Faculty of Education and Language Studies
Faculty of Education and Language Studies > People Profiles > Tom Power
Profile
Tom Power is Programme Director of English in Action (EIA, www.eiabd.com) at the Open University. EIA is a 9-year programme to improve the English Language competence of some 25 Million people in Bangladesh, funded through UK-AID (DFID). EIA provides teacher professional development and classroom resources through low-cost mobile phones, supporting changes in classroom practice for teachers across Bangladesh through peer-learning.
Previously Tom was co-director of the Digital Education Enhancement Project, DEEP (www.open.ac.uk/deep), which researched the potential of mobile technologies to support teacher professional development and practice in schools serving disadvantaged communities in the Eastern Cape of South Africa, and Cairo, Egypt. Tom was also a lead academic on the Teacher Education Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA, www.tessafrica.net) programme, chairing the web and media group during the design of the multi-lingual, multi-national OER website, and providing academic leadership to the teacher professional development materials in numeracy. Tom has also worked on a number of UK teacher education programmes at the OU, including Teach Global, Teach and Learn, and the Learning Schools Programme.
Tom has been a regular presenter at COL, mLearn and eLearn Africa, and has been invited to speak on teacher education and international development at Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard Universities. Tom has carried out consultancies for DFID in South Sudan (mid-term review of educational initiatives under the basic services fund, and scoping the national English language needs). He has also carried out consultancies for the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s ‘Unit for Rural Schooling and Development’ in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.
Teaching Interests
Tom is particularly interested in teacher professional develoment, in international development settings. Themes include low cost mobile technology, school-based professional development (activity based learning), peer-support, Open Distance Learning (ODL), and Open Educational Resources (OERs). Tom is currently the Open University programme director for English in Action (www.eiabd.com), a large scale teacher training initiative in Bangladesh, and is in the process of developing new but related projects in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Research Interests
Tom is interested in high-impact school-based professional development for teachers, and how peer support and low cost mobile phones may be used to enable and support this, at large scale, in international development contexts.
Current Research
EIA project overview
English in Action (EIA) is a nine-year project contributing to the economic development of Bangladesh. EIA aims to increase the number of people able to use English language in order to participate in social and economic activities. By 2017, EIA will have reached 25 million people in Bangladesh, including primary and secondary school children, and adult learners.
EIA is implemented in partnership with the Government of Bangladesh and a consortium of three international partners: BMB Mott McDonald, BBC World Service Trust, and the Open University; and two national partners: Underprivileged Children’s Education Programme, and Friends in Village Development Bangladesh. EIA is funded through UKAID.
During 2010-2011, 700 teachers took part in pilot interventions, introducing new English language learning activities with 120,000 students from a representative sample of schools across all seven divisions of Bangladesh.
Teachers carried out these new activities with the support of project materials, including audio-visual training and classroom materials made available at low cost through mobile technologies.
Pairs of teachers supported each other in school, as well as participating in workshops and cluster meetings beyond school.
Research summary
Alongside the teacher training and support ran an extensive research programme seeking to:
- understand views and experiences of teaching and learning English
- monitor changes in classroom practice
- independently evaluate any gains in the ability to communicate in English.
EIA studies focusing upon teachers included quantitative observations of almost all teachers’ classroom practice, together with in-depth observations, interviews and questionnaires with approximately a fifth of the 700 teachers taking part. In addition to this, over 1500 secondary students responded to a questionnaire, and 900 students took part in individual and group interviews.
Views and experiences of teaching and learning English
Findings indicate some success in changing views on English language teaching and learning, establishing the necessary pre-conditions for a more communicative approach.
Most EIA teachers now agree that the focus of their English classes is on communication, explaining grammar as necessary to aid understanding. (But attitudes are a little mixed; around a third of teachers still think studying and practicing grammar is a quick way to improve English, and students, particularly in secondary school, like to learn grammar, perhaps for exams).
Practice
There is strong evidence of basic changes to classroom practice from large-scale quantitative observation.
|
Impact 1: Substantial increase in teachers’ spoken English
71% of all observed primary teacher talk now in English.
86% of all observed secondary teacher talk now in English.
|
Impact 2: Substantial increase in students’ spoken English
Most (88%) observed student talk now in English, in both primary and secondary EIA classrooms.
On average, over 1/3 of all observed lesson time now given to student talk |
Impact 3: Substantial increase in students’ participation in communicative practices.
During 30 minute primary classroom observations, there were on average 12.5 minutes student talk, made up of individual (3.5m), pair (2m), group (2m) and choral work (5m). |
Assessors from Trinity College carried out diagnostic (GESE) interviews of English language competence, providing a comprehensive baseline and a representative post-intervention sample of almost half of the teachers and over a thousand students. Findings show statistically significant improvements in teachers’ and students oral / aural communication in English language, on the GESE scale.
|
Impact 4: The numbers of teachers scoring higher GESE levels increased all the way up Levels 3-7. |
|
|
Impact 5: Increase in primary GESE pass rate, from 35% in 2010, to 50% in 2011. |
Impact 6:Increase in secondary GESE pass rate from 71% in 2010, to 90% in 2011. |
Within educational research literature, there are very few examples of teacher professional development activities that are able to show evidence that student outcomes improve (see reviews by Lawless and Pelligrino 2007, Wilson and Bryne 1999). The findings of EIA show statistically significant improvement for primary and secondary students, and in secondary, an improvement across all initial and elementary grades of the GESE scale. These results indicate a positive outcome of the EIA programme in almost all aspects of the data examined.
Concluding remarks
EIA recognises the scope of the challenge, in sustaining such impacts as the project moves to substantially larger scale, as well as the need to take teachers further in their professional development journey than these early steps. However, we consider these to be extremely encouraging findings, that at least provide ‘proof of concept’ for the effectiveness of the teacher training and support model.