An Adapted Cascade Model to Scale Primary School Digital Education Curricular Reforms and Teacher Professional Development Programs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adapted cascade model for deploying primary school digital education teacher professional development programs, addressing limitations of traditional cascade models and demonstrating effective large-scale implementation.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel adapted cascade model that enhances traditional models by involving active teachers as trainers supported by experts, improving scalability and effectiveness in digital education reforms.

Findings

The adapted cascade model effectively overcomes traditional cascade limitations.

Teacher perceptions and motivation are comparable to expert-led training.

Large-scale deployment of digital education PD programs is feasible and effective.

Abstract

Many countries struggle to effectively introduce Digital Education (DE) to all K-12 students as they lack adequately trained teachers. While cascade models of in-service teacher-professional development (PD) can rapidly deploy PD-programs through multiple levels of trainers to reach all teachers, they suffer from many limitations and are often ineffective. We therefore propose an adapted cascade model to deploy a primary school DE teacher-PD program throughout an administrative region. The model relies on teacher-trainers who (i) are active teachers in the region, (ii) have a prolonged trainer-PD with experts who piloted the teacher-PD program to acquire adult-trainer and DE-related competences, and (iii) are supported by the experts throughout the deployment. To validate the deployment model we used data from 14 teacher-trainers, the 700 teachers they trained, and 350 teachers trained by experts. The teacher-trainer findings demonstrate that the adapted cascade model effectively addresses most cascade models' limitations. The teacher-related findings further validate the adapted cascade model in terms of perception, motivation and adoption which are at least equivalent to those obtained with the experts. To conclude, the adapted cascade model is an effective means of spreading primary school DE PD-programs at a large scale and can be used in other DE reforms.