policy as an integrated component of national education sector plans or policies, aligned to national development plans and strategies.
More specifically, the Guide is a tool designed to contribute to the elaboration of an evidence-informed national teacher policy, specific to each national context and drawing on the evidence of good practices from a wide range of countries and organizations.1
Based on the best available evidence on teacher policy and the teaching profession, the Guide aims to:

• Present an overview of teacher-related policy dimensions and issues that need to be considered when elaborating a national teacher policy and how they are interrelated;
• Outline policy responses that need to be considered; and
• Suggeststepstoelaborateandimplementanational teacher policy.

UNESCO, International Taskforce on Teachers for Education 2030

2019

Little research attention has been paid to documenting and analyzing attempts of education systems moving quickly and at scale to provide online learning when all or many schools are closed. Related 'good practices' are considered rare, and on the whole, activities and initiatives of these sorts are poorly documented, especially when it comes to the needs of learners and education systems across the so called 'developing world'.

This brief extrapolates from the existing knowledge base about the use of educational technologies in general over past decades, as well as from consensus expert and practitioner wisdom and experience, to offer high-level guidance and 'rules of thumb' for policymakers forced to make related decisions in fast moving, very challenging circumstances with little guidance or relevant experience.

World Bank

2020

The aim of this paper is to supports the ways countries may go about developing or strengthening their pre-primary workforce. There are multiple pathways to competent and effective workforce that may be relevant to different country context and that may combine different level of qualifications, with training and retention strategies in support of developing adapted career trajectories for pre-primary teachers. Our focus in this paper is to summarize the background evidence and research available in the area of pre-primary workforce development that can in turn support the outline of options and pathways to be developed further through in the next part of the work.

UNICEF/Jan Peeters, Ayça Alayli, Marilou Hyson and Hsiao-Chen Lin

2019

This guide has been designed to strengthen the competencies of child protection actors. The term "child protection actors" covers three categories of actors: social workers, para-social workers and community actors.

The goal of this guide is to develop the basic professional competencies of child protection actors, particularly social workers and para-social workers. This guide will also help trainers develop training content and ensure that child protection actors acquire the required information (knowledge), know-how (skills) and interpersonal skills (attitudes). The first part of the guide is intended for those who train child protection actors and is based on a child protection competency matrix. The second part of the guide includes sessions on themes specific to Terre des hommes.

Terre des Hommes / Didier Sevet, Claudie Ouedraogo, Saïdou Chojnowicz, Gaele Bertrand, Sara Lim

2018

Informing and guiding the development of a Framework to Strengthen the Capacity of “Tipat Halav” nurses in Israel is a qualitative research study on behalf of Goshen Institute, with the overall objective to generate in-depth data that unveil effective processes and strategies which need to be in place in order to achieve a practice-change among Parent and Child Health ("Tipat Halav") nurses in Israel. Specifically, the study, which is part of a larger initiative pursued by Bernard Van Leer Foundation, the Rothschild Foundation Foundation and Israel’s Ministry of Health, aimed at mapping:

1. the strategies and processes that need to be in place in order to successfully achieve a practice-change among nurses in working with parents;
2. the common elements among successful programs;
3. the barriers and challenges in program implementation.

Interviews with 9 training providers and practitioners from across 6 countries, highlighted the complexity of the field and of nurses’ role and revealed the necessary knowledge, skills and attributes that effective nurses should possess. In addition, the interviews revealed the key challenges faced by the profession, the professionals and the training programs, as well as the success factors and recommendations about how challenges can be tackled. Research results highlight that practice-change is inseparably linked to the system in which practitioners operate and that in order for practice change to be achieved it is important to recognize the importance of the field as well as the uniqueness of this field. Thus, interviewees highlighted the need to focus on the social aspects of health and move beyond hospital-oriented practices and theory as well as the need for more innovative, practice-based approaches and experiential learning and for common standards of practice and common standards among training providers.  

2020