The Lives of Teachers in Under-Resourced Communities: Implications for Intervention, Professional Development, Implementation, and Educational Quality

Most efforts to improve school settings and increase student learning assume adequately trained and knowledgeable teachers with the personal capacity and professional support to effectively implement new programs. This is unlikely to be true in under-resourced communities where teachers face a range of personal and professional barriers to effective teaching. This dissertation presents a framework for re-conceptualizing the role of teachers' lives, characteristics, well-being, and contexts toward the goal of more effective education for children growing up in challenging settings. It then examines this framework through a close look at one particular educational intervention: a teacher training program for early childhood education (ECE) teachers in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. Paper 1 highlights the breadth of possible supports and barriers teachers face -- teachers' lives in context -- and how these influence their attendance, attrition, and pedagogical quality within under-resourced settings. Paper 2 describes the conditions of ECE teachers in six disadvantaged districts of Greater Accra and how these conditions relate to teacher attrition, take-up of the training, and observed adherence to and quality of implementation of training materials. Paper 3, using a novel approach to reducing researcher degrees of freedom, tests the causal moderation of teacher training on classroom processes and student learning by teachers' lives in context. Findings indicate that ECE teachers in this setting face a wide range of barriers to high quality teaching at multiple levels of the bioecological model and that many of these relate to their responsiveness to the training. Low job satisfaction predicts increased attrition; depression predicts decreased take-up; seniority and poverty risks predict decreased adherence; many time demand barriers predicts increased adherence and implementation quality; and secondary degrees and prior early childhood development training predict increased implementation quality, as does take-up. Some of these barriers influence the effectiveness of the training program. Specifically, the training impacts classroom processes for teachers with secondary degrees but not without and student learning outcomes for those with more contextual barriers than average. This work contributes to a more complete, nuanced understanding of teachers, the barriers they face, and how to support them to strengthen classrooms and advance student learning in under-resourced communities. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]