Catalyzing Change in Education Through a Transformative Learning Collaborative: Scaling-Up of a Social Emotional Learning Curriculum in Uganda

Teachers' social emotional learning/competence (SEL/SEC) can influence teachers' ability in developing healthy teacher-student relationship, managing classroom, implementing evidence-based SEL promotion strategies in classroom, and supporting students' parents. Also, most SEL/SEC interventions have not considered gender equity. Given high prevalence of gender-based violence and high exposure to adverse environment for teachers in low income countries (LIC), which may lead them to greater risk for lower SEC, transforming current education system and considering gender equity and SEL/SEC promotion curriculum to both teachers and children is needed.

The goal of this project is to respond to this need by adapting a locally supported evidence-based-intervention (EBI) for children and further integrates SEL/SEC curriculum for teachers and gender equity component. The EBI to be adapted in this study is ParentCorps-Professional Development (PD), a school-based EBI that trains, empowers, and supports teachers to apply EBI strategies to promote child SEL/SEC and academic learning, and reduce behavioral problems. Two pilot implementation studies from prior work conducted in Uganda and Nepal have demonstrated feasibility, acceptability, usefulness, and efficacy of PD in diverse low resource contexts. PD has shown positive impacts on multiple-level, including positive changes on students' emotional regulation and social competency, teacher-student relationship, and classroom social emotion climate. The proposed research builds on prior positive evidence and further partner with policy and relevant stakeholders to integrate gender equity and teacher SEL/SEC curriculum into the PD (as the PD-Enhance) as well as to test scalable strategies to provide the enhanced PD curriculum at the system level.