Professional Development of Secondary School STEM Educators in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematized Literature Review

Studies funded by the World Bank suggest that developing the teaching capacities of educators in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most effective ways of improving the state of education, and indirectly, the quality of life of Sub-Saharan African citizens. Consequently, effective teacher development requires an intimate knowledge of the current state of teacher development in the subcontinent. This study was motivated by a recognition of that need. Thus, we conducted a systematized literature review synthesizing existing literature on the professional development of secondary-school science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) educators in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our guiding research questions follow: what recommendations have been made regarding effective professional development of STEM Educators in Sub-Saharan Africa, what professional development programs have been conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa in the past 5 decades, how were they facilitated, and what did subsequent evaluation of their impact reveal? We limited our review to articles focused on STEM teacher development in 44 sub-Saharan African countries. Our review included articles that were published in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, or books within the past 40 years. We excluded articles that were published in languages other than English. Twenty-three articles satisfied the inclusion and exclusion criteria for this review and formed the primary studies for the synthesis. Because of the sparsity of peer-reviewed articles, we expanded our scope to include gray literature. Our analysis of the methodologies showed that authors predominantly took a quantitative approach to address the deficiencies of STEM educators in sub-Saharan Africa. In our discussion, we argue that this lens tends to focus on the numbers rather than the quality of pedagogical instructional practice. Our study also revealed that recruitment of participants of the professional development interventions, more often than not, failed to cater to the gender diversity of teachers in the respective settings. Recommendations offered by teacher trainers and researchers regarding professional development efforts were analyzed thematically. We discuss our findings using a macro, meso, micro-level model. Macro-level recommendations included systemic reforms addressing the acquisition of resources (e.g., technological teaching aids), provision of incentives for teacher development, emphasis on teacher licensing, and alignment of education goals to national priorities. Meso-level recommendations suggested including teachers in the co-construction of curricular and instructional content as well as conceptual understanding of teachers' motivations for entering the teaching profession. At the micro-level, recommendations discussed the importance of focusing on personal efforts that STEM teachers take to develop their teaching practice.