Learning from the Endeavours Made to Actualise Teacher Education and School Frameworks: Annotations to Advance Policies and Practices

Despite the efforts made to reform education in Eritrea, the quality of teachers, which directly originates from an established teacher education programme (TEP), has not ensured the desired outcome in the education practices in Eritrea. A contextual extrapolation has made it clear that learners’ learning achievement is low in the country. We uphold the need to enhance teacher professionalism through instituting TEPs that highly focus on developing teacher professional skills and dispositions to actualise certain frameworks. We have voiced our analytic and inductive reasoning to discover situations and suggest better ways of practice and policy considerations. Our study followed a qualitative approach using reflective talks and inductive analysis developed through a longitudinal study. It thoroughly examined the informally introduced and practised model that used collaborative action research (CAR) to try out TEP and school frameworks. It was deduced from the outcomes and processes of the individual and collective engagements and behaviours sensed during the last four years (June 2019 – January 2023) that markedly made various implications to the education system in Eritrea. It urged that teacher educators and schoolteachers should collaborate, engage in research and practice-based actions to develop requisite professional behaviours, attitudes, and values that can help improve practices in continuously changing educational situations. It claimed continuous professional development as an agent of teacher intellectual and moral advancement. We learned that all the processes we went through have powerful messages for every aspect of education, TEP, and school practices in the country. We insist that there is a possibility of doing and relating through CAR in transforming educational practices and ensuring the coherence between reform intentions and their practical implementation.