Gender and Inclusive Pedagogy as an intervention: changes in teaching practice and student engagement in secondary schools

Abstract

Inclusive pedagogy is vital for an inclusive classroom. Teachers’ professional development is crucial to bring changes in teachers’ attitude and practice to lead effective and inclusive classroom teaching-learning. This paper presents the changes found in teachers’ teaching and students’ classroom engagement as a result of teachers’ professional development on ‘Gender and Inclusive Pedagogy (GIP)’ at secondary schools of Bangladesh. A four-phased professional development on GIP was provided to 363 teachers of total 60 experimental schools employing both face-to-face and online modality as an intervention. Sixty other secondary schools were selected as control schools. Pre and post observation of the classrooms were conducted before and after the intervention respectively to investigate the effectiveness of GIP intervention. A structured classroom observation checklist was used to measure the constructs related to teachers’ practice and students’ participation. The results show that for all the aspects of the classroom observation the mean score increased from baseline to end-line. However, not all the differences were statistically significant. The intervention helped in decreasing the discrepancies between the rural and urban schools and government and non-government schools in some aspects. There is no significant difference in the practice of and the classrooms of male and female teachers. The intervention worked better in the segregated schools compared to the coeducation schools. Girls’ participation in classroom significantly improved in the end-line. This study can shed light within the comparative and international education arena on how an intervention can be successful in a developing country context for addressing similar educational issues.