A study on the effectiveness of the PEDP trained teachers in Tanzania: a case of Iringa District

The purpose of the study was to assess the effectiveness of Primary Education Development Programme (PEDP) trained teachers on classroom performance and its impacts in provision of quality education in primary schools. Four research objectives guided the study: To find out the number of trained teachers in PEDP phase one; to explore whether PEDP teacher training improved the teachers’ skills and knowledge; to examine the effectiveness of the PEDP trained teachers and to examine the participants’ reactions to PEDP teacher training programmes conducted. Data were collected through interview, questionnaires from ninety six respondents, document analysis and classroom observation. Sampling technique which included purposive sampling, stratified sampling and simple random sampling procedures were used to obtain the study respondents. Data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The findings indicated that the government has played a great role in increasing the number of teachers through PEDP programmes in schools. However, still there is a shortage of teachers in most of the primary schools. Pupils are overcrowded in classrooms and teacher-Pupil ratio was very high and the situation resulted to overloaded work. Although there are some indicators of skills and knowledge improvement, the training conducted had some discrepancies which in turn caused the ineffectiveness in some aspects of teachers’ professional qualifications. The study disclosed various factors which hindered teachers’ effectiveness which include the overcrowded classrooms and shortage of teaching and learning materials both in the colleges and in schools. Also the study unearthed several different challenges that faced the training which included the training duration, competency of facilitators, shortage of physical and human facilities and the mode of the training syllabus. The study recommends that more effort be made by the government to train more teachers and improve the teacher training. Moreover, schools should be equipped with enough physical and human resources to make teaching-learning process more effective.