Rethinking Design-Based Approaches for School-Based Improvement: The Experience of the TAMAM Project – By Rima Karami Akkary & Jennifer DeKnight– IJER- 2019

Vision for self-renewing community school

TAMAM aspires to promote the transformation of schools into self-renewing institutions where educational practitioners collaborate and are actively engaged in professional learning communities to initiate and lead change and improvement to graduate the next generation that leads innovation and change in their society. These self-renewing institutions provide the flexibility and the professional space where exchange of expertise and collaborative work on improvement and student learning can take place. In response, practitioners are motivated to collectively devise innovative approaches and improvement initiatives. This collaborative effort also serves as a platform for continuous learning and growth, allowing those involved to glean insights from both their setbacks and past experiences. These self-renewing institutions not only embrace but also actively undertake the responsibility of fostering cultural and social transformation with a primary focus on shaping students into responsible and engaged citizens. To realize schools as catalysts for social transformation, it is imperative to cultivate leadership capacity at every level, with a particular emphasis on empowering teachers. Through consistent and impassioned mentorship, teachers can effectively serve as role models, enabling students to develop into leaders who contribute significantly to the overall progress of their communities and societies.

Vision for Educator

TAMAM is dedicated to empowering educators by instilling transformative habits of mind that enable them to become active learners, leaders, change agents, and knowledge producers. Through this empowerment, they evolve into leaders who are reflective thinkers and inquirers, jointly responsible for their educational institution’s success and their students’ achievements. As leaders of their own learning and catalysts for institutional improvement, TAMAM educators acquire a set of rich competencies and skills that trigger and sustain their motivation to improve their educational institutions. This motivation propels them to initiate, lead, and sustain improvement. As such, they engage in formulating an understanding of the problems they face, propose feasible and plausible solutions to these problems, and recommend changes to the existing processes and practices at their educational institutions. While engaged in iterative cycles of inquiry and problem-solving, practitioners remain critical of their deeply held assumptions and open to shifting the professional paradigm that guides their practice. This commitment to inquiry and reflection in action brings about transformational and sustainable change in educational institutions initiated and led by school-based educational practitioners and generates actionable theory suitable for the socio-cultural context of those institutions.

Student learning is at the heart of TAMAM work. TAMAM is committed to providing the school climate and capacity needed to remove the barriers that inhibit students from developing to their full potential.

TAMAM’s model adopts the term “student leadership” for acknowledging and valuing students as contributors to the teaching learning process and to their societal advancement. In this respect, a student profile was generated that encompasses a set of values, skills, and capacities that a TAMAM graduate should embrace stemming from the notion of student leadership. This profile was developed through a collaborative process that included educators from all its partners, schools and educational institutions.

The “TAMAM student profile” is organized under three main categories:
– A responsible Citizen
– A balanced and moral individual
– A lifelong Learner

TAMAM Initiation

TAMAM began when the senior vice president of Dhahran Ahliyya School in Saudi Arabia, Dr. Sally Al Turki, approached two professors at the American University of Beirut (AUB), Dr. Saouma Boujaoude and Dr. Murad Jurdak, to propose a school-based reform initiative that could generate actionable theories grounded in the sociocultural context of the Arab region. The four key concerns that inspired TAMAM were:…

(1) the absence of a culturally-grounded, research–based body of educational knowledge in line with international best practices yet capable of addressing the challenges of Arab educational practitioners, (2) the lack of agency and preparedness among school-based practitioners to lead innovative school improvement; (3) the compromised quality of professional development programs offered to Arab educational practitioners; and (4) the lack of accountability and evidence-informed decision-making at all levels of the educational system. 

Dr. Al Turki, Dr. BouJaoude and Dr. Jurdak drafted the initial design in 2007, securing its first grant from the Arab Thought Foundation with an emphasis on introducing action research as a tool for development at all levels.  

Dr. Rima Karami, an associate professor at AUB, joined TAMAM as a researcher two months after the project launching and soon became one of its three principal investigators and a member of its Steering Team. At that early stage, the initial design did not include fully developed objectives and strategies for implementation. Consequently, a large part of Dr. Karami’s role in the first Phase of TAMAM consisted of conceptualizing the link between action research and school-based improvement and identifying the strategies to achieve TAMAM’s goals. This resulted in designing professional development (PD) activities for building leadership capacity to initiate and drive school improvement. In 2012, Dr. Karami completed the first design of the Capacity Building Program (Documented in Technical Report Four) that became the blueprint that defined the Capacity Building Program and framed research studies for TAMAM. This PD model also served as the basis for securing three additional grants from the Arab Thought Foundation, totaling close to $2,000,000 and making TAMAM the longest continuously–funded educational research project in the history of AUB.  

Starting in 2015, Dr. Karami transitioned into the role of fully leading the research and development activities of TAMAM as its creative director while two of the TAMAM initiators (Dr. Al-Turki and Dr. BouJaoude) continued their contribution to the project in an advisory role. Since 2015, the TAMAM Steering Team, led by Dr. Karami and composed of a team of researchers, designers and consultants, is leading the research and development activities of TAMAM.

This course is an introduction to TAMAM’s Capacity-Building Program that aims to prepare educators to lead sustainable school-based improvement. It is delivered online through the Continuing Education Center (CEC) at AUB. This course aims at introducing the educational theoretical background for sustainable school-based improvement and the needed principals and strategies to lead improvement. The course describes the characteristics of self-renewing schools, the educator who leads improvement, and the profile of the student we aspire to graduate. The course explains the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that educators need to become agents of change in their educational institutions. It also presents the steps followed to launch an innovative intervention, and the procedure to design, implement and evaluate an improvement project, which are referred to as “TAMAM school improvement journey”. The course also discusses the challenges that could face the launching of school-based improvement and suggests strategies to overcome these challenges using the leadership competencies and skills for based-improvement. In this course, the participants will engage in interactive activities and reflections that help them understand the nature of the process of leading school-based improvement. Language: The program will be delivered in Arabic only.

Link to CEC webpage