Improving Teacher Quality at Scale: 10 Tips from Practitioners

Enhancing teacher quality is a high priority for the Partnership to Strengthen Innovation and Practice in Secondary Education (PSIPSE)—a collaborative of donors seeking to catalyze improvements in secondary education. Over the past five years, PSIPSE donors have invested more than $18 million in eight projects run by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to improve teacher quality. These NGOs are testing strategies to sharpen teachers’ pedagogical skills, mostly in East Africa.

The NGOs’ experiences yield several insights for practitioners who want to design scalable interventions for cultivating teacher quality. This brief draws on these insights to offer 10 concrete tips on designing an intervention, partnering with key stakeholders, and motivating teachers.