Using the Capacity Approach to improve the sustainability of teacher inservice training

This paper has presented a CA/CR lens that aims to strengthen the efficacy and sustainability of EGR teacher training. This entails seeking teachers’ participation to identify their valued functionings, the conversion factors that constrain these, and designing in-service training to address constraints. The hypothesis being that designing training that is guided by teachers’ values and reducing constraint, will strengthen the acceptance, adoption and assimilation of EGR practices.

This process of EGR teacher training development is by no means a guaranteed silver bullet solution; what it does do however, is place teachers’ well-being at the forefront of training strategies, and also sees the levers of behaviour change being deeply rooted in their values and lived experiences. Given these benefits, it should be noted that use of the Capability Approach also has its limits. The approach does not account for shifts in individuals’ values and decisions over time. For example, a new teacher may not initially value ‘taking care of family’, but over the course of her career, this may change with the birth of children, as well as recede after her children grow older (which was indeed demonstrated across the age range of teachers in this study). In a similar vein, shifts in conversion factors over time can also occur. Thus, in order to be more responsive to the fluidity of people's values and corresponding conversion factors, it may be necessary to plan for data collection and analysis to be conducted during the course of training implementation, in order to adjust and fine-tune solutions to changing value sets.

It should also be noted that this framework for EGR training development can be generalised – not at an individual level of preference or experience – but at a meta-level with regard to the components that generate behaviour. Clearly, teachers’ values and constraints vary over population and context; however at a theoretical level, it is possible to generalise about the fact that a valued functioning acts as a causal mechanism that guides behaviour, conversion factors can act to constrain it, and the interaction of these can result in certain classroom actions. Given this understanding, it is imperative that an EGR training intervention acknowledges the importance of these meta-level components in order to ensure the efficacy of training.

Overall, this paper has argued that without acknowledgement of these components of behaviour –teachers’ valued functionings and constraints – it is unlikely that new EGR instructional practices will be sustained, as teachers will revert to their ‘old ways’, which are grounded in the valued functionings that consistently generate much of their behaviour. The benefit of reframing teachers’ classroom actions in this manner is that it provides a theoretically grounded account of teacher behaviour that is situated in their values and contexts. Such an account not only fosters detailed explanations of teacher performance, it hopefully engenders more nuanced and creative strategies aimed at improvements.