British Council – Core Skills

British Council - Core Skills

Americas

2018 - 2019

Countries

Mexico

Lead M&E Consultant(s)

Jimena Hernandez

Project Overview

The British Council ‘Core Skills’ programme is part of the British Council global ‘Connecting Classrooms’ programme. In the Americas, the focus of the programme was on developing teachers’, trainers’, and learners’ core skills over a period of three years (2016-2019); the large-scale programme was evaluated by TCE (led by Nicky Hockly and Gavin Dudeney) during this time. However, within this period, several smaller scale summative evaluations took place – and one of these smaller evaluations (led by Jimena Hernandez) is described here. The objective of this particular evaluation was to identify observable effects in the classroom of the implementation of the Core Skills programme in Mexico.

Approaches & Outputs

This evaluation focused on public sector lower secondary teachers in Mexico who had received training on the six British Council Core Skills modules. Using RCTs with specially developed observation protocols focusing on the interactions between teachers and students, the teaching and learning strategies used by core skills-trained lower secondary teachers were compared with those of untrained peers who worked at similar schools. The summative evaluation measured the effect of core skills training on lower secondary teachers, by comparing whether there was a difference between trained and untrained teachers. The evaluation also provided evidence-based insights into the teaching practices taking place inside lower secondary classrooms in Mexico. The evaluation findings and recommendations were relevant for the implementation of the Core Skills programme not only in Mexico but in the Americas as a whole.

Impact On

Public sector lower secondary teachers and their learners, in six schools in three states in Mexico (Guadalajara, Jalisco and Mexico City).

Challenges

Using RCTs created a number of challenges. First, as a result of attrition in the Core Skills training programme, only a small treatment group (of teachers who had completed all six Core Skills training modules) could be identified. Secondly, although RCT methodology requires the probabilistic selection of the contrafactual group, due to the context, the selection of lower secondary teachers for the control group was manually performed by the Education Ministry in order to grant access to schools for observations. Thirdly, the quantification of the effects in RCTs are usually carried out with quantitative evaluation instruments. However, due to the nature of the core skills expected effects (i.e., on teaching and learning processes), a more qualitative and descriptive approach was taken within the structured observation of classes; this approach was designed to be less reductive, and it enabled the evaluators to gather richer and more nuanced classroom observation data.

British Council – Core Skills