Beyond Training: Addressing Teachers’ Belief-to-Practice Gap in Foundational Learning

In this blogpost, Najmeh Kishani and Sehar Saeed discuss the findings of the Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices, and Beliefs (KAPB) study conducted by the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network in Tanzania and Senegal. The findings reveal a belief-to-practice gap between what teachers learn and what they can apply in real classrooms. The authors argue that, to close this gap, policy efforts must go beyond designing better training content and include institutional investments that allow new practices to take root.

Background

Foundational learning poverty remains alarmingly high, with 88 percent of children in Sub-Saharan Africa unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 (World Bank, 2022). Teachers are central to improving foundational literacy and numeracy: beyond delivering content, effective teaching requires professional judgment, emotional investment, and enabling classroom environments. Drawing on findings from the recently concluded Knowledge, Attitudes, Practices, and Beliefs (KAPB) study in Tanzania and Senegal conducted by the People’s Action for Learning (PAL) Network, this blog explores how teachers’ beliefs and attitudes can shift through targeted training, and why these shifts do not always translate into sustained changes in classroom practice. Understanding this disconnect is essential for strengthening the support teachers receive where it matters most: inside the classroom.

Even when teacher training programs are thoughtfully designed and rooted in sound pedagogy, a persistent gap remains between what teachers learn and what they can apply in real classrooms. Overcrowded classrooms, rigid curricula, pressure to cover the syllabus, and limited access to materials often constrain teachers’ efforts to personalize instruction. Teachers may believe in the value of child-centered methods, yet still struggle to implement them in systems that do not enable adaptive or innovative teaching. This belief-to-practice gap lies at the heart of the KAPB Study, exploring these dynamics across two foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) remediation programs, the My Village programs in Tanzania and Ndaw Wune programs in Senegal, revealing what enables teachers to turn belief into action.

My Village is a community-based foundational learning initiative implemented by Uwezo in Tanzania and ASER in Nepal, under the PAL Network. Since its launch in 2022, the program has reached over 60,000 children and supported more than 800 teachers and volunteers to deliver after-school learning camps in local schools and community centers, helping children who are falling behind in reading and numeracy, including those out-of-school, to master their foundational skills in 30-45 days.

Ndaw Wune (“Success for All”) is a multilingual remedial education program led by the Associates in Research and Education for Development (ARED). Since 2021, it has reached over 4,000 Grade 2 and 3 students across four regions of Senegal, offering after-school learning in local languages to help the lowest-performing children strengthen foundational skills.

These programs draw inspiration from Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), a proven approach that groups children by their current skill level and uses targeted, interactive instruction to accelerate progress. Short, focused activities and structured routines help children move from recognizing letters and numbers to reading simple texts and solving basic problems. This approach has demonstrated strong evidence of improving foundational learning outcomes across multiple countries (Banerjee et al., 2016). When adapted to context and supported over time, these level-based and interactive pedagogical approaches can shift both teacher knowledge and instructional practice, even in resource-constrained environments (Kraft & Falken, 2021). Both My Village and Ndaw Wune programs equip educators with 4–6 days of practical training focused on assessment-led grouping and interactive activities, to deliver foundational literacy and numeracy instruction that responds to children’s actual learning levels.

Study Design

The recently concluded KAPB study provides a unique opportunity to examine how educators’ participation in My Village and Ndaw Wune leads to internal transformation across four dimensions:

• Knowledge (technical content and planning)
• Attitudes (toward students and professional change)
• Practices (observed classroom behavior)
• Beliefs (in student potential and teacher capacity)

Together, these programs provide a valuable lens for understanding what enables teachers to turn belief into action in real school environments.

