M. Desforges, P. Vumilia (eds.), Developing Partnerships to Support Quality Education, 135-151. ©2010 Hope University Press. All rights reserved. Lessons from Teaching in Action: Developing, Implementing, and Sustaining a Teacher-Training Professional Development Program Mr. Matthew Thomas, M.A. and Dr. Frances Vavrus, Ph.D. University of Minnesota (USA) Introduction International efforts to improve education in Africa have increased in the last two decades as a result of multinational commitments to Education for All forged in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990 and reaffirmed Dakar, Senegal in 2000. In addition, there has been a proliferation of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) dedicated to formal education in countries where it is most limited. Many of the educational programs initiated both by international development agencies and NGOs aim to increase access, improve quality, or introduce educational reform policies. Although most organizations have experienced some success in their programming, they also face challenges at some point in their work, including the design, implementation, or monitoring and evaluation stages. This article explores the successes and the challenges of an educational initiative in Tanzania—Teaching in Action— funded by the U.S. NGO AfricAid, Inc. 1 The multiple programs supported by AfricAid all aim to improve education, especially for women and girls, with the specific focus of Teaching in Action (TIA) being to build capacity and improve teaching and learning at the secondary and tertiary levels in Tanzania. Following a description of the relevant national, cultural, and educational contexts in Tanzania, we provide a history of the TIA program and summarize the challenges and successes encountered by its facilitators and by the initiative at large. In the last section, a series of recommendations are included that aim to improve the Teaching in Action program, including its collaborations with the Ministry of Education and its impact on education in Tanzania. It is our hope that this chapter will be beneficial to other organizations that aim to build teacher education capacity and improve teaching and learning across the education sector in Tanzania. Context and Conceptual Framework Although access to secondary education in Tanzania has significantly improved in the last ten years, most scholars agree that educational quality has suffered (Wedgewood, 2007). At the end of the 2006 school year, 85,865 students in Form Four took the national exam and 64.3 percent—more than 55,000 students—failed or score in Division IV, the lowest ‘passing’ category (MOEVT, 2007). Therefore, only 39 percent of Four Four students were able to transition to Form Five, the first year in the A-level cycle. These exam results indicate that the majority of Form Four students are not learning the expected content and, as a result, cannot access higher levels of education. With only one percent of tertiary-age Tanzanians enrolled in tertiary education (UNESCO, 2005), increasing the quality of secondary–school education and 1 AfricAid is a small U.S. non-profit organization that supports girls’ education in Tanzania. Details about the organization can be found at http://africaid.com/.