The research design combined three core approaches:

• 406 teacher surveys to capture self-reported knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs
• 117 classroom observations to document teaching practices
• 8 Focus group discussions to explore teachers’ perspectives in greater depth

Schools were selected to ensure representation of both treatment and control groups, allowing for comparison between teachers who received the structured pedagogy training and those who did not. For the sake of this blogpost, we focus on three interrelated questions:

• What types of internal change (knowledge, attitudes, beliefs) did teachers undergo after participating in structured pedagogy training?
• Why did these shifts not consistently translate into improved classroom practices?
• What system-level interventions are needed to close the belief-to-practice gap and enable sustainable teacher-led transformation?

Key Findings

While trained teachers demonstrated greater understanding of pedagogical techniques and expressed stronger belief in student potential, many were unable to implement what they had learned due to systemic barriers. In what follows, we explore the reasons for this belief-to-practice gap, and ways to support sustained instructional change.

Shared Patterns, Diverging Contexts

Across both countries, teacher training led to measurable improvements in pedagogical knowledge and attitudes toward student-centered instruction. However, changes in classroom practice were partial, and belief shifts—though visible in qualitative data—did not register strongly in survey scores. The biggest constraint to practice change was not teacher will, but the broader environment: overloaded curricula, lack of materials, and limited systemic support consistently limited teachers’ ability to translate intent into behavior. Notably, while Tanzania and Senegal shared broad patterns of improvement, the depth and sustainability of change varied significantly across settings.

Tanzania

• Knowledge Gains: Trained teachers scored significantly higher on pedagogical assessments and used more level-based materials in class.
• Attitude Shifts: Teachers showed a 12% improvement in positive attitudes and were 28% more likely to try new instructional methods.
• Classroom Practice: Group formation and use of teaching materials improved, but feedback, assessment, and adaptive practices did not change significantly.
• Belief Changes: Survey data showed no shift, but focus groups revealed a mindset change. Teachers began to view learning gaps as instructional challenges, not student deficiencies.
• Systemic Barriers: Overcrowded classrooms, limited resources, and time constraints hindered progress. Teachers called for refresher training, peer support, and stronger leadership engagement to sustain change.

Senegal

• Knowledge Gains: Teachers in Senegal demonstrated meaningful knowledge gains.
• Attitude Shifts: Trained teachers were 22% more likely to display active behaviors and scored significantly higher on affective attitude scales. Teachers found the training energizing and relevant, with corresponding knowledge gains.
• Classroom Practice: Use of teaching aids improved. However, no consistent gains were seen in adaptive instruction, peer learning, or student engagement.
• Belief Changes: Belief scores did not shift, but teachers expressed renewed optimism. Their ability to act on beliefs was limited by peer friction and lack of leadership alignment.
• Systemic Barriers: Implementation was weakened by overlapping programs, limited materials, and head teacher unfamiliarity with new methods, creating confusion and reducing cohesion.

Policy Implications and Recommendations

The findings from Tanzania and Senegal reveal a consistent pattern: remedial and structured pedagogy programs can shift what teachers know and believe, but without supportive systems, these gains rarely reach the classroom. The “belief-to-practice gap” is not due to lack of teacher effort or motivation. It reflects a systemic disconnect between training and everyday implementation.

To close this gap, policy efforts must go beyond designing better training content. They must invest in the institutional scaffolding—coaching, materials, alignment, leadership engagement—that allows new practices to take root.

Table 1: Policy Priorities to Bridge the Belief-to-Practice Gap

If foundational learning is the goal, systems must create the conditions that allow teachers to act on what they know and believe.

Conclusion

When teachers are trained, they believe change is possible. But belief alone is not enough. This study shows that without systems that reinforce new practices—through coaching, coherence, and classroom-level support—training fades into frustration. The promise of programs like My Village and Ndaw Wune lies not only in pedagogy, but in how seriously systems take their responsibility to enable teachers. Closing the belief-to-practice gap is a policy choice. The question is no longer whether teachers can change—but whether we will build the conditions that let them.

The Authors:

Najmeh Kishani is Research Manager at Pal Network | nkishani@palnetwork.org

Sehar Saeed is Research Fellow at Pal Network | ssaeed@palnetwork.